Any engineer that takes issue with that statement has never spent a day dealing with rude, angry customers and has no accurate frame of reference to draw up a response.
I remember some time in support, most customers weren't rude. It's boring calls to register on the service, moving out to a new address, or confirming identity.
If telephone support is the final option after email doesn't work, I feel entitled to be angry. That doesn't mean I have to be rude, but I let the call center person now that I am fucking angry if I wrote 2 emails/support tickets already and they haven't solved the problem.
I have been in dev, qa and support roles. When I write code today, I always keep in mind what steps I can take to help folks in support troubleshoot any issues with it. Having clear and informative logs, comments including wiki links for more details etc. I have a lot of empathy for support now. Once you have to baby sit an error-prone daily batch or deal with issues from users who think you aren't much use - things that basically screw up your day - you never forget.
Having experience in both roles (and some more, all on the technical end), I don't think so. Of course, it's not a simple harder/easier question and it doesn't apply to everyone but if you are good at supporting customers you naturally care about stuff and the customer's issues. You file an internal ticket, have to keep watching it but in many cases there's just no progress or even a response.
Ultimately when there's a real bug you are just being an (internal) customer requiring support. The support quality of a company is not only determined by the right customer support employees or vendors but how good the internal support and escalation paths are.
As an internal engineer, when an internal ticket comes in I'm going to track down the issue, may realize it's a known thing that requires a lot of planning to resolve, loop in my manager, etc. but ultimately it usually ends with "we don't have time to address this right now and it doesn't affect enough users". If you're lucky there's a workaround that can be shared.
Now, I don't like that. I'd rather fix the issue for the user but I already have committed deadlines and team goals and it's rather easy to just go with a "sorry, we may revisit in Q1 or Q2 next year".
The support agent still has to a) deal with the customer's anger and b) cannot be honest with them, i.e. needs to wrap the situation in a blanket of corporate speak so as not to shed a bad light on internal teams / the company. At the end of the day they are just powerless and have to take on the responsibility in front of the user, whereas the engineer may feel unsatisfied not being allowed to spend time on it, but ultimately is far enough removed from the user to be actually affected by the situation. Granted, personally I always try my best to get a fix out but a lot of engineers would rather work on their projects and the managers want that too.
FWIW, when I did customer support I always reminded myself that nothing is personal. When I'm at the opposite end (a customer) I also don't get mad at the individual I'm dealing with unless they are not trying to understand or help at all.
I work in a senior support role and I am constantly telling my juniors not to take things personally.
Funny thing is I used to take things personally and it did occasionally lead to me going the extra mile to save the situation, but it is just so emotionally exhausting, to the point where I do not think it is humanly possible to maintain that level of service (I suppose some one might be able to, but I have not met anyone like that).
A part of me misses that do-or-die personal commitment to the customer, but for the most part I enjoy not going insane
as an engineer, i typically face complaints i have the power to fix. it would be a lot more stressful to spend all day fielding complaints i had no power to fix.
I used to be a software engineer at a nonprofit that handled a lot of customer care requests. I wanted to see what frustrated our users, and I also wanted insight into how we could better support the customer care team. So I talked to the volunteer coordinator, took a day of PTO, and worked a shift in customer care. (Because I did it as volunteer work on PTO, my boss and project manager couldn't tell me not to do it.)
Reader, working in customer care blows. It sucks hardcore. From my engineering work, I actually knew what the cause of the problems were and understood the timeline for fixing them -- information that real customer care reps rarely have available to them, but even that wasn't enough to appease some people. Even when people weren't rude, just the never-ending barrage of complaints and problems that I had to fix wore me down. And I only worked one shift, and then went back to engineering the next day.
People who can do this day after day, retain their composure, and somehow not burn out from the nature of the work are awesome, and they have my respect. Their jobs are absolutely more difficult than mine.