3 ms·
> 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 o
by 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 agoOk 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 agoMy 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 agoThere'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."