this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
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Fuck AI
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Sounded like a lovely company
Engineers at customer support might also make tooling after understanding the process flows and struggles which might in turn make support more productive/happy.
In the companies I worked it, engineers were at most at 3rd level support (mainly in places where the users were business experts and advanced computer users) or even the people 3rd level support calls when they can't sort the problem out.
Either way, the vast majority of support calls are filtered by lower support levels out before it gets to them.
Putting engineers as first line support sounds like a spectacularly bad idea, at multiple levels: they're far too expensive to waste doing that job, they generally tend to use expert terms rather than common terms so the users don't get them, what they see as "baseline computing know-how" that they expect users have is still well beyond the computing expertise of most people so all in all they tend to detest doing it.
Sure, I agree with you on that, but I'm more talking about listening in on customer support or just joining their stand-up every once in a while. I think it's bad when people are working in silos and don't understand the different obstacles other parts of the organisation are struggling with.
Well, I've worked directly with end-users often enough, both on the side of getting requirements from them for new features and supporting them for the existing application features (these were expert users) and think it's important for engineers to get that kind of exposure.
However working with a limited number of users who are experts in their domain and have high skills in computing is something very different from manning phone lines to provide first line support for a mass marketed product or service whose users are just average people who don't work on any organized thinking area (so their thinking and ability to express themselves clearly is all over the place) and whose computing abilities are usually pretty low, especially compared to an engineer - the mismatch is so broad that it tends to be an exercise in frustration from which the average engineer will learn very little even if they are open minded and understanding.