5 ms·

I'm fortunate that my own company (Rackspace) at least has a level head about this sort of thing. My direct manager looks at my numbers (~60-80 interactions per

I'm fortunate that my own company (Rackspace) at least has a level head about this sort of thing. My direct manager looks at my numbers (~60-80 interactions per month) and my colleagues (many hundreds of interactions per month) and correctly observes that we have different strengths, and that's the end of the discussion. I have a tendency to take my time and go deep on issues, and my coworkers will send me tickets that need that sort of investigative troubleshooting. My coworker meanwhile will rapidly run through the queue and look for simple tickets to knock out. He sweeps the quick-fix work away, but also knows his limits and will escalate the stuff he's not familiar with. Let me stress here, this is not nearly as easy of a problem to solve as it appears to be on the surface. We're struggling as a company right now because after our recent merge, a lot of our good talent has left and we're having to rebuild a lot of our teams. Even so, I'm still happy with our general approach. Management understands that employees will often have wildly different problem solving approaches and matching metrics, and that's perfectly OK as long as folks aren't genuinely slacking off and we as a team are still getting our customers taken care of. I think that's important to keep in mind no matter how big or small your support floor gets.

ethbro 7y ago
Support should be looked at as a profit center, but almost everyone tries to run it like a cost center. It's crazy that companies spend $$ on marketing and sales, then cheap out on a interaction with someone who is already interested in / using their product.
- vinceguidry 7y ago
  Running profit centers requires comparatively rarer leadership resources while running cost centers only requires easy-to-hire management resources. You don't want your best leaders whipping your support center into shape letting the company's competitive edge fritter away.
  - ethbro 7y ago
    Alternatively, I'd ask if you want easy-to-hire management resources as your primary touchpoint with paying customers.
- hitekker 7y ago
  Crazy from the individual perspective; natural from the group's. "We have a mark, lets suck it dry until we can throw it away and find new and better marks." Sustainability tends not be a concern until after a group's leadership jumps ship and parasitizes other hosts.
Phlarp 7y ago
+1 for Rack support. A previous company I worked for was heavily invested in Rackspace infrastructure and while I often opined not getting the equivalent experience with AWS for the resume, I was regularly floored with the quality of their support. Whenever I had the pleasure of needing to open a ticket they solved my problems and usually taught me something new in the process. The linux guys were very clearly battle hardened admins. I couldn't imagine getting that level of support from DO, let alone Amazon.
- bluedino 7y ago
  i have the opposite experience with Rackspace. The low end stuff (hosted exchange etc) is basically useless, people who are obviously on multiple chats, they let tickets sit for days... Even when we had small handful of physical servers with them, they seemed inept. They actually lost our servers one time and couldn’t get someone out to reset power on our firewall.
  - Phlarp 7y ago
    My experiences were all with their "dedicated" or "managed" cloud services. Although I did notice that their marketing seemed to shift in the last months I was working with them for that employer from "let us help you build things on Rackspace" to "let us help you move what you built on Rackspace to AWS"
    - zeta0134 7y ago
      Yes, the Public Cloud, which houses most of the smaller Managed Infrastructure accounts (minimal support) is one of the bigger ... I believe the polite word is "opportunities?" It's a very pretty UI on top of a somewhat fragile Open Stack deployment, which needs a significant amount of work to patch around noisy infrastructure problems. That turns into a support floor burden, and it shows in ticket latency. Critiques directed at that particular product suite are, frankly, quite valid. I think Rackspace tried to compete with AWS, realized very quickly that they do not have Amazon's ability to rapidly scale, and very nearly collapsed under their own weight. That said, our FAWS team are a good bunch, and what AWS lacks in support they more than make up for in well engineered, stable infrastructure. Since Rackspace's whole focus is support, I think the pairing works well on paper and it should scale effectively, but we'll have to see how it plays out in practice.

ethbro 7y ago

Support should be looked at as a profit center, but almost everyone tries to run it like a cost center. It's crazy that companies spend $$ on marketing and sales, then cheap out on a interaction with someone who is already interested in / using their product.

vinceguidry 7y ago
Running profit centers requires comparatively rarer leadership resources while running cost centers only requires easy-to-hire management resources. You don't want your best leaders whipping your support center into shape letting the company's competitive edge fritter away.
- ethbro 7y ago
  Alternatively, I'd ask if you want easy-to-hire management resources as your primary touchpoint with paying customers.
hitekker 7y ago
Crazy from the individual perspective; natural from the group's. "We have a mark, lets suck it dry until we can throw it away and find new and better marks." Sustainability tends not be a concern until after a group's leadership jumps ship and parasitizes other hosts.

Phlarp 7y ago

+1 for Rack support. A previous company I worked for was heavily invested in Rackspace infrastructure and while I often opined not getting the equivalent experience with AWS for the resume, I was regularly floored with the quality of their support. Whenever I had the pleasure of needing to open a ticket they solved my problems and usually taught me something new in the process. The linux guys were very clearly battle hardened admins. I couldn't imagine getting that level of support from DO, let alone Amazon.

bluedino 7y ago
i have the opposite experience with Rackspace. The low end stuff (hosted exchange etc) is basically useless, people who are obviously on multiple chats, they let tickets sit for days... Even when we had small handful of physical servers with them, they seemed inept. They actually lost our servers one time and couldn’t get someone out to reset power on our firewall.
- Phlarp 7y ago
  My experiences were all with their "dedicated" or "managed" cloud services. Although I did notice that their marketing seemed to shift in the last months I was working with them for that employer from "let us help you build things on Rackspace" to "let us help you move what you built on Rackspace to AWS"
  - zeta0134 7y ago
    Yes, the Public Cloud, which houses most of the smaller Managed Infrastructure accounts (minimal support) is one of the bigger ... I believe the polite word is "opportunities?" It's a very pretty UI on top of a somewhat fragile Open Stack deployment, which needs a significant amount of work to patch around noisy infrastructure problems. That turns into a support floor burden, and it shows in ticket latency. Critiques directed at that particular product suite are, frankly, quite valid. I think Rackspace tried to compete with AWS, realized very quickly that they do not have Amazon's ability to rapidly scale, and very nearly collapsed under their own weight. That said, our FAWS team are a good bunch, and what AWS lacks in support they more than make up for in well engineered, stable infrastructure. Since Rackspace's whole focus is support, I think the pairing works well on paper and it should scale effectively, but we'll have to see how it plays out in practice.