Re:Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users
by ROTMetro on Sunday January 29, 2023 @04:01PM
(#34572705)
And sometimes you have to stay on a war room call with the customer team the entire time until the issue is resolved, while trying to accomplish all of the above, and navigate that company's unique internal politics (which you need to understand to navigate). But yeah, someone who is good at doing this makes it looks like you can replace them with a cookie cutter support person because they are good and making sure there is no visible friction with the customer, therefor to the bean counters, this persons hard work is invisible. But when this person is gone, and there is suddenly tons of friction next year's sales is f'd. Good luck tech companies laying all these 'dead wood' people that took care of all these things (stuff that also doesn't just fit into the corporate knowledge base). I said before, if you can replace people that do this sort of thing with just anyone, you don't have a real company, you have a franchise that can just plug people into roles. But large customers don't want the McDonalds treatment, they want (and their complexity demands it if your solution is to work for them) the personal service treatment.
In the small company I may something like "flip this windows setting and reboot the server". They do, we test it, and the call is done.
In enterprise the different levels of complexity spiral out of control very quickly. Is it the standard windows setting issue, or is it the enterprise endpoint protection causing the problem? Ok, lets follow the windows setting issue. Do we have access control the windows settings on this machine? No, we'll need admin access. Actually its controlled by a GPO. Now we need to raise a ticket with the active directory team and may need a custom change. Custom changes need a compliance and security officer to review. Because this change also requires a reboot a impact report needs filed before implementation and reboot. Do we have to test this in the customers Dev/UAT/QA system before implementation? And if this is a new issue will I have to write up the issue for the documentation team?
And after that I'll have spent 10 hours of on the call time with the customer, mostly waiting on them. And next year when sales comes to them with an even higher price tag for the same product they pay the bill because they know when they call we'll stay with them until the problem is solved.