Everyone should read support emails

This only works if they know how to convey the relevant issues to the right developers properly.

I had some large files on my Amazon Drive (the consumer product) which could never be downloaded via the desktop app, web browser, odrive, or rclone. I had to endure multiple instances of support going through the flowchart, and some promises of conveying my issue to the engineering team only to be met with disappointment.

I never managed to recover those files in the end.

But the attitude displayed in some of the replies is exactly what I'm talking about when I say some people think support is beneath them.

At my last job the support team was a thin abstraction layer that seemed to pass almost everything directly through to my dev team. For a while I enjoyed it -- it is satisfying to see how my efforts could directly help customers, undertand how they were using the product, etc. The type of software I was working on meant that technical configuration problems were showstoppers and people hailed me as a hero whenever I stepped in and resolved their issues.

The downsides were insidious and slow to show themselves: lack of time to invest in fixing problems in a systematic way rather than helping customers one-by-one because of time consumed by support, inability to focus on feature work due to support-related interruptions up to 2-3 times per day, the sentiment from leadership that we weren't delivering new features fast enough because of our invisible support labor, the feeling of being "always on" because we had customers with high-urgency tickets around the globe, etc.

After two years of that, I was staring burnout in the face. I told my leadership I didn't want to work this way but nothing changed. When a month went by where I only made 3 commits to source despite feeling overwhelmingly busy I knew something had to change, if not in the org then in myself. I told my manager I simply would not participate in support any more and was deleting Slack from my phone, that if they wanted a good customer experience they needed to make the necessary investments. In my mind this ultimatum was the first step toward quitting my job. But an amazing thing happened once I started putting boundaries in place: leadership started talking about the need for better systems, better documentation, the need to prioritize work that would make the product easier to use and support. My productivity on feature work skyrocketed and my product managers were happy because we were over-delivering for their bosses after under-delivering for so long. I was given a large raise a few months later, the kind people normally have to change jobs to get.

For myself, I learned it's important not to enable dysfunctional process just because I can excel, for a while, in that process. I learned it's important to set boundaries in my work. I learned that focus is sacred and should be protected. If you are a leader in your company thinking about diffusing the support burden, carefully consider the productivity cost to your most expensive/valuable employees that comes with repeated direct exposure to customers.