Moving the goalposts so that support engineers with deep technical skillsets are actually software devs is kind of a dick move. From someone who's worked both

Moving the goalposts so that support engineers with deep technical skillsets are actually software devs is kind of a dick move. From someone who's worked both sides of the glass -- support engineering is way harder. You don't get to play in a nice, standardized, performant environment. You're often parachuted into a random customer issue, with little context and an unstable environment, someone nervously watching over your shoulder, and a customer director/VP demanding updates every hour. And from watching traditional software devs be pulled into those calls and flounder past "works on my machine," live debugging is a very different skillset on top of technical expertise. Not only do you have to thoroughly understand the happy path, but you also have to tread both known and unknown failure paths. One of my litmus tests for product companies is how they set up their support orgs and escalation paths: as checkboxes or continuous improvement loops. The former approach tends to produce shitty products.