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0 pointsjjirsa5y ago0 comments

Why should a company hire two lines of support to shield an engineer from bugs they introduce?

0 comments

1. Not every support request is the result of a bug.

2. Not every bug is directly related to the product owner/team. Bugs can be introduced from different teams/processes.

3. Requiring senior engineers to do L1 and L2 support is likely a misallocstion of resources when less senior people can handle those issues.

ocdtrekkie5y ago

1. The best team I've ever worked with considered every support request to be a bug. Is the user confused? At minimum, that's a documentation bug. It's also possible the product itself should be doing a better job stepping the user through a process or self-diagnosing.

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24554399

hinkley5y ago

4. Engineers have a bad habit of renegotiating scope in front of the customer without realizing they’ve done it.

imhoguy5y ago

As usual, "that should be easy to fix, just line of code here". At least from SWE perspective the fix may be easy to make but architecture or product management team may not be so happy about such pitch, especially when customer responds with "oh great, when?".

jjirsaOP5y ago

3 is a common mistake, like the one engineers make when they pretend that the hard part of programming is typing

inerte5y ago

I am not sure most of the calls are bug reports. There's a customer support level, they triage. Sometimes what the customer think it's a bug it's a design decision (or lack of a feature) and the customer support knows another way of accomplishing the same task. Or they know it's not supported at all.

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