I started these new series to debunk widespread myths about software technical support. The first one is:
Technical support engineers can’t and don’t write code (myth). Technical support engineers do write code and sometimes fairly advanced one (fact).
There is a prevalent view of a technical support engineer spending all the time on the phone as a shield from introvert software engineers who hate customers. This is not true. There are usually several layers of support from very basic ones requiring only customer communication and foreign language skills to very advanced problem identification and troubleshooting skills that requires a thousand page knowledge from Windows Internals book. My point here is that advanced troubleshooting requires tools that sometimes don’t exist and this prompts support engineers to develop their own. Sometimes it is easy to query information from the customer environment and/or fix the problem on the spot by writing a tool or a script. And this is pure unconstrained development limited only by individual imagination, skills and complexity of the task.
The weak form of this myth is the view of a support engineer using only Visual Basic or its scripting variant.
What do you think about this? The idea of these series came from the following book that I’m reading at the moment:
Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering (Agile Software Development)
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -