| A support role is a great place to understand the interface between your company's product/service and customers. A few ways for you to look at this differently: 1. Carve out some time (I know this might sound difficult when being buried in P1 tickets, but do it nevertheless) at least on a weekly basis to do analysis of support ticket trends. 2. Build a pareto chart of the top 1 or 2 repeat tickets. (Believe me, there will be repeat tickets in any support op) 3. Build relationship with the core dev team. Show them your analysis of the top ticket and ask them if you could be part of the root-cause-analysis. Use the opportunity to understand the code base and volunteer to test the fix or provide test cases for the issue. 4. Keep doing this until your core dev team starts believing in your analytical skills. 5. Ask them if you could look at their feature/bug-fix prioritization and if your analysis could inform that process. If you keep doing this, you will find that your volume of tickets go down, you have built rapport and relationship with the dev team (and hopefully the engg manager sees your contributions) and when there is an open position (this is a startup, right? So, positions would open up at some point), apply for it and move laterally. If the culture of your engg organization is open and they let you contribute through pull reqs, ask a dev for a task assigned to them that you could write unit/integration tests. Repeat this to gain their trust that you know how the code works. These steps should put you on solid footing for a lateral move into the engg organization. If you feel the burnout is severe and the culture of the organization does not permit the path mentioned above, you may be better off looking out for a different job that suits your needs. |