> I do think that many people would be better off doing a tour of "civil service" in retail or food service before going off to fancy jobs.
A thousand times, yes. I've moved into 'devops' from support, and it's just as clear on this side of the divide just how little esteem developers have for support staff.
One bit of schadenfreude from the past: I worked in a 2-person support team in a small company, and constantly had requests for improvements (both support- and client-friendly varieties) rebuffed, basically with the 'eh, what would support know about products' attitude[1]. I ended up leaving that place, and the other support guy had already booked a month-long sojourn on the other side of the planet, leaving the developers to now support their own product. The company ground to a halt and no-one could do a thing as the half-dozen strong dev team struggled to do support with the shitty environment they gave us to work with. Apparently on the other guy's return, better support tools shot to the top of the devs' priority list.
I also remember hearing about a wine distribution company in Western Australia where every new hire, regardless of position, spends a week half on support calls and half in shipping, so that everyone is exposed to the difficulties of packing and shipping wine, and dealing with customer breakage. I love this idea, and wish it was more widespread. Dealing with the public is hard, but there's not much you can do about that. Dealing with the undeserved contempt of your coworkers is also hard, and it doesn't take much to expose people to the more human aspects of the crappy positions in a company; raising empathy can really help.
[1] I've always found this bizarre, that the department that has the most client contact when something goes wrong is so routinely ignored when developing the product further.
Absolutely. I did a few stints in support (both before and after my harrowing multi-year retail and foodservice adventure), and I can definitely sympathize. Thankfully the most recent support job had enough downtime for me to build tools for us that got me the "on resume" experience to move over to development, but all of those jobs left me with a sensation that there's a really valuable body of knowledge to be gained working at the bottom rung.
I especially like your point about raising empathy -- I think that's a really important effect of having to try out being the person at the bottom of the totem pole.
A thousand times, yes. I've moved into 'devops' from support, and it's just as clear on this side of the divide just how little esteem developers have for support staff.
One bit of schadenfreude from the past: I worked in a 2-person support team in a small company, and constantly had requests for improvements (both support- and client-friendly varieties) rebuffed, basically with the 'eh, what would support know about products' attitude[1]. I ended up leaving that place, and the other support guy had already booked a month-long sojourn on the other side of the planet, leaving the developers to now support their own product. The company ground to a halt and no-one could do a thing as the half-dozen strong dev team struggled to do support with the shitty environment they gave us to work with. Apparently on the other guy's return, better support tools shot to the top of the devs' priority list.
I also remember hearing about a wine distribution company in Western Australia where every new hire, regardless of position, spends a week half on support calls and half in shipping, so that everyone is exposed to the difficulties of packing and shipping wine, and dealing with customer breakage. I love this idea, and wish it was more widespread. Dealing with the public is hard, but there's not much you can do about that. Dealing with the undeserved contempt of your coworkers is also hard, and it doesn't take much to expose people to the more human aspects of the crappy positions in a company; raising empathy can really help.
[1] I've always found this bizarre, that the department that has the most client contact when something goes wrong is so routinely ignored when developing the product further.