Entry-Level Startup Jobs Are Now Mostly Dead Ends in the Boondocks
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On the other hand, the idea that employees doing one aspect of a company's work could count on being promoted to another area requiring different skills is not particularly common in most industries, pre-internet. Most people who regard doing support as an "in" need to either independently enhance their skills or choose to work at a much smaller company.
One of the sad things that this article exposes is that so many support people choose their careers with the same attitude this article criticises; that support isn't valuable or rewarding to them. Maybe this is akin to people going into teaching, which paradoxically tends to be a major with lower scores and grades than average. People go into a job where they help people not because it's exciting but because they think it's an easier path to working in tech than coding. Great support people committed to what they do can sometimes succeed and grow into more senior roles, and that path should be more rewarded.
Or maybe they go into a job where they help people not because they think it's an easier path than coding, but because they believe teaching is more valuable than making the next "angry birds" or hawking ads 1% more effectively. ¿Quien sabe?
I've always been talented with computers and had actually written some applications for my classroom, knowing full and well that I could be making twice as much with that skillset. I had always felt like the public school system had failed me, though, so I wanted to be a part of it to try to make it better.
Turns out, there isn't a whole lot a teacher can do in the face of an overwhelming emphasis on testing and meeting state standards rather than just being a charismatic and passionate person who gets kids excited about science, math, english, and history.
> Turns out, there isn't a whole lot a teacher can do in the face of an overwhelming emphasis on testing and meeting state standards...
Pretty much. A friend of mine is currently trying to figure out whether he values education enough to put up with hostile, indifferent students and a culture of bullshit testing and teacher evaluation in a bad (but not inner-city bad) school district. He's a smart guy who could make the same money doing something else with way less effort and frustration, but he's also more of an idealist than I. When teachers are more respected and better paid than mobile app developers, we will have a better education system. I'm not holding my breath.
At my company we really to value our support team and are working to make it possible to promote within the team. Yeah sure we have people go to our doc and QA team and other parts of the company, but having people who are passionate about support is something that is extremely valuable to us and to me.
We try to hire people with the same attitude towards support and it shows. The level of support we provide because everyone really cares is awesome.
It seems like the majority of issues that cause me to contact Support are caused by design, implementation or documentation problems.
When I was a kid, I watched Disney movies. I had this whole alternate "Disney" universe constructed in my head. Cinderalla, Aladdin, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, etc.
But importantly, they only existed in my head---and of course, on the screen.
Then I got to visit Disneyland. Suddenly Sleeping Beauty's castle is a real place, and I've been there. I've taken a pull on the Sword in the Stone.
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A couple years ago, long on knowledge about monads and short on portfolio, I found myself in need of a job in the Bay Area. I started working for Zirx, an on-demand valet company. Basically my job was to run around SoMa and pick up people's cars, and later return them to them. The rest of the time, I wandered the streets, waiting for my company-issued phone to summon me.
Imagine my surprise one day when, running from parking a car near 2nd Street, I saw Github.
"Oh," I thought. "I guess that's where that is."
Or Hipmunk, which was recessed behind a grate. Or that building right by the freeway on the east side of 2nd, that has five floors and about ten startups.
So, I don't know. To me---to an extent---San Francisco really is where the Internet is.
http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/davidson/2015/05/...
Though I must admit that having lived in Mumbai, Upstate New York and New York City, the cost of living is low argument is bullshit. It is just sugar coating the fact that your work/job profile is not important enough for the company to merit the benefits that living in a metropolis brings.
35K$ per year is a really very low salary, especially for SF, grad students earn more.
Also
""" It doesn’t make any fucking sense to live in one of the most expensive areas in the country and work in nonprofit development,” one told me."""
I think she meant cost-center, there is nothing related to non-profit in usual sense in that article.
Another guy I knew moved from support into being a "sales engineer", which is basically helping to sell software to the more technically minded, demo it properly, assist with integrations, etc. That's also well-paying.
Bottom-line is, if you come out of college with an English degree and want to work in tech, you need to get your foot in the door somehow, and support is an option.
I came into one in a Support role, and I was one of two support personnel (in the entire organization) that had any industry experience going in, making me the company's very first "Advanced Support" engineer. The rest were straight out of college (but most had degrees, at least).
Q.A. was likewise seen as entry-level.
I'd like to propose the phrase "new-economy company" to replace startup.
It must be all those MBAs that flock to these companies that don't read up on HN.
We're growing like crazy here across the business- engineering, finance, HR, support, sales... Yesterday we had a hot chicken lunch [0] to celebrate two new engineering hires. Tomorrow we'll christen some temporary office space to accomodate our newly-added sales team. Within a year, we'll be moved into a new space more than triple the size of our current office. Trust me, that's not because we're tripling the size of our support team.
Within engineering, my coworkers in Nashville come from a number of different backgrounds, Many of them are experienced devs. Others are career changers via coding bootcamps. Most relevant to the article, some have come from our customer support team. People tend to stay at Eventbrite for a long time [1]. There may not be as clearly defined a career path as you'd find at a more established company, but you're not stuck doing the same thing forever.
[0] It's a Nashville thing. If you haven't had it here, you're missing out. :-)
[1] Although you see the real tenure in the original SF office, in Nashville no one in engineering has quit yet (if you don't count the guy who left for Y Combinator, then came back afterwards).
Just curious. Is that going to help her get a job in Silicon Valley while competing with grads from top schools for the same jobs?
Yes, but not with a well-known company as their first gig.
I stay mainly because of the number of tech companies in the area. Anyone can lose their job at any minute, and if/when that happens I'd rather be in an area where there were options across the street than in an area with one option two towns over. I'd move back in a heartbeat if there were a more robust tech hiring market in the boonies.
My point is that code is the lingua franca of well-compensated digital laborers, which is the point the article hints in its closing sentence:
"Another customer service worker I’d talked to from a big software company decided that if she wanted to stick around the Bay Area, it was time to teach herself to code."
Alternatively, go try it. You could take a paycut to go live in bumblefuck any time. Why not today? I think you'll discover pretty quickly that the grass isn't that green over there. They are low rent because there is either nothing to do, or because they're dangerous.
Most such people have never seen inland states from ground level.
I'm a CA native looking to leave, and Nashville is one possible landing zone that is getting better and better press (outside of conventional media, which here retains the coastal bias).
Yeah, you don't know anything about Nashville.
I'm considering BOS->ATL right now, because Atlanta is also a really nice city but a little more tech-friendly.
There is a large fundamental difference between Outerbumbelch, North Dakota and Dallas, Kansas City or even Denver.
This country is full of low-rent places. If you don't like your rent you don't have to stay in the city. What people want is to be somewhere desirable but not have to pay a premium for being someplace desirable.
That happens briefly when you find a good place that nobody discovered yet. But it never lasts. Eventually people find out. My property taxes have gone up 3 times in 5 years for precisely that reason. It's a small price to pay, IME, to be somewhere you like even if you have to pay extra.
That's a few things off the the top of my head. Now some downsides: 1) Culture (art, music, etc) are generally less available. 2) There aren't as many conveniences. 3) You pretty much have to drive everywhere in rural areas. 4) Towns aren't very well planned, I rarely see any bike lanes or pedestrian oriented areas.
I also don't think it's totally fair to compare it to the plains states, those places are emptying out for a reason (ok, several reasons).
These are just the facts. If I had my way we'd have a lot more affordable housing and renter-friendly policies here, but we don't and that's not going to change any time soon. So let's get real and know that putting support in low cost of living areas is the right thing to do.
(1) at the early stage basically everyone is part of customer support in that they are addressing/solving a slew of new/unanticipated problems together in real time and therefore its beneficial/valuable to have everyone in the same place. they also (usually) don't know how to run a customer service organization and are learning how it goes on the fly, esp. for the new product.
Later, the product matures and the majority of customer issues and their solutions are known and the process for addressing them can be (mostly) crystallized into a pre-determined set of responses, meaning that the customer service team can be separated from the rest of the organization. This is usually identified (or forced) by a more experienced customer service manager trained at a larger organization.
(2) at an early stage, costs associated with customer service are still relatively low vs. other investments (ie. product development, customer acquisition, technical hiring) so it seems relatively cheap to grow (you can hire 3-4 CS people for the price of one eng. in SF)
Later, as the organization grows, customer service can quickly balloon into a massive, expensive organization that grows in a more linear relationship with business/customer growth vs. product or dev teams, which (ideally) can be more leveraged.
(3) at the early stage, they are focused more on growth than profitability, so they aren't looking to optimize for lowering customer support costs and are more focused on the speed at which they are solving customer problems, aka. resolving impediments to growth.
Later, when it comes time to pay the piper (which is what appears to be happening with many, many on-demand startups..), customer service is a very easy place to try and cut costs, esp. when up until this point they had been run very inefficiently.
conclusion:
Once a company realizes that their support teams don't need to be at the HQ anymore, that the teams are inefficient and (oh shit!) they want to (try and) be profitable, it makes a lot of sense to move the customer service team to a lower cost location, or outsource it entirely. there's a reason most large, mature corporations do it.
Working in a commodity job means less opportunity. It's the same reason not every company has Uber's valuation. Pay is (roughly) correlated to value.
What's the actual average cost of a support request? $30 seems like it would eat up annual profits of a lot of services fairly quickly.
This is why many companies make it hard to call them.
Why are they associated with women? Where does that stem from?