[jacquesm]

Take it one further: everyone should do support, not just read the emails. 1 day per month or so should do the job, it puts everybody in a good position to appreciate that if they don't do their work properly the support people end up taking the heat. So do not just read the emails, answer them, make it work for the end-user and spot the dysfunctional bits in your organization first hand.

[AdmiralAsshat]

> Take it one further: everyone should do support, not just read the emails.

That's a really fast way to burn out your entire team.

Devs don't necessarily have good communication or people skills. They haven't been trained to respond politely when someone sends them a screaming, all-caps e-mail that their product is garbage. That's my job as the Support Engineer.

[smush]

The gp comment mentioned once a month doing support to provide empathy for Support Engineers. If doing an activity once a month is so bad as to cause burn-out, perhaps us Support Engineers are the real suckers?

I would argue a once a month support engineer stint / shadowing would have more benefits than drawbacks.

[the_gastropod]

While that stereotype may be true for some developers, I don't find it holds for most devs I know and work with. People incapable of dealing with emotion probably don't make great employees to begin with.

[AdmiralAsshat]

The emotional response is probably the most egregious that a developer can do, but I stand by my assertion that developers aren't trained in communications. I work with some developers who write amazing code, but if you read their emails, you'd think they were written by a ten year-old. The responses are terse, lack proper punctuation, and usually rife with misspellings. And that's fine: their job is to write code, after all. But it doesn't look good if that raw response goes out to the customer.

[behringer]

At one of the companies I've worked for, the tech team can be directed a ticket or whatever to look at, but they respond to the customer service team, not the customer.