i want to understand which option will give me more advantages in terms of career growth and job stability, working on technically advanced projects etc,.
Some good tactics here. I wonder if some people are innately better/worse with directions. I'm horrible at directions and I have tried to ditch Google maps while driving and being mindful of my surroundings while walking downtown for dinner, but I always get turned around. My wife on the other hand, she always seems to know where she's at.
I also found this quote ironic:
"Stop and enjoy the scenery. Set your phone to vibrate every 15 minutes to remind you to note where you are, Richard S. Citrin, an organizational psychologist from Pittsburgh, said in an email."
As someone who has worked at a tech company in support, this is article is misguided. It assumes that all companies are being thoughtless and asking any employee to answer customer support tickets without any training or guidance. We had engineers and product manager answer a few tickets with customer support agents providing guidance. These folks had training and they volunteered to answer tickets for 1 hour/week for a few weeks (with supervision). The engineers and product managers who participated enjoyed the experience because they could see first had the user problems and the language they used. It helped them understand our product not just from the business/product perspective, but from the user perspective. In addition, it allowed them to gain insight into what customer service agents have to deal with on a day to day basis. This led to products being built and launched with customer service in mind. This was a cultural shift and still exists today. Customer service is looped in as product is being built to get help articles and CS agents familiar with how to support new features.
I dunno about the engineers where you work, but a lot of the game programmers at (name witheld, but pick any company. They all seem similar) are not good with interpersonal soft skills. Granted, I didn't read the article before looking at the comments (helps me weed out articles that are a waste of time), but most of our engineers (myself included) would just walk away from the CS role on tilt having learned nothing more than to be grateful they don't have to interact with any people, much less people who have gotten angry enough to contact CS, as a means of making their living. Maybe I'm completely wrong and I just got unlucky with myself and the engineers at the 3 companies I've worked at with programmers, and they really do enjoy confrontational human interactions. I've been wrong before, but the stereotype fits pretty close, though exaggerated, with my experience.
I see a lot of myself in these traits; I don't have the best interpersonal skills. While I don't enjoy confrontation for its own sake, I do enjoy robust debate with my peers so long as it serves a purpose.
However, that in no way precluded me being a consummate professional on support calls. Being nice and polite to your customers isn't difficult, though it can require a bit of patience if they are slow or make mistakes as you talk them through stuff. Or biting your tongue if they are rude or nasty; that's generally due to the frustration the software you wrote caused them. Show them some sympathy! I can't say that I particularly liked doing support calls, but I think pretty much anyone can play the role and do a decent job if they can use some basic common sense when talking to the person at the other end of the phone and keep their cool in the face of an angry caller. If a developer can't handle a routine telephone call in a civilised and respectful manner, I'm not sure I'd want them on my team.
I know a number of engineers who are extremely socially competent. I also know a lot who fit the description you give. It just depends on who you hire, and what the emphasis is on. Personally, I'd strongly prefer the type that can talk to customers without raging, because it's also their job to understand what users want, and build that.
I know plenty of socially competent programmers who are also good programmers.
However, some people really do associate lacking social skills with technical skills. That sometimes informs company culture - be it by peefering to hire more stereotyped people or by creating culture where unnecessary confrontational style wins the day. In such culture people who have good social skill adjust the way they communicate (full disclosure: I personally did through I am not claiming super superior communication).
This is really nothing more than a stereotype. You find what you are looking for. There are entirely too many engineers in the world for a generalization like this to be accurate.
>There are entirely too many engineers in the world for a generalization like this to be accurate.
For a generalization to be accurate it doesn't need to apply to everybody in a group, just to a larger percentage of people in the group than in the general population.
It doesn't also need to apply absolutely to each one of the group that it does apply: it just needs to apply more than it does to an average person in the general population.
Yeah. I answered phones and emails for a few years at a B2B software company, and the most I got was a veiled threat that they'd send a formal complaint. In general, abusive customers were were few and far between.
People I know who've worked on B2C support got verbal abuse almost daily.
As someone who has also worked primarily B2B or at least B2(Small Busines) in the technical arena...
In these situations I'd like to remind you that the person you are talking to very likely may be copping that abuse from their customers or managers, and most don't pass it on. So try to help them out, they're literally making your job less miserable :)
> People I know who've worked on B2C support got verbal abuse almost daily.
Is this generally the case? I've answered thousands of customer service queries for my (mostly B2C) startup. I can count on two hands the number of angry/abusive emails I've received.
Yes. In a past life I did phone and email support for two wildly different industries (cellular and banking). I helped train new hires during the first couple of weeks that they answered calls, and several times people broke down in tears during the first few days. Average tenure at one company was only 3-4 months. The other managed close to a year.
I don't know how big your startup is, but I'd hazard a guess that you're small enough for your support to still feel "human." I think this is the biggest issue with most bigco CS.
I really like that you could volunteer rather than being commanded to do CS. Irrational as it may be that would make a huge difference for me. I'd personally consider volunteering but for some reason I'd resent being ordered to do it.
I have a lot of respect for the Amish, I think they are true hackers. It's pretty amazing the things they build with the resources they have.
Of course I love technology, the internet, etc and couldn't imagine my life without all that, but yes I am addicted to my phone and being able to look up anything whenever I want. This is extremely powerful, but this quote gives me something to think about as I type this at my desk job:
“If you can just look it up on the internet, you’re not thinking,” said Levi, another woodworker. “The more people rely on technology, the more we want to sit behind a desk. But you can’t build a house sitting behind a desk.”
>>“If you can just look it up on the internet, you’re not thinking,”
I really do not see how having instant access to information precludes you from thinking. Au contraire, it probably gives us more time to think and it allows our minds to branch out into much more interesting places. I think it's fine that we can just look things up. Even Albert Einstein seemed to think so:
“Never memorize what you can look up in books”
p.s. For the picky the real quote is:
“[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. He also said, “…The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.”
> I really do not see how having instant access to information precludes you from thinking. Au contraire, it probably gives us more time to think and it allows our minds to branch out into much more interesting places.
There are two ways in which writing dulls the critical faculties rather than enhances them:
First, writing is necessarily a one-way monologue, not a dialogue. The reader, the consumer of information is unable to probe the author to assess credibility and veracity of information. You also have no way to assess if you have correctly learned the information. As a result, it is all too easy to see misinformation, not information, get spread. This is not an idle concern--an awful lot of history turns out to be very old lies that have been retold so often in this manner that they have come to be treated as truth.
A second issue that readily arises is that, when information is readily available at your fingertips, you're less likely to recall the information to find relevant comparisons. A lot of productivity in science or the humanities is in being able to draw parallels and synthesize similarities between rather disparate-seeming topics.
It's hard to invest much interest in the opinion of someone on a subject they've literally devoted their lives to knowing as little about as possible, to such a degree they live a life entirely isolated from it.
It's not that they don't know about it, it's that they opt to selectively use it. The largest reason to avoid tech is because it removes from family values that they hold dear. This is why, when they go home, they probably don't bring their cell phone into the house.
Err... Many of them have a phone house, though some use a privy. They leave their phone in there, be it landline or mobile.
In fact, one of my most bizarre experiences was spending a year or two regularly conversing with a couple of Amish people. Why was that strange? It was on IRC. They were both away at college and, during that time, made free use of certain tech, because it didn't diminish their concept of family.
Key point: "The better those relationships are, the better your own work will be, which is why it’s so important to treat others with empathy and respect."
I want to highlight empathy, especially when interacting with colleagues who are not technical. There are a lot of things developers know that are second nature, but to many others, it's not. Meet them halfway, help them understand, don't dismiss someone because they don't know how something works.
Empathize with them. Really try to put yourself in their shoes. Does your product actually solve a problem for your customer? Is it a problem they're willing to pay for?
Once you build a product that solves a problem customers are willing to pay for, figure out where they are and go there. At the risk of sounding trite, like pg's advice, do things that don't scale: http://paulgraham.com/ds.htm. Literally go to potential customers in person and talk to them.
When I was a contract iOS engineer, I've had the following payment situations:
- Paid 1x/week at a design agency with regular hours
- Paid 1x/2weeks at a company with regular hours
- 50% of contract value down with next 25% paid at project milestone and remaining 25% paid at completion.
As a contractor, getting paid on a regular, expected time schedules relieves so much stress. If you can commit to regular payment schedules, I guarantee your contractors will be happier, at least related to receiving payment.
