Why should I do production support?
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Why should I do production support?
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Re: Why should I do production support?
#2People seem to get stuck in support work. That would be my aversion to doing too much of it. At some of my prior workplaces, there have been people who have been so good at support that they never got assigned to do new development work. Engineers far more experienced and senior than I was (or currently am) were dealing with trivial issues as they were good at it while I got the nice greenfield project.
They had to quit to get out of support.
Re: Why should I do production support?
#3People seem to get stuck in support work. That would be my aversion to doing too much of it. At some of my prior workplaces, there have been people who have been so good at support that they never got assigned to do new development work. Engineers far more experienced and senior than I was (or currently am) were dealing with trivial issues as they were good at it while I got the nice greenfield project. They had to q…
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Re: Why should I do production support?
#4At some large tech companies, production support as a software engineer does not seem to be a path to promotion, unless you are a junior level engineer. And yet, solving some of the bugs encountered in production environments, especially with a heterogeneous set of users, requires expert level knowledge of a particular software library. It is probably a great way to coast, so I hear.
Re: Why should I do production support?
#5Teams I've worked on have not had dedicated support staff, but rather engineers rotate 24 hour support duties on a weekly basis.
I have always had mixed feelings about "on call". I dread my turn on the rotation because the imminent threat of a prod issue has a psychological impact on my entire week, even off hours, and usually for a day or two after.
If everybody on the team feels that way, maybe it can act as a forcing function for product quality. I've seen this work on teams that already cultivate a strong sense of ownership.
On the flip side, it really stresses me out, and I sometimes resent that I'm not getting paid overtime for 24hr on call days. Maybe that's just baked into an engineer's salary these days, though...
Re: Why should I do production support?
#6I work in finance, where we have clearly defined processes for production support, simply because developers don’t have access to production environments.
However, production support teams don’t have a real understanding of our application and how it’s build. So most of the times you have engineers on call with production support, telling them how to debug the problem and come up with relevant logs.
It’s incredibly infuriating and time consuming, and I absolutely hate doing it this way.
90% of the time you also get incredibly vague bug reports with irrelevant logs, and a description of what they think the problem is. Most of the time you need to spend another day finding correct logs and somehow debugging it. Most teams log every single request with all parameters and payloads because they can just replicate the problem locally instead of relying on production support.
We’ve long advocated for either having dedicated support or have engineers on some sort of schedule that can do support.
Re: Why should I do production support?
#7If you aren't doing production support, you don't actually know your product. You aren't connected to the pain points your users experience and you miss what is, to your support team and your customers, the glaringly obvious.
I would argue all developers should be required to do some support work.
Re: Why should I do production support?
#8It sounds very much like the poster is describing an on-call rotation rather than "production support", which is a very different thing altogether.
Production support is customer support: responding to chat messages or communications from users.
An on-call rotation, on the other hand, involves responding to production incidents and mounting a proper incident response.
The Google SRE workbook has a great chapter on the subject: https://landing.google.com/sre/workbook/chapters/on-call/
Re: Why should I do production support?
#9You don't get anything out of burning out. You just burn out. And that time is not coming back. This post seems like an apologist talking.
Production support alone is not that much of a problem. What the author skipped (conveniently? or forgot to mention?) is - it's really the "on call" phenomenon that's the problem.
The "typical" on-call - where when you are on-call you are magically on-call 24x7. Yes, during your sleeping hours as well; as if that's less important and the company can avoid spending money to hire dedicated support for those hours and instead make you suffer (yes, it's just that - there's no other name for it like "satisfaction", "learning", "growing" or any of those buzzwords).
You want engineers to do production support? Well, let them do it during normal office hours and only few times a month. Or heck, let them do it for weeks but let them punch in and punch out normal office hours. Let them choose to do only one half of the day and have someone else willing to do the another half.
There's no excuse for burning out engineers (esp. unsuspecting youngsters) by pushing them into ungodly hours of work ruining their health among other things while trying to constantly tell them - "do you even realise what a service to humanity you are doing!".
It's just exploitation.
Re: Why should I do production support?
#10Teams I've worked on have not had dedicated support staff, but rather engineers rotate 24 hour support duties on a weekly basis. I have always had mixed feelings about "on call". I dread my turn on the rotation because the imminent threat of a prod issue has a psychological impact on my entire week, even off hours, and usually for a day or two after. If everybody on the team feels that way, maybe it can act as a forc…
The engineers at the organization I just departed (at least the ones in the support rotation which did not include me) got paid in both money and extra time off for their time spent on support tasks.