Ask HN: Does rising through the ranks from helpdesk still happen?
My impression is that it's a 90s thing that doesn't happen any more and modern tech suppport is deskilled and outsourced.
I don't see it happen much, at least not straight from the help desk to someplace else without someone say going to school or doing other things in the company.
Personally I worked 'tech support' for some high end networking type stuff for a long long time and that was a good career and still is in many places.... and yet:
Sadly I don't think people think highly of any kind of helpdesk or technical support anymore no matter what their public statements are.
At every company inevitably support budgets are cut, seen as a cost (even at places where we brought in a huge chunk of revenue via support contracts), and the skilled management types try to avoid / stay way from support so there's very few skilled managers to really stop the trend of cutting into support headcount, training, tools, and etc.
This is of course all self defeating because when support type roles are devalued and budgets cut... yeah they're going to suck.
As for the job change I think the issue is that companies don't think anymore about "What could this guy do?" They just see a list of alphabet soup and assume nothing ever changes. We had some "university hires" that were great guys and we wanted to bring up to a salary on par with everyone else. HR fought tooth and nail because "but they're university hires"... like what even does that mean? They're damn good employees...
I worked there almost 2 years, and saw 3 women move on from reception to various departments (they also became employees, they were contractors when they were receptionists). Funny thing is, there was no chance for developers to further their career there, though they were paid well (we were just 5 devs with a CTO, so no promotions etc).
Other than this one example, I rarely saw people getting promoted. When people needed a better work/title/pay, they simply found another job.
At the very least, it doesn't appear to happen within companies anymore. It's more likely that an entry-level position (helpdesk, or otherwise) is a foot in the door to a _different_ company, rather than being the stepping stone _within_ a company.
I have nothing to support that, just my anecdotl observations.