[hinkley]

Perverse incentives. They are judged by how long the call takes, and every time they escalate a common problem that the devs could fix, now their numbers will go down and they'll get punished for their good work.

Dell at one point pulled the plug on outsourcing their tech support. They spotted this moral hazard partway through the process and decided it was better to keep it in house.

[lavelganzu]

On the opposite side of moral hazard, early in my career I worked for a large web security company in tech support. We were not permitted to escalate to engineering at all. Often this meant the only solution was to apply our own, unofficial code changes!

[ericbarrett]

> We were not permitted to escalate to engineering at all.

I have no words! Except that I really want to know the organizational dysfunction that ended up creating that policy.