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If you aren't doing production support, you don't actually know your product. You aren't connected to the pain points your users experience and you miss what is

If you aren't doing production support, you don't actually know your product. You aren't connected to the pain points your users experience and you miss what is, to your support team and your customers, the glaringly obvious. I would argue all developers should be required to do some support work.

axaxs 6y ago
I largely agree. My company has dedicated CS, a second tier 'triage', and well...me. I always prefer if customers just email me directly. CS is a frustrating, cost saving measure. And often I'll get tickets, 3 weeks later, like 'customer said they have an issue.' What's the point again?
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Having skin in the game will make you a better engineer. You’ll get better at the non-sexy things: monitoring, alerting, testing, etc. You better believe a person who is pages for software at 3:00 am has an incentive to make that software more reliable.
- lostdog 6y ago
  But the directors and VP's aren't getting paged at 3am, so the incentives of the organization still go to lower quality software.
  - johnbellone 6y ago
    If the directors and VPs aren’t getting paged at 3am you need better leadership. The first thing that I did was subscribe to all outages. And I let the operations center to call me anytime if they need help resolving a production issue.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  I'm not even talking 24/7 pager work. But just tackling some support tickets as part of your job so you see where people are having issues with your product. Too often I see BigCorp development teams seeming blatantly oblivious to where their pain points are, and it's because they aren't forcing their developers to do support. They're pushing code, but they aren't pushing code that solves real problems for people.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    If you work for a Bigcorp development team, you are probably jus trying to keep a product owner happy. The user being happy or not will not ever impact your life, especially since you might well have moved on before it ever goes to prod.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
TuringNYC 6y ago
Dont most developers do level III support? Ultimately if the first and second lines of defense cannot solve the problem, from everything I've seen, it goes to an Engineer. If it is your product, i'd assume it comes to you. This has been the case at almost every company I've been at.
- jjirsa 6y ago
  Why should a company hire two lines of support to shield an engineer from bugs they introduce?
  - octodog 6y ago
    1. Not every support request is the result of a bug. 2. Not every bug is directly related to the product owner/team. Bugs can be introduced from different teams/processes. 3. Requiring senior engineers to do L1 and L2 support is likely a misallocstion of resources when less senior people can handle those issues.
    - jjirsa 6y ago
      3 is a common mistake, like the one engineers make when they pretend that the hard part of programming is typing
    - hinkley 6y ago
      4. Engineers have a bad habit of renegotiating scope in front of the customer without realizing they’ve done it.
      - imhoguy 6y ago
        As usual, "that should be easy to fix, just line of code here". At least from SWE perspective the fix may be easy to make but architecture or product management team may not be so happy about such pitch, especially when customer responds with "oh great, when?".
    - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
cgrealy 6y ago
Sorry, this is a terrible argument. No one expects customer support people to write code. Why? Because they don't have the skillset. Yet people who make this argument seem to think any moron can do support. The skillset for an engineer is not a superset of a customer support person. Have your engineers sit in on support, by all means, but actually making them DO support will result in unhappy engineers and sub-par support. Do not undervalue a good support person. They have a whole suite of skills engineers often don't have.

axaxs 6y ago

I largely agree. My company has dedicated CS, a second tier 'triage', and well...me. I always prefer if customers just email me directly. CS is a frustrating, cost saving measure. And often I'll get tickets, 3 weeks later, like 'customer said they have an issue.' What's the point again?

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

Having skin in the game will make you a better engineer. You’ll get better at the non-sexy things: monitoring, alerting, testing, etc. You better believe a person who is pages for software at 3:00 am has an incentive to make that software more reliable.

lostdog 6y ago
But the directors and VP's aren't getting paged at 3am, so the incentives of the organization still go to lower quality software.
- johnbellone 6y ago
  If the directors and VPs aren’t getting paged at 3am you need better leadership. The first thing that I did was subscribe to all outages. And I let the operations center to call me anytime if they need help resolving a production issue.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
I'm not even talking 24/7 pager work. But just tackling some support tickets as part of your job so you see where people are having issues with your product. Too often I see BigCorp development teams seeming blatantly oblivious to where their pain points are, and it's because they aren't forcing their developers to do support. They're pushing code, but they aren't pushing code that solves real problems for people.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  If you work for a Bigcorp development team, you are probably jus trying to keep a product owner happy. The user being happy or not will not ever impact your life, especially since you might well have moved on before it ever goes to prod.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

TuringNYC 6y ago

Dont most developers do level III support? Ultimately if the first and second lines of defense cannot solve the problem, from everything I've seen, it goes to an Engineer. If it is your product, i'd assume it comes to you. This has been the case at almost every company I've been at.

jjirsa 6y ago
Why should a company hire two lines of support to shield an engineer from bugs they introduce?
- octodog 6y ago
  1. Not every support request is the result of a bug. 2. Not every bug is directly related to the product owner/team. Bugs can be introduced from different teams/processes. 3. Requiring senior engineers to do L1 and L2 support is likely a misallocstion of resources when less senior people can handle those issues.
  - jjirsa 6y ago
    3 is a common mistake, like the one engineers make when they pretend that the hard part of programming is typing
  - hinkley 6y ago
    4. Engineers have a bad habit of renegotiating scope in front of the customer without realizing they’ve done it.
    - imhoguy 6y ago
      As usual, "that should be easy to fix, just line of code here". At least from SWE perspective the fix may be easy to make but architecture or product management team may not be so happy about such pitch, especially when customer responds with "oh great, when?".
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago

cgrealy 6y ago

Sorry, this is a terrible argument. No one expects customer support people to write code. Why? Because they don't have the skillset. Yet people who make this argument seem to think any moron can do support. The skillset for an engineer is not a superset of a customer support person. Have your engineers sit in on support, by all means, but actually making them DO support will result in unhappy engineers and sub-par support. Do not undervalue a good support person. They have a whole suite of skills engineers often don't have.