[asdf21]

Always has been for 10+ years now.

As a former Call Center Director, it's pretty amazing to me how much bad-will these massive companies are willing to foment by not running their support correctly.

It's not that hard / expensive guys... you can hire great support employees for $20 / hour all across America.

[oefrha]

Are these great $20/hr support engineers the kind I often deal with over email or phone, who usually employ canned responses, can’t solve off-script problems, tend to repeat the same unhelpful responses, and are sometimes indistinguishable from bots?

[asdf21]

Those are $9.25 an hour support agents who are paid mostly to get you off the phone and take 70 calls a day.

Or their $10.25 an hour tier 3 "supervisors" who you might escalate the call to.

[patrickbolle]

Look towards Shopify Support Gurus. Paid well, fully remote. As a Shopify Partner I deal with them a lot and have never had a bad experience; while some can't always answer my question, I always speak to a human (24/7 via live chat) and they direct my query in the right direction.

[ashtonkem]

Support is also one of the most remote friendly forms of work available, and often benefits from spreading workers over multiple time zones.

[rapind]

Much of customer support is like the close doors button on an elevator. It doesn't actually do anything, but makes you feel like it does.

[kube-system]

It's much more expensive than not having it.

Back of the napkin math for 1 billion users and a 1:100 support staff ratio comes out to around 5.8 billion dollars/yr.

[asdf21]

This is developer support, not user support.