by make_it_sure on 3/30/23, 4:12 AM with 2 comments
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?
by midenginedcoupe on 3/30/23, 6:57 AM
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.