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Comment by TuringNYC | Hacker News Reader

Dont most developers do level III support? Ultimately if the first and second lines of defense cannot solve the problem, from everything I've seen, it goes to an Engineer. If it is your product, i'd assume it comes to you. This has been the case at almost every company I've been at.

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Don't dismiss the value of tier 1 and 2 support requests. Maybe 30% of your tier 1 requests are some confusion that support knows how to alleviate, but an engineer could make the product more straightforward to eliminate those support issues entirely.

You aren't looking for the hardest problems, you're looking for the problems your users hit the most that an engineer could reduce in the product.

> You aren't looking for the hardest problems, you're looking for the problems your users hit the most that an engineer could reduce in the product.

This is the hard part of software.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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?".

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

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