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Comment by prpon | Hacker News Reader

I would second your thought. I worked for a enterprise software company that had developers building the product, a maintenance team that fixed bugs and 3 layers of support.

The only people who knew what was going on with a huge product were the developers who actually wrote it. But you had to go thru so many layers to get to the developers, irrespective of silver or gold or platinum support. I would never ever pay for support of another product that comes from a big corporation.

We went opensource with our products and every developer responded directly to questions from customers. It made a big difference to the users.

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I don't think open source is the particular answer to the problem you state, I think it's an orthogonal issue.

If you have millions of users who want to ask questions (think of supporting Microsoft Office), then direct access to developers is a non-starter.

What I have seen work are rotation programs where developers spend some time as first-line support (maybe 1 week per year). When doing so, they help educate the rest of the support staff, and they get great exposure to real users facing real problems.

> What I have seen work are rotation programs where developers spend some time as first-line support (maybe 1 week per year). When doing so, they help educate the rest of the support staff, and they get great exposure to real users facing real problems.

This skirts the real issue, though, which is that the person you get on the line should have the power to fix your problem. Putting developers on first-line support would only help if they were still developers while they worked there, with all the same access privileges and tools available to them.

One of the reasons often cited for the structure that existed was 'it would distract developers working on the product from meeting the deliverables'. There is a role for support on a complex product where user errors often are the reason for tech support calls.

However, If you have a problem that requires code fixes, I cannot imagine having to deal with a long line of people who have no power to make those changes.

If a lot of users make the same error, then a fix in the code is required.

Office has not just millions of users but also, I suspect, thousands of developers.

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