They sure did.

In fact after the company was acquired again later (well a few acquisitions later) I had moved on and was thinking of changing careers when a former coworker(s) and a manager contacted me desperate for help. I was only mildly interested but I agreed to interview at the new company. Their system rejected me for no CS degree, it was an automated email from their HR system ;) I had years of experience with some of their proprietary systems, but nope.

Before they could fix that glitch I had reconsidered and told my friends I wanted to move on (more so based on my personal interests).

> I'd be surprised if companies have a CS degree requirement for that job.

I wouldn't be as there are not a lot of 'technical support' degrees.

Someone once told me something to the effect of "the two people groups that understand a program the most are the developers and application support", which I interpreted to mean that just because you didn't write the program doesn't mean you don't gain close familiarity with its problem domain, inputs, outputs, behavior under adverse conditions etc.

I worked tech support for years and completely agree with that statement. I work in test automation these days and try to meet regularly with support to figure out what usage patterns are like and what pain points people are actually having in the field. My current company is too small to have a dedicated support team so I just get all the emails for the engineering team, but as we grow I plan on implementing something similar. Good support people are worth their weight in gold and I feel like they get dismissed too often in the field. It seems like that's starting to change though as I see better pay at startups for support positions.

It's good to hear startups care, although my experience from company to company is support is largely seen / treated as an expense. Lots of talk about support, but the quality of leadership and resources tell another story in my experience.

That is partly why I changed careers.

A lot of "bigcorp" has a computer science degree as a 'requirement' for their technical support roles.

You would be surprised, but it's fairly common practice.

I'm guessing not a CS degree, but a degree period.