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So much this. I'm working for a company that used to have Support Engineers and now does not, and I now get bombarded directly with requests from customers, and I haven't been able to make any effective new development happen for months as a result. Those Support Engineers are invaluable. They can investigate those requests, decide which ones are legitimate (we get a lot of either one-off minor freak things happening due to network glitches or customers just interacting with the software in really crazy ways and we don't have time to baby proof the software -- I should note that this is internal software, so we only have a couple hundred users), and for the things that do happen from time to time, like a customer accidentally closed something out and needs to reopen it but we don't normally allow that to happen so it doesn't get abused, we provide tools so the support engineer can fix those things without involving the rest of the dev team. Once those things are taken care of, everything that's left, assuming the support engineer thinks it's important enough, can then be passed along to us. We used to only get a handful of those a month. Now that there's no Support Engineer I get these requests all the time, and I'm getting burnt out, as I'm effectively working two jobs now instead of one (actually four, as I'm also an Architect now and the director of the phone systems, without the promotion, and basically have four bosses now, who don't communicate with each other and each have their own high priority requests I'm expected to do for each of them in addition to dev and support work, but that's another story....we lost a lot of people and there's almost no efforts being made to replace them). |