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Not to disprove your point (cuz I know how rare this is), but anecdotally: I currently work for a small, bootstrapped company of about 12 people. We never took VC money, was founded by two partners, and just slowly grew by organic word-of-mouth.

I'm one of just a handful of customer support people there, but we try really hard to provide good help to our customers across emails, forums, and live calls in several time zones. We're a headless CMS company, so the questions tend to be a mix of stuff like "how do I do this with your API" and "my Next.js site isn't working, fix it" (even though it's not our code) and "halp, the internet is down" (occasionally it's our infra, but more often it's just a regional outage).

We serve a variety of customer types, from experienced devs to marketers who've never coded before. We try our best to help with all of them, sometimes providing in-depth troubleshooting and mini code reviews for their frontends, all at no additional charge. We're a tiny company in a small niche to begin with, but our customers tend to like us a lot and stick around for a long time. We'll never hyper-scale, but our customers, founders, and employees are happy. None of us will ever become the next tech billionaire, but we have good work-life balances and families and hobbies outside of our jobs. It's sustainable as long as our core product remains relevant. I wish more companies were like that!

In my experience, this sort of setup is more common with smaller companies who deliberately want to maintain an intimate relationship with their customers (and employees, for that matter). As companies get bigger, the human element tends to get lost in the anonymous seas of profit and loss statements. I know it's rare these days, but I really wish we had more small-biz tech companies of a dozen or two people rather than the global (and soon, interplanetary?) hyper-scalers.

I think biologically we just function best at the scale of small villages, where we can actually build rapport and trust over time. Whether it's customer support, a vendor-customer relationship, or even an organic community like a subreddit (or HN), people work together better when they feel like they're part of the same in-group (or at least a federation of allies working towards aligned goals). At a certain scale, personal relationships get replaced by impersonal bureaucracies instead, and then trust and accountability start to crumble. It takes deliberate effort to stay under that scale when the allure of hyperwealth is so strong, but it IS possible.

The last few companies I've enjoyed working at were also smaller outfits, small enough where I could personally answer all web inquiries from our customers. It wasn't technically part of my job description, but I'd go out of my way to try to build trust – a rarer and rarer commodity on the Web these days. If someone complained about a bug on our website, I'd take the responsibility to apologize, find and fix it, and let them know what happened. And at the bigger companies where I wasn't able to have that sort of direct connection with our customers, I'd still work with the customer support team to make sure they at least had a direct line of communication/escalation to me and the other devs. I'd also take time out of my days to learn from the support team to better understand their jobs, how they do it, what their pain points were internally, and what our common customer complaints were. Again, it's rare, but it IS possible, and far easier/more common in the few remaining small companies who actually still care about customer experience and that human touch.

The TLDR is I'd highly encourage people in our field to work for smaller/mid-sized businesses wherever possible :) There is almost always a wage tradeoff, but as long as it's a livable wage, it's totally worth it for the sanity, autonomy, and happiness you get in exchange. And as a customer, I'd far prefer to do business with small companies who have good support vs faceless megacorps.