Ask HN: Developers that also do support?

1 pointsmake_it_sure3y ago2 comments

We are a startup with just a few people and the hardest position of all is tech support, from filling it to retention. The requirement is that you need to be a mid-developer at least but also do support all day.

We're having a super hard time finding someone that wants to do this even when paying over the mid-dev rate.

Developers hate support or any kind of prolonged client interaction, support guys don't have technical experience. Besides that, it takes 2 months minimum of training for a tech support position to get remotely productive, it actually starts at 3-4 month mark.

After all the time the team spends on training them and they start to actually deliver something, we're seeing them fleeing away to a full dev job on some other place.

We just spent months on interview and training and they leave exactly when they start to become helpful. Since we're a very small company of 7, this affects us a lot.

I'm very frustrated about this. Do you guys have any idea on how to handle this?

2 comments

2 comments · 1 top-level

midenginedcoupe3y ago· 1 in thread

I'd fold the function in to the team and spread the load.

You have 7 people, so if you took a week each you'd have a schedule of 6 weeks of "regular" work and 1 week of support.

And allocate some time to reducing that learning curve - a 3-4 month ramp-up is pretty extreme, so there must be work you can do to lessen that considerably. Whether that's through automation, bug fixes, documentaion, adding features so customers can self-serve instead of having to resort to support, it'll probably take some time to figure out the most effective combination of all of the above.

The same goes for the amount of support needed. A full-time role in a team of 7 is also pretty extreme. What is it about your company/product that needs so much? There must be things you can do to bring that down by an order of magnitude.

make_it_sureOP3y ago

We're 7 but we're only 3 front end developers that have the technical expertise to do this support task. I've though of putting FE developers in rotation for support, but after talking with them and other developers, it's very off-putting for them.

It takes a lot because the app is very complex and if you don't know all the little things, a wrong reply can cause a lot of issues for the client.