[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.