4 ms·

I came in ready to disagree with you... until I read the article. Engineers joining usability tests is a great thing. Engineers talking with PMs and joining ea

I came in ready to disagree with you... until I read the article. Engineers joining usability tests is a great thing. Engineers talking with PMs and joining early discovery is a great thing. But I would quit immediately if I were put on a customer support rotation. This seems idiotic.

gopalv 4y ago
> I would quit immediately if I were put on a customer support rotation Why? I sort of thought similarly about a decade ago, until I actually was on the end of a giant on-call tree almost permanently for 3 years. I wasn't the first person they'd call and not even the second, third or fourth. But eventually someone would call me and ask me to jump in & dig through it - I loved it, because eventually that's just a neat puzzle with an angry customer attached (if I could walk in someone else's shoes for a week, it would be rachelbythebay's). I also did primary on-call out of solidarity with the team. And 1 week out of every 20-odd wasn't hurting me as much as I thought it would, but the customer contact gave me enough weapons to argue with the PM teams when it came to "customers want 'faster horses', stop working on cars" arguments. I could actually see the product used and talk to the people who are struggling with it, better than the stage-managed customer advisory board they setup for each year's sales kick-off. Of course, there's a vastly different "competency rearrangement" disease which you might be referring to, which is spread through out the article. If engineering is good at doing things, they get things to do that have nothing to do with engineering - QE is slow, get engineering to fix QE process, product has bugs in prod at a customer, get an engineer to fix it reactively, customer conversations aren't closing fast enough, get a credible engineer to talk to their engineers, if product can't figure out what to build in what order, get an engineer into that conversation. Eventually, engineering is doing a lot of things half-competently and the company chugs along, dragging the other people who aren't failing hard enough to get fired because the engineers stop every buck passed to them.
- willsmith72 4y ago
  Ok but I see that as something totally different. Of course I'm ok with being "on-call" (and do that for 1 week out of around every 8 right now), as a 3rd+ level support. But the impression I got from the article was something totally different. I'm more than happy to receive a request like "something weird happened with this user's account, can you look into the data/logs?", but not, "Hi, I can't log into my account, what should I do?". That is the customer support I got the impression of from the article
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    My old job had 5 day-a-year first line support. It was fun, sometimes. There was this one time the customer was explaining an issue over email and I asked for a screen shot. I kid you not, they printed their screen, scanned it, and then emailed that to me. We weren’t allowed to touch the “I can’t access my account” tickets because that usually involves some kind of identification process where getting it wrong could result in huge legal liabilities. But all the other stuff… bugs, people just confused on some process, or whatever. Those were fun.
- brailsafe 4y ago
  There's a difference between being a tertiary technical problem solver and a rotational generic customer support person. I wouldn't quit immediately, but I'd start looking seriously for other companies. Why? Because I've done it. It's not something I'm suited for, and it's a dumb thing to expect me to be good at. I can respond to people if it's a fixed set and small set of them, on my team, about technical things. That's all he communication I can be good at, while doing engineering work. Otherwise it burns me out and makes me depressed. I also make this very clear to my boss. "If you want someone on customer support, you want someone else instead of me."
gw99 4y ago
As an engineer I regularly get pulled into customer calls. It's really important to know how disconnected you are from customers. On every single occasion at every organisation I have worked for I have discovered great disparity between the user's desires and problems and what is communicated through the layers. Layering communication is dangerous! Also quite frankly sometimes it's only engineering who can turn an angry customer back into a happy one because they are the only people who can really action change.
- willsmith72 4y ago
  I think we're in agreement, see my other comment in reply to gopalv. Basically, rotating 3rd level support along with an alert/on-call duty I'm totally fine with. First-level, I'm not.
- dustymcp 4y ago
  I agree i learn something everytime i get involved with a support case, its nice to see your system from the other side aswell now and then, but i would absolutely hate to be in full customer support role.
- vsareto 4y ago
  >On every single occasion at every organisation I have worked for I have discovered great disparity between the user's desires and problems and what is communicated through the layers. This is a quality problem of the people doing the communicating. We need those people to do better, not drop engineers to get the real story >Also quite frankly sometimes it's only engineering who can turn an angry customer back into a happy one because they are the only people who can really action change. This is true, but the engineer doesn't (shouldn't?) have to be the face of that. Once you allow customers to escalate directly with engineers, they'll see the rest of your support process as bullshit.
glitchc 4y ago
The key element is training. It is indeed idiotic to put you on customer support rotation without training you first on how to deal with customers.
grepfru_it 4y ago
I have not read the article but I disagree with your last statement. When I contracted for the federal reserve, every new engineer was required to moonlight for 6 months on support rotations. Doesn't matter if you were hired as an AD architect or Weblogic admin, you were only on call to assess system failures for that time. Why? Because then you have intimate knowledge of what users were experiencing and that colored your experience to think of how users interact with your system. Lots of engineers rage quit by the second month, but everyone who stayed provided great design and strategy input to their areas. This is what made me customer obsessed and to this day I will meet with the support team at any new company I work with to understand the plight of the customer

gopalv 4y ago

> I would quit immediately if I were put on a customer support rotation Why? I sort of thought similarly about a decade ago, until I actually was on the end of a giant on-call tree almost permanently for 3 years. I wasn't the first person they'd call and not even the second, third or fourth. But eventually someone would call me and ask me to jump in & dig through it - I loved it, because eventually that's just a neat puzzle with an angry customer attached (if I could walk in someone else's shoes for a week, it would be rachelbythebay's). I also did primary on-call out of solidarity with the team. And 1 week out of every 20-odd wasn't hurting me as much as I thought it would, but the customer contact gave me enough weapons to argue with the PM teams when it came to "customers want 'faster horses', stop working on cars" arguments. I could actually see the product used and talk to the people who are struggling with it, better than the stage-managed customer advisory board they setup for each year's sales kick-off. Of course, there's a vastly different "competency rearrangement" disease which you might be referring to, which is spread through out the article. If engineering is good at doing things, they get things to do that have nothing to do with engineering - QE is slow, get engineering to fix QE process, product has bugs in prod at a customer, get an engineer to fix it reactively, customer conversations aren't closing fast enough, get a credible engineer to talk to their engineers, if product can't figure out what to build in what order, get an engineer into that conversation. Eventually, engineering is doing a lot of things half-competently and the company chugs along, dragging the other people who aren't failing hard enough to get fired because the engineers stop every buck passed to them.

willsmith72 4y ago
Ok but I see that as something totally different. Of course I'm ok with being "on-call" (and do that for 1 week out of around every 8 right now), as a 3rd+ level support. But the impression I got from the article was something totally different. I'm more than happy to receive a request like "something weird happened with this user's account, can you look into the data/logs?", but not, "Hi, I can't log into my account, what should I do?". That is the customer support I got the impression of from the article
- withinboredom 4y ago
  My old job had 5 day-a-year first line support. It was fun, sometimes. There was this one time the customer was explaining an issue over email and I asked for a screen shot. I kid you not, they printed their screen, scanned it, and then emailed that to me. We weren’t allowed to touch the “I can’t access my account” tickets because that usually involves some kind of identification process where getting it wrong could result in huge legal liabilities. But all the other stuff… bugs, people just confused on some process, or whatever. Those were fun.
brailsafe 4y ago
There's a difference between being a tertiary technical problem solver and a rotational generic customer support person. I wouldn't quit immediately, but I'd start looking seriously for other companies. Why? Because I've done it. It's not something I'm suited for, and it's a dumb thing to expect me to be good at. I can respond to people if it's a fixed set and small set of them, on my team, about technical things. That's all he communication I can be good at, while doing engineering work. Otherwise it burns me out and makes me depressed. I also make this very clear to my boss. "If you want someone on customer support, you want someone else instead of me."

gw99 4y ago

As an engineer I regularly get pulled into customer calls. It's really important to know how disconnected you are from customers. On every single occasion at every organisation I have worked for I have discovered great disparity between the user's desires and problems and what is communicated through the layers. Layering communication is dangerous! Also quite frankly sometimes it's only engineering who can turn an angry customer back into a happy one because they are the only people who can really action change.

willsmith72 4y ago
I think we're in agreement, see my other comment in reply to gopalv. Basically, rotating 3rd level support along with an alert/on-call duty I'm totally fine with. First-level, I'm not.
dustymcp 4y ago
I agree i learn something everytime i get involved with a support case, its nice to see your system from the other side aswell now and then, but i would absolutely hate to be in full customer support role.
vsareto 4y ago
>On every single occasion at every organisation I have worked for I have discovered great disparity between the user's desires and problems and what is communicated through the layers. This is a quality problem of the people doing the communicating. We need those people to do better, not drop engineers to get the real story >Also quite frankly sometimes it's only engineering who can turn an angry customer back into a happy one because they are the only people who can really action change. This is true, but the engineer doesn't (shouldn't?) have to be the face of that. Once you allow customers to escalate directly with engineers, they'll see the rest of your support process as bullshit.

glitchc 4y ago

The key element is training. It is indeed idiotic to put you on customer support rotation without training you first on how to deal with customers.

grepfru_it 4y ago

I have not read the article but I disagree with your last statement. When I contracted for the federal reserve, every new engineer was required to moonlight for 6 months on support rotations. Doesn't matter if you were hired as an AD architect or Weblogic admin, you were only on call to assess system failures for that time. Why? Because then you have intimate knowledge of what users were experiencing and that colored your experience to think of how users interact with your system. Lots of engineers rage quit by the second month, but everyone who stayed provided great design and strategy input to their areas. This is what made me customer obsessed and to this day I will meet with the support team at any new company I work with to understand the plight of the customer