What? It absolutely does. As a dev the more senior customer support people are often the first people I think of when trying to solve complex business logic related issues in legacy code. Also, customer support are sitting between clients and dev, and the more problems they can solve without passing along the chain the more time you save. There's a tonne of value in experience in that role.
One of my friends was on the food team. She was an amazing musician and won our talent show. She wound up transitioning to work on music partnerships until the pandemic hit.
Starting looking for a job doing manual labour. Working with a computer no longer an option. Had 2 engineering degrees: electronics & embedded.
Can relate, but the career advancement prospects in software-unrelated fields are seemingly non-existent and employers are increasingly exploitative (e.g. CP Rail). Seems you have to start your own company to get anywhere or you're just spinning your wheels for the rest of your working life.
Yeah, this is wrong. I have a good friend who developed his understanding of the customer in that role, and leveraged it to become, gradually, a director. He was good, and he was recognized, and he was promoted.
Okay, but only if you promise to write a similar essay after you yourself are burned out by the company, for the edification of the public.
How can this person even say this when they don't touch any financial data? A quick look at Q4 2020 results for Airbnb shows a $1B loss on net income ex. IPO costs and a $21M loss on the financially engineered/hacked "adjusted EBITDA". An unprofitable company is not in a position to be keeping jobs for the sake of it.
> These material conditions bled into work-life - while some of us took Ubers to work and shopped at Barney’s, others maxed out credit cards or could only afford to live in the East Bay
Oh no, customer support can only afford to live in the East Bay. This person needs to get a grip. A customer service agent is not making 200k+ in any world. That is a recipe for running a failed business. You know what does let people live where they want? Building more housing.
> a clearer non-product career ladder
There is no "ladder" to being a customer service agent. Experience doesn't scale your value to the company, so there's no reason for there to be a ladder. And with the advent of gig platforms there's no reason for there to be a manager either. Saying that customer service agents need a career ladder shows how delusional this person is with respect to running a business.
This person needs to realize that life is about working for yourself, never for the "Airfam". Loyalty means nothing. If they're burned out (it sounds like they are) then they can leave with their multi-million dollar stock options and free up a job for the rest of us who would gladly get paid half a million dollars a year to complain about "inequities". Corporate won't care they left and they shouldn't feel bad about it either. Sometimes some people just aren't cut out to keep going hard day in and day out for 5+ years. And that's okay, because if you worked at Airbnb then you can easily get a cushy job somewhere else.