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Everyone should read support emails

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Re: Everyone should read support emails

#181

Post by jwr »

PeterisP wrote: post #164
jwr wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully disagree. Note that 10-15% of resources of a 5-customer organization is very different from 10-15% of resources of a 1000-customer organization, assuming your customers actually pay you money (generally recommended). This means that even assuming you get no benefits of scale (and you should be, your software/product should improve as you learn and support load should fall), there is no reason why you c…

This is all about scaling. You want to do 10x the customers with 2x the employees, so that the business finally starts to make money. The service level that took 10-15% of your resources back then would take the majority of your resources now; the same % of your resources now is much less hours per customer.

But that's my point, isn't it? If you want to do 10x the customers with 2x the employees, you will be cutting into your support resources, and your customers will suffer.

This is exactly why we (as customers) all have to suffer bad or no support. And sadly, we put up with it, mostly.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#182

Post by blaze33 »

mey wrote: post #166
blaze33 wrote: post #163

Actual reports from actual users are priceless to build what provides value actually worth paying for. I've met devs considering good code and well engineered systems as their ultimate work goals. While myself, only ever saw software as tools towards any actual value keeping the business afloat. Does that make me a weird software engineer? Or one that should look for some better suited role? Still wondering...

It doesn't make you weird, but unfortunately may put you in the minority of developers. There is a balance to be struck. Business can drive really bad technical decisions (debt) due to time/people constraints that take decades to remove. This may be needed simply to get the company going or stay going (see most startup MVPs). Those decisions need to be intentional and strategic, otherwise it becomes the norm, and you…

Good point. I may add I constantly try to learn and understand best software or engineering practice while working hard to also stay aware of whats most useful for the business. As you say " There is a balance to be struck"!

Like trying to know enough to deliver value while avoiding shooting yourself in the foot and also not wasting time on what's only seen as a black box by outsiders?

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#184

Post by linuxftw »

jurassic wrote: post #100

The flip side of this, of course, is that not everyone wants to be involved in support and that sharing around the support burden can lead to a loss of focus within the organization. Often everybody doing everything is indistinguishable from everybody doing nothing. 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…

You hit the nail on the head right here. Helping support is literally reward-less work.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#185

Post by paulcole »

systemtest wrote: post #128
superice wrote: post #43

This is why we regularly take developers to customers. It is eye-opening to see on-site that your mobile app with tiny but well-designed buttons doesn't work for registering container positions when the user is in a shaky 90 metric tons weighing machine, handling 30 metric ton containers. We write software for container terminal and other logistical actors, and seeing the software being used by real users is so incre…

I worked at a first-response call-center company where after each shift, they would go through the records that they processed that shift and manually count the number of high-priority incidents and various other metrics. They did this after each shift, taking about 15 minutes. For the last three years. After my field visit I took it to the PO and we implemented these metrics in one sprint. With a single click they c…

Sometimes when you automate this stuff away, you lose the value of manually reviewing the data. Just seeing a metric isn't the same as reading through the logs and seeing what actually happened.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#186

Post by linuxftw »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #103

How do you prevent this from becoming another stream of continuous disruptions that prevent knowledge workers from having enough sustained, concentrated time to develop big picture solutions? Obviously you want to prioritize work to address what adds value for the customer. But can you really do that if everyone has to be constantly disrupting their work to scan incoming streams of idiosyncratic support requests? Tha…

This is literally what the 'management' types should be doing, and then prioritizing this work along with feature work.

The support org should have enough staffing to be able to 'train up' and start tackling more and more issues themselves. Even if they're not writing the software, they can often work to get reproducables or get you most of the way there "null pointer deref of x caused this bug" etc.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#187

Post by TheLuddite »

gist wrote: post #120
michaelt wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably he also took over the employee's desk, computer, chair, telephone headset, photos of wife and children, and so on. "Mind if I..." would be a normal, polite thing to say in such a situation.

It's not the employee's desk. It is Microsoft's desk (and Bill is defacto Microsoft) He wasn't in the employee's house. He is using the desk that Microsoft provided for him. He is not 'another guy doing tech support asking to sit in and do a job'.

You are a retard.

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#188

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

AllegedAlec wrote: post #42
ape4 wrote: post #40

Now its impossible to email many companies I find. You click on "Contact" and get Twitter, Instagram, Facebook... but not email :(

A few weeks ago I tried to make a complaint to the national mail service, because they decided the pickup point closest to me was about half an hour from my house, rather than the pickup point that was literally around the corner. They had an online complaint form, but you were only able to use it on workdays between 0900 and 1600.

The Social Security website has limited operating hours.

https://imgur.com/KYSOqUn

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#189

Post by g___ »

adwww wrote: post #2

"We can't give devs access to support, because [ZenDesk, FreshDesk, etc] costs 9 gazillion dollars per user"

At least FreshDesk has an "occasional agents" option (users who are paid per every day they logged in).

https://support.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/227...

Re: Everyone should read support emails

#190

Post by gravypod »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #90
alanfalcon wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, and I don’t disagree re: the nightmare Medium has (predictably) become. But I’d love to know what platform would you suggest?

I self-host my Jekyll-based blog, by compiling each push on builds.sr.ht and rsync'ing it onto a static web server. Basically roll-your-own GitHub pages. I also wrote a tool which converts your Medium posts into a Jekyll blog. https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/unmediumify

Have you considered building https://cdn.sr.ht? I do a similar process for some sites and use AWS CloudFront to essentially get globally deployed static sites.

Since this is a workflow you've encountered might be something that people would pay for. I definitely like a CloudFront alternative that wasn't as overpriced.

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