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Having devs on level 1 support is a good way to have high turnover imo. The support process should have a way of escalating to developers though. I've found pl

Having devs on level 1 support is a good way to have high turnover imo. The support process should have a way of escalating to developers though. I've found plenty of bugs in products and had no way to get in contact with someone that would actually be interested in hearing it.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
> Having devs on level 1 support is a good way to have high turnover imo. I pretty much agree with rblatz comment. From my opinion it's a good way to have high turnover of people I don't want on my team anyway. Note I don't think developers are bad if they don't want to do customer support, but I am particularly interested in hiring product focused developers. That is, developers who really care not just about difficult technical problems, but who care about how solving those problems actually affect the customers for whom we're building the product. I have found that, on the contrary, product-focused developers love doing customer support (some small portion of the time). They like to see how their features and fixes affect the customer experience, and they get a kick out of fixing small annoyances that overall build a more polished product, but might get just "triaged away" if it went through multiple levels of CS -> product manager -> engineers.
- msh 6y ago
  I have worked support part time during my studies and I think it can be a good thing having developers do support but some developers do not have the "people" skills to do proper support but are still good developers who care about customer experience. Another options is to have them sit with customer support and listening to their phone calls with them. It might also be that while the developers might not be skilled enought in the problem domain to provide general support as many questions might be more general.
  - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
    For many companies that have moved to primarily a chat-based first-line support model (e.g Intercom, Help Scout), this can help a lot with this concern. Many engineers don't like talking on the phone but IMing with a customer in real time is fine.
cosmotic 6y ago
It's also a good way to improve the user experience. Devs frustrating with answering questions that can be solved by technical solutions will develop those technical solutions so they no longer have to deal with those questions.
- mook 6y ago
  That depends on the dynamic of the company; for some of the ones I've been in, making the PMs do support would have the desired effect, as the devs don't necessarily get to manage the schedule.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    Why not everyone?
rblatz 6y ago
Devs too good to shadow the support personnel, which are the frontline of the product they build, aren’t welcome on my team. We build high quality products, and we do that by caring about the customer experience. Both support and consumers are our customer.
- necovek 6y ago
  It's not about ego: I love learning about customer problems, and hearing their stories about how they use "my" product. I love it more when I am building that product. With such a competitive market (software developers), don't be surprised if my motivation is a bit lacking when I've got to respond to a bunch of people asking questions unrelated to the product.
  - bArray 6y ago
    > With such a competitive market (software developers), > don't be surprised if my motivation is a bit lacking when > I've got to respond to a bunch of people asking questions > unrelated to the product. I did suggest some kind of filtering where more technical questions could be passed on to developers. You would also expect the completely unrelated questions to be filtered. But don't underestimate the power of the experience, if you've got 100 support tickets asking where the 'login' button is, maybe you'll be motivated to label it clearly with the word 'login' and not some icon that requires interpretation. If you think about it, the power of agile development has really come from being more customer requirements focused, with quick rounds of feedback and review on deliverables and milestones. If you abstract the developers away from the feedback, how on earth can you expect them to make a decent end result?
- unionpivo 6y ago
  That's good, and I always prefer buy such product, but it's getting harder and harder to find them. I think you are giving tp-link too much credit, that they want to build good devices. Most products (including pretty much everything tp-link has) are mass market garbage, where the goal is to throw as many of them over the wall and hope some stick (and then milk the ones that stick). By the time you buy device, developers are already working on next one. They only address issues that blow out. Customer service in such cases is just minimum necessary that they can get away with. They are there more as damage control rather than actually helping users. If they can have a choice of cheaper customers support (and development time), or better one, they will pick cheaper one 100% of time.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

> Having devs on level 1 support is a good way to have high turnover imo. I pretty much agree with rblatz comment. From my opinion it's a good way to have high turnover of people I don't want on my team anyway. Note I don't think developers are bad if they don't want to do customer support, but I am particularly interested in hiring product focused developers. That is, developers who really care not just about difficult technical problems, but who care about how solving those problems actually affect the customers for whom we're building the product. I have found that, on the contrary, product-focused developers love doing customer support (some small portion of the time). They like to see how their features and fixes affect the customer experience, and they get a kick out of fixing small annoyances that overall build a more polished product, but might get just "triaged away" if it went through multiple levels of CS -> product manager -> engineers.

msh 6y ago
I have worked support part time during my studies and I think it can be a good thing having developers do support but some developers do not have the "people" skills to do proper support but are still good developers who care about customer experience. Another options is to have them sit with customer support and listening to their phone calls with them. It might also be that while the developers might not be skilled enought in the problem domain to provide general support as many questions might be more general.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  For many companies that have moved to primarily a chat-based first-line support model (e.g Intercom, Help Scout), this can help a lot with this concern. Many engineers don't like talking on the phone but IMing with a customer in real time is fine.

cosmotic 6y ago

It's also a good way to improve the user experience. Devs frustrating with answering questions that can be solved by technical solutions will develop those technical solutions so they no longer have to deal with those questions.

mook 6y ago
That depends on the dynamic of the company; for some of the ones I've been in, making the PMs do support would have the desired effect, as the devs don't necessarily get to manage the schedule.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Why not everyone?

rblatz 6y ago

Devs too good to shadow the support personnel, which are the frontline of the product they build, aren’t welcome on my team. We build high quality products, and we do that by caring about the customer experience. Both support and consumers are our customer.

necovek 6y ago
It's not about ego: I love learning about customer problems, and hearing their stories about how they use "my" product. I love it more when I am building that product. With such a competitive market (software developers), don't be surprised if my motivation is a bit lacking when I've got to respond to a bunch of people asking questions unrelated to the product.
- bArray 6y ago
  > With such a competitive market (software developers), > don't be surprised if my motivation is a bit lacking when > I've got to respond to a bunch of people asking questions > unrelated to the product. I did suggest some kind of filtering where more technical questions could be passed on to developers. You would also expect the completely unrelated questions to be filtered. But don't underestimate the power of the experience, if you've got 100 support tickets asking where the 'login' button is, maybe you'll be motivated to label it clearly with the word 'login' and not some icon that requires interpretation. If you think about it, the power of agile development has really come from being more customer requirements focused, with quick rounds of feedback and review on deliverables and milestones. If you abstract the developers away from the feedback, how on earth can you expect them to make a decent end result?
unionpivo 6y ago
That's good, and I always prefer buy such product, but it's getting harder and harder to find them. I think you are giving tp-link too much credit, that they want to build good devices. Most products (including pretty much everything tp-link has) are mass market garbage, where the goal is to throw as many of them over the wall and hope some stick (and then milk the ones that stick). By the time you buy device, developers are already working on next one. They only address issues that blow out. Customer service in such cases is just minimum necessary that they can get away with. They are there more as damage control rather than actually helping users. If they can have a choice of cheaper customers support (and development time), or better one, they will pick cheaper one 100% of time.