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Comment by skeeter2020 | Hacker News Reader

skeeter2020·

I have several junior developers on my team who came from the customer success / support side of the business who grew themselves into developer roles. They typically have not only the strongest desire to learn & improve, but also the most empathy and understanding of our impact on customers & their livelihood.

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I believe every developer needs to spend regular time in a customer-facing support role (if possible). They will learn much more clearly how difficult (or less likely easy) their product is to use.

Yes! If you can get somebody on your team that has worked their way up from, for example, a customer service contact center, they'll be immensely valuable. Just their insight on what customers love and hate about your product is probably worth their hire.

This was my path into software development! It's served me so well, now I want to figure out how to "recruit" future engineers from customer service teams.

The benefits would be endless, and they'd "cut their teeth" on solving crunch problems for themselves/their teams.

Very often they go into product management roles

Several? That feels like _many_. I rarely cross paths with teams that can handle more than one at a time.

Do you have a particularly large team? Or a particularly good process for 'onboarding' new/less-experienced engineers?

Sounds like a lot of things are going right at your company for your team to have picked up several developers this way.

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