@movq@www.uninformativ.de From my limited experiences in two companies I can anedoctic tell you, that what we developers told our support work mates after analyzing things and what they replied back to the enquirers was not always the same. That also happend when we gave them answers in written form. Always super nice support folks, no a single doubt, but their basic technical knowledge was pretty much non-existent. And plenty of them didn’t even really know the softwares they’re supposed to support. Granted, those were not easy programs, one was indeed super complex. But if they use them on a daily basis for years one would expect that they know them quite well. At least the main features and workflows. We also often had to tell them basic stuff several times, which was quite a bit frustrating for both sides.
But, I was super glad, that we had them in the front row. You wouldn’t believe what crap queries they had to deal with and what utter bullshit they kept off our shoulders. Sometimes people wrote really offensive e-mails for no reason. Holy moly. I wouldn’t want to trade with them, not in a hundred years. Lots of my developer work mates, however, didn’t value our first level support at all. I mean, I totally understand, that after telling the same things over and over and over and over again it pisses you off, but treating them in a way they feel like shit, doesn’t help either. It only makes things worse. I had the impression that there was a slight war between development and support.
One thing that was totally stupid, is that the POs didn’t listen to improvements and suggestions on how to make things easier for the support team and also all our users. I mean, support has to deal with this software all day long and also get the same questions about workflows and stuff that’s too complicated or unintuitive. So a lot of things were really low hanging fruit to improve everybody’s live. But when they suggested anything, the POs always declined it, nah, it’s the support’s job. Period. A few times I teamed up with the support work mates and told the POs the same, the support team was suggesting and then it was accepted without hesitation. So that clearly shows there really was a two-tier society.
In my current project we don’t have a support team, so we need to handle all the support queries ourselves. In that regard I miss the old project. But luckily, it’s basically just other developers who are needing our help, so that’s fairly okay.