Right on. Exactly my experience dealing with AWS ("premium") support.

TAM (technical account manager) usually uses every trick in their book to do just that. First they take a while to answer, if they answer, they ask if we've opened a ticket. If the ticket has been openened they will "prioritize it". That means they'll won't do anthying about it.

The answers you receive from that L1 support are usually pages of garbage filled with: have a look at this blog post, have a look at this doc which is mostly irrelevant to the problem you're having.

Then you want to get ahold of TAM again. They'll usually answer in the last hour of that working day so that conversation will have to wait till tomorrow. Want a meeting? Sure! Lets talk in couple of days over that garbage called Chime. Oh, our engineer couldn't make it, we'll schedule the meeting next week. Can you please upload 60GB of your logs to this S3 bucket which is configured in such a way that you can only do it using GUI? Oh, you've split the 60GB files into multiple ones? Can't do that, we have no idea how to read those. Can you reupload?

Want to talk with someone about EKS? After 2 days of radio silence: oh yeah sure! We can schedule a meeting in 3 weeks time. etc etc

All of this makes it even more infuriating is that we've been paying for the support almost 1 million USD per year. And in 9/10 cases we get absolutely nothing out of it, just a waste of our time. For $1M they should have a dedicated tech actually working for us every single day. AWS is a fucking racket.

> For $1M they should have a dedicated tech actually working for us every single day. AWS is a fucking racket.

Do they not assign you a dedicated account manager like everyone else does?? For $1M a year you should really have a real person assigned to you whose number you can call directly at any time. Last time I checked, GCP does this. Not that I'd recommend switching, but still, that sounds insane.

Yeah, that's a TAM. And yes, it's insane. His offical purpose is to help you out. His real purpose is to help AWS out by delaying, stalling, referencing to wrong documentation, making you run in circles etc.

The harder it is for you to get some real support, the better he is at his real job. Its a crazy incentive and I'm not even sure if you can evaluate your TAM. My current manager plays softball with them for unknown reasons so we're stuck with the smooth talking asshole. Not that we had one, I've seen almost a dozen in my career and apart from one, all were useless _to us_.

I don’t get it: how does AWS benefit if the TAM delays resolving the ticket/

AWS doesn't benefit from them resolving the ticket in a timely manner... or at all. AWS benefits from being able to put someone in between the customer and the rest of the company. It's like a layer of insulation, that prevents the customer from actually inconveniencing the business or any of the other people who work there.

TAM doesn't necessarily resolve the ticket nor that's their first priority. Their first priority is to be a contact person or a face of a faceless company. I don't believe they're paid by a resolved ticket (all tickets get resolved anyway), MTTR or something similar. Tickets are for some faceless support personnel. TAMs are supposed to help you, but unless it's something trivial they are a waste of time.

What the actual f. This corporate paradigm needs to burn to the ground.

Believe it or not, there are helpful support resources out there which are typically hard to come across, you’ve admittedly just had a shitty experience (not uncommon)

> Do they not assign you a dedicated account manager like everyone else does?

That's the TAM he's mentionioning.

This is too cynical. For serious B2B customer service, and higher end B2C businesses, they are genuinely there to make sure every last inquiry is resolved to satisfaction.

Of course that's because they don't charge a fixed rate, usually a pricier variable rate.