Though having direct experience with this, these numbers are pretty good. Few places will need a dedicated VP/Director level for a 6 person team though, and if they did, that would apply to outsourced teams as well.
They also bear a lot more of the burden than a front-line support person, as the problems they solve are much more complicated, and need to fit in with competing interests beyond one customer's single support request.
I'm not sure about that part. The amount of abuse those people have to withstand without being allowed to defend themselves (because "it's a customer, be nice!") can break even the calmest person.
I kinda kid about the last part, but even when it's internal, being front-line support is brutal, especially for low-value products. The customer knows they can usually get free stuff by being mean, and it's the front line support rep who has to deal with that, almost always without the power to fire the customer. Half the time, they have to deal with corporate policies that are set in place really to get rid of customers who actually use support, but that don't want to admit this obvious fact. This requires an ungodly amount of patience.
That was one of the reasons why I think doing support for your own company is so much easier; you can actually say "Hey, uh, I don't think we can help you, how about I give you your money back and you go talk to a competitor?" you don't have to pretend to be ineffective until they leave on their own, which is essentially what the corporate policies are setup to do. It's soul crushing.
(I mean, developers get paid more because businesses notice when their developers can't develop; businesses seem to be largely okay with ineffective customer support. I suspect you would have to come within 70-80% of a developer salary if you actually wanted to keep effective customer support people. If you look at very high dollar products where support people are expected to actually help customers solve problems? they pay in that range; sometimes better. )
burden? i don't think so. I can code for hours but I am in awe of good support people. They have amazing skills at maneuvering situations. I would have glenfiddich in the coffee cup before 9am if I tried that role.
I think that's overly glorifying what engineers do and under appreciating support resources.
Most engineers that I know, highly talented or not, wouldn't last a week in a support org because they don't have the required soft skills.
And honestly, I think every engineer should spend more time talking to their support teams. It puts things in perspective when you realize that that bug you wrote or fix you delayed made someone's life a living hell when an irate customer kept badgering them about a fix.
My attitude at the time was to provide the support that would expect as a customer. This means that I understood the customer's problem, understood the product, and made an effort to solve the customer's problem. If the customer encountered a defect, I was honest about the defect and explained how to work around the problem.
I completely defend my statement, that, as an engineer, the problems that I solve are much more complicated then when I had to fill in while we were between support staff.
A support person's role is being an expert in the product supported; and clear communication. That is much easier than implementing a product where there are competing interests; and one customer may expect the product to behave in a way that contradicts what another customer expects; and contradicts what's in the business's best interests.
Furthermore, there is no formal eduction required for being a member of support staff; nor is there a requirement for the kind of accomplishment of skills. The appropriate analogy is nurse to doctor.
In my experience, support issues tended to involve legacy application technology and/or environment issues (usually antivirus given the nature of our product). Support for anything non-trivial involved WinDbg dumps or SQL dives in cooperation with development.
Did your support experience include working the issue back through development for a hotfix and retest until resolution?
Supply and demand! Software engineers are much harder
to find than support staff.
Nobody wants to think they're busting their ass to enrich someone who thinks they're better than you. That's not the kind of thinking that inspires people to work 10 hour days because they really feel dedicated to Twitter's world-changing mission! So our society has, in some ways, a sort of perpetual denial that class is there. People who want to be elected president have to be "someone you could have a beer with" and CEOs of billion-dollar companies have to let everyone call them by their first name.
If your company only employs engineers, and your cleaners mostly work at night, you can retain that impression pretty well. Everyone here is the same!
But the moment people notice there are support workers who don't get free snacks because they're lower on the status ladder, you can't really retain the impression that everyone is the same.
We've stayed on the peninsula and done our best to raise productivity (and thus comp) through training, retention, and technology. Wasn't easy but working well now.
I'm based out of a fairly cosmopolitan southern city, and I'd be hard pressed to construct a scenario where I could only find someone so unprofessional and conservative enough as to make a difference to the customer.
Maybe it's living in the south (where my social views tend to put me in the minority and hence used to dealing with ideological disagreements daily), but SF in particular seems pretty intolerant of the idea that lovely people might also happen to have different social opinions.
We've got 50+ people in the South (GA,SC,NC,FL), so I'm only calling it as I see it, not as I'm doing.