[RickJWagner]

Support engineer here. For anyone considering a career in support:

- It's harder than development. Green fields are easier.

- It's pretty much a thankless job.

- You are sort of the janitors of the IT world. Not much respect.

+ The money can be pretty good. Because of the above, management usually rewards good support engineers.

+ You are welcomed by those who don't want to do support.

+ You stay fresh, learning other people's ideas all the time. This contributes to longevity.

All things considered, it's been a good career move for me. YMMV.

[SketchySeaBeast]

> You stay fresh, learning other people's ideas all the time. This contributes to longevity.

I recently moved from a dev/support combo role to more of a support one, and this really stands out to me. I'm supporting a half dozen solutions currently, and each one consists of a pile of different flavours of the month. I'm learning a ton of new technology to support the solutions, much more so than if I'd stayed on any one dev team.

[levi-turner]

Very good list, although I'd disagree about pay. I'd add:

+ it's one of the easier routes to becoming a literal expert in how to deploy the software.

[jpatokal]

Pay for level 1 positions is indeed not great, but the money is pretty good in companies that value support enough to do it in-house and once you've learned enough to be senior/backline to a whole crew of juniors.

I do agree that the pay does not necessarily reflect the fact that the job is often harder than mere software development: you're basically debugging other people's software in realtime, often while angry people yell at you.