Thread by @nickpowpow

I started my career in tech support (Cisco TAC). This had profound effects for me and I feel like getting on a soapbox on the internet (thread) to share my opinion on the relationship between support, really caring about customers, and people's first jobs.

1/n

First, if you want to get into tech or are looking for a first job out of college, I highly recommend tech support. You get a glimpse of the hardest and most important issues to practitioners multiple times a day. It's dog years of experience

2/n

Second, support cases and the experience of being in a shitty place, being totally reliant on a person on the phone, completely shapes and defines how organizations make decisions. Support sucks? Overly-promised marketecture deck? That's a recipe for misery.

3/n

And as a support person you are the owner of that misery. Learning to understand it, manage it, absorb the general entropy and undirected frustration, and that process is highly reusable in basically any job.

4/n

Misery ownership has three parts. First, you get first hand experience about the worst parts about operating stuff. Second, you get to dive deep into the technical reasons of those problems. The third, and hardest, part is not letting the steam of problems corrupt your mind.

5/n

You have to understand that, as a support person, you only see the worst of the worst, and basically zero of the business value. When people don't call you, things are doing well. And that's the majority of people. Everything isn't terrible. But you know what is.

6/n

But man, you see some shit, every day in support, and build a huge amount of empathy. I think four jobs later I'm still fighting for the people I spent hours with on the phone 10 years ago.

7/n

Do you still keep the perspective of solving the problems of your first job? I do. I think everything is going to break and I want to prevent phone calls at some deep level. Support did that to me and I think it's a good thing.

8/n

In retrospect, l think the folks o worked with in support and others that came from that background, have an outsized impact on customers and end up with awesome careers.

9/n

A lot of days I just want to get on the queue, get a stream a customer problems, dive deep and knock them out, and get that little dopamine hit. But now that process just takes longer. So here's an homage to you support, and everyone on the phone/chat/email queues.

10/10