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Entry-Level Startup Jobs Are Now Mostly Dead Ends in the Boondocks
- mcphage 11y agoOh man, having to live somewhere the commutes aren't an hour long (or more) and you can afford a house, how terrible...
- seibelj 11y agoI know people who work in enterprise customer support, on expensive software applications, that are far more complex tickets than just refunds and bug reports. They make good money. Another guy I knew moved from support into being a "sales engineer", which is basically helping to sell software to the more technically minded, demo it properly, assist with integrations, etc. That's also well-paying. Bottom-line is, if you come out of college with an English degree and want to work in tech, you need to get your foot in the door somehow, and support is an option.
- hkmurakami 11y agoI guess it's akin to wanting to join the video game industry and getting your foot in the door through QA play testing.
- dietrichepp 11y agoWell, that's one alternative to learning to code, and taking on more hours for less pay than your peers. But at least you're making games, right?
- machinshin_ 11y agoJust finish play-testing that level than rerun the PM's comments about that new level design!
- DrScump 11y agoFor awhile (1980s-90s), Support and QA got short-shrift in the priorities of many startups. I came into one in a Support role, and I was one of two support personnel (in the entire organization) that had any industry experience going in, making me the company's very first "Advanced Support" engineer. The rest were straight out of college (but most had degrees, at least). Q.A. was likewise seen as entry-level.
- Aloha 11y agoI'd gladly take a paycut to move to a place where the cost of living was 1/4 as much. I might be unique.
- nfriedly 11y agoI moved from SF to Ohio and kept my pay. Then switched companies a year later and got a raise. I see your point, but I like my version even better :)
- yareally 11y agoAlso in Ohio and quite happy here. The lure of higher wages in CA isn't so amazing after taxes and the higher cost of living. My salary here would be a typical developer salary in the Bay Area if you factor in that. I might have to drive to work, but it's only a 15 minute commute.
- mistersquid 11y agoI moved from Ohio to SF and got a raise. After 2 years, I've doubled what I was earning in Ohio. I also switched careers, from tenure-track university professor to web development. My point is that code is the lingua franca of well-compensated digital laborers, which is the point the article hints in its closing sentence: "Another customer service worker I’d talked to from a big software company decided that if she wanted to stick around the Bay Area, it was time to teach herself to code."
- knieveltech 11y agoYou could probably have gone from tenure track university professor to delivering pizza and still doubled your salary provided you didn't end up delivering in a crappy part of town.
- knieveltech 11y agoFor folks that think I'm being sarcastic, a quick google check returned an average salary for untenured professors at around $45,000 annually. I worked with a guy that banked ~$80k a year delivering pizza to a swanky neighborhood that included a bunch of corporate offices.
- jchonphoenix 11y agoEmotions aside, this makes perfect sense. Working in a commodity job means less opportunity. It's the same reason not every company has Uber's valuation. Pay is (roughly) correlated to value.
- vr3690 11y ago>Another customer service worker I’d talked to from a big software company decided that if she wanted to stick around the Bay Area, it was time to teach herself to code. Just curious. Is that going to help her get a job in Silicon Valley while competing with grads from top schools for the same jobs?
- eropple 11y agoAlmost certainly, seeing as how all the companies you don't read about in TechCrunch are desperate for warm bodies.
- Alex3917 11y ago> Is that going to help her get a job in Silicon Valley while competing with grads from top schools for the same jobs? Yes, but not with a well-known company as their first gig.
- shanemhansen 11y agoYes. Demand > Supply at the moment. Most companies can't get ahold of one of those top school grads because google is giving them a 6 figure offer right out of college.
- blakesterz 11y agoSo Nashville with a population of darn near 2 million is "the Boondocks?" Am I missing that part of this that had something about a job in someplace that could even remotely be considered Boondocky?
- mcphage 11y agoYou see, San Francisco is where the Internet is. You might think it's a globally interconnected network of computers, but in fact it's really all in one place, and so the further away from it you are, the less you can channel its power into disrupting markets.
- Apocryphon 11y agoLet's hope that this Silicon Valley chauvinism accidentally builds new SVs in places around the country, who can pick up once this one crashes.
- rhizome 11y agoSV stole the industry from Boston, and I think we can assume that if SV wanted to support remote organizational models that they would have done so more readily than they have. Best of the best, after all.
- roymurdock 11y agoSV economics 101: the "reverse network effect"
- rhizome 11y agoProbably more like "privatize network effects."
- toomuchtodo 11y agoI swear, this line needs to make it into Silicon Valley the show.
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- takno 11y agoI hate that customer support in start ups is considered nothing more than a leg up into a "real" job. It may not be the best paid job in the organisation, but it's crucial and certainly shouldn't be paid at such a fraction of other jobs that "promotion" to another department is the only viable option.
- dba7dba 11y agoYup. Every startup bio story and advice hypes up how much you have to have good communication with customers. It must be all those MBAs that flock to these companies that don't read up on HN.
- dilemma 11y agoAgreed. It is a differentiating feature (see: Amazon/Zappos/Apple Store), and an important source of information for product development. And certainly, not everyone can do it well. I can see Customer Service being the starting point for Service Designers and integrated with that department.
- dtinsley 11y agoWhat is the business reason that Lyft is moving their customer service jobs here? Wages are not low here. Perhaps it is lack of state income tax? HMMMM
- HillRat 11y agoOh, I think the fact that TN's median income is about 70% that of CA and Nashville's is about 60% that of SF might have had something to do with it, along with commercial lease rates being 20% those of SF office space. Meanwhile, the rest of the company is still commuting to the Mission.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoFrom the article, it seems clear: "Their jobs were moving to Tennessee. They could relocate and take an eventual pay cut, or they could leave"
- aub3bhat 11y agoWell, outsourcing to Nashville is better than having entire work outsourced to India. Though I must admit that having lived in Mumbai, Upstate New York and New York City, the cost of living is low argument is bullshit. It is just sugar coating the fact that your work/job profile is not important enough for the company to merit the benefits that living in a metropolis brings. 35K$ per year is a really very low salary, especially for SF, grad students earn more. Also """ It doesn’t make any fucking sense to live in one of the most expensive areas in the country and work in nonprofit development,” one told me.""" I think she meant cost-center, there is nothing related to non-profit in usual sense in that article.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- graeme 11y ago>“‘How do we make this cost less?’ Every support case can cost up to $30 for them. You cost them a lot of money and don’t bring in a lot of revenue.” Still, “They can’t run the company without you.” What's the actual average cost of a support request? $30 seems like it would eat up annual profits of a lot of services fairly quickly.
- jschwartzi 11y agoThat's the cost of a support incident handled by a live person. If you use self-service options like the knowledge base or Google then the cost is essentially zero. This is why many companies make it hard to call them.
- graeme 11y agoAnd is that the same across mediums...i.e. are email, chat and phone all $30 on average?
- cylinder 11y agoWhy are ten year old billion dollar companies with back offices in other states still called startups?
- Aloha 11y agoOften they're even publicly traded billion dollar companies. I'd like to propose the phrase "new-economy company" to replace startup.
- josephjrobison 11y agoOr "post-startup" or "previous startup" or "startup alum" (like YC alum)
- shardinator 11y agoor 'started' not sure if I'm joking
- holografix 11y agoBrilliant.
- alexnewman 11y agoremote teams, not remote people
- laurex 11y agoThis article is a little hand-wavey. Customer support is definitely underappreciated in terms of its value. Support is the primary connection to your product's relationship with customers and a source of research as well as ambassadors for your brand. On the other hand, the idea that employees doing one aspect of a company's work could count on being promoted to another area requiring different skills is not particularly common in most industries, pre-internet. Most people who regard doing support as an "in" need to either independently enhance their skills or choose to work at a much smaller company. One of the sad things that this article exposes is that so many support people choose their careers with the same attitude this article criticises; that support isn't valuable or rewarding to them. Maybe this is akin to people going into teaching, which paradoxically tends to be a major with lower scores and grades than average. People go into a job where they help people not because it's exciting but because they think it's an easier path to working in tech than coding. Great support people committed to what they do can sometimes succeed and grow into more senior roles, and that path should be more rewarded.
- rhizome 11y agoYears ago there was an article or case study about a company who had rehomed their support under Sales to some success. I always thought that was a good way to balance things, where customer problems don't have to wend their way through IT/Ops to some meeting where pushback against sales may or may not occur.
- shkkmo 11y agoWouldn't it make more sense to merge Support with QA? It seems like the majority of issues that cause me to contact Support are caused by design, implementation or documentation problems.
- dragonwriter 11y agoWhen I worked in enterprise support, a significant part of my work was dealing with misrepresentations made by sales reps, so I can see where moving the costs of those problems back to Sales would be a productive way to create a disincentive to causing the problems in the first place, which is more efficient than having someone else cleaning up behind Sales.
- smitherfield 11y agoIt's a bit unreasonable to join a tech company as something other than a technical person or a manager, and expect to quickly be promoted to a top-tier position. No career path works that way.
- payMDgovt 11y agoDumb article....customer svc is a low man on totem pole job. There is a huge demand for coders so learn how to code and make a very good living or fight all ur fellow reps for that one or two PM openings. That's how it goes in the tech world and in general. Everywhere.
- sciurus 11y agoI'm a part of Eventbrite's engineering team in Nashville. I'm really bummed about this article. I think it's a shame that Lyft told a whole department "leave SF or lose your job". I agree it's problematic for a company to segregate customer support in a satellite office. Neither of those are how Eventbrite handled their expansion to Nashville. We're growing like crazy here across the business- engineering, finance, HR, support, sales... Yesterday we had a hot chicken lunch [0] to celebrate two new engineering hires. Tomorrow we'll christen some temporary office space to accomodate our newly-added sales team. Within a year, we'll be moved into a new space more than triple the size of our current office. Trust me, that's not because we're tripling the size of our support team. Within engineering, my coworkers in Nashville come from a number of different backgrounds, Many of them are experienced devs. Others are career changers via coding bootcamps. Most relevant to the article, some have come from our customer support team. People tend to stay at Eventbrite for a long time [1]. There may not be as clearly defined a career path as you'd find at a more established company, but you're not stuck doing the same thing forever. [0] It's a Nashville thing. If you haven't had it here, you're missing out. :-) [1] Although you see the real tenure in the original SF office, in Nashville no one in engineering has quit yet (if you don't count the guy who left for Y Combinator, then came back afterwards).
- joshjkim 11y ago3 reasons that, in early stages, startups have customer service at their HQs (IMO), and why it makes (financial) sense to move them to lower cost areas when a startup reaches a certain size: (1) at the early stage basically everyone is part of customer support in that they are addressing/solving a slew of new/unanticipated problems together in real time and therefore its beneficial/valuable to have everyone in the same place. they also (usually) don't know how to run a customer service organization and are learning how it goes on the fly, esp. for the new product. Later, the product matures and the majority of customer issues and their solutions are known and the process for addressing them can be (mostly) crystallized into a pre-determined set of responses, meaning that the customer service team can be separated from the rest of the organization. This is usually identified (or forced) by a more experienced customer service manager trained at a larger organization. (2) at an early stage, costs associated with customer service are still relatively low vs. other investments (ie. product development, customer acquisition, technical hiring) so it seems relatively cheap to grow (you can hire 3-4 CS people for the price of one eng. in SF) Later, as the organization grows, customer service can quickly balloon into a massive, expensive organization that grows in a more linear relationship with business/customer growth vs. product or dev teams, which (ideally) can be more leveraged. (3) at the early stage, they are focused more on growth than profitability, so they aren't looking to optimize for lowering customer support costs and are more focused on the speed at which they are solving customer problems, aka. resolving impediments to growth. Later, when it comes time to pay the piper (which is what appears to be happening with many, many on-demand startups..), customer service is a very easy place to try and cut costs, esp. when up until this point they had been run very inefficiently. conclusion: Once a company realizes that their support teams don't need to be at the HQ anymore, that the teams are inefficient and (oh shit!) they want to (try and) be profitable, it makes a lot of sense to move the customer service team to a lower cost location, or outsource it entirely. there's a reason most large, mature corporations do it.
- hanswesterbeek 11y agoThat article reads identical to the first few chapers of The Circle by Dave Eggers.
- tryitnow 11y agoSupport needs to move out of the Bay Area. Honestly, there's just no way to live here on the salaries support professionals make. These are just the facts. If I had my way we'd have a lot more affordable housing and renter-friendly policies here, but we don't and that's not going to change any time soon. So let's get real and know that putting support in low cost of living areas is the right thing to do.
- angmarsbane 11y ago"Those are soft skills, and associated with women, they’re not super valued.” Why are they associated with women? Where does that stem from?