[coffeecloud]

When I got hired as an associate engineer in 2015 the job was 50% coding and 50% technical customer support. 2 of us got hired at the same time and we would switch off weeks.

On customer support weeks I would take bug reports from customers, repro them, write down the repro steps, then try to figure out the right engineer to take it to. Eventually I started going deeper to try to find what part of the codebase was broken, then eventually I tried actually fixing the bugs myself. It was a great way to slowly ease into a real production codebase while simultaneously providing some actual value to the company without having to deliver features. It gave me a ton of customer empathy that I’ve carried with me through the rest of my career.

I did this for about a year before I was competent enough to get promoted to regular engineer and focus on product work full time.

Idk if any other companies do it like that but it was a really great way to upskill very green engineers.