[snuxoll]

I spent 4 years working customer support, technical support and service desk gigs before I got a chance to enter software development (and now DevOps). As much a slog as these jobs could be at times, the soft skills and years of practice walking anyone from a total novice through a power-user through a problem has been invaluable.

I don’t call people users anymore, every employee at my company that I support is a customer of mine - I’ve learned over the years that the vocabulary change can really affect how you interact with people. My team writes internal LOB applications, we’re a medical billing company and not some hip startup; when you call every employee in the company “user” there’s a certain level of animosity (unconsciously best case) - they USE what you provide, it’s the same reason I’ve grown to hate the term “consumer”. A customer is someone you have a relationship with, respect and trust go both ways - ultimately the goal is to have a mutually beneficial relationship.

Being human even I have moments where my level of empathy drops below acceptable levels, when people keep reanimating dead tickets with unrelated issues I can get a little curt (don’t do that, now I’m going to send this to the service desk since development doesn’t work with the spam filter) - but overall I really enjoy the relationships I’ve built with everyone I support. When I get 20 tickets in the morning because a critical application is down I’m not racing because we’re losing $10,000 a minute or to meet an SLA - it’s there’s over 800 people, many of whom I know individually, who are relying on me to get it working again so they can get back to work (and for a production-focused company we have a shockingly low turnover rate, our employees generally love what they do).