Why do we do this?

Support is a fascinating collection of people who all got here in different ways. Many of us didn't start our careers in tech support, or even think of it as a career one could get into.

I went to school to be an aerospace engineer. When I finally got my degree, I got a job in an R&D department of the US Department of Defense. For twelve years I designed and tested weapons for the government. Not a job I'm particularly proud of, for several reasons. One of the many reasons is that I hated that job for most of that time, but I stayed there anyway because the pay was decent, the benefits were good, and change is scary.

One day, I had enough and decided I wanted a career change. Looking around at the things I was good at and the things that bring me joy in my work, it seemed like getting a tech support job would be a good option. I like working with people, I like solving problems, and I like working with software. So I applied for some jobs and in 2013 I left my cozy civil service career and joined GitHub as a technical support engineer.

Support doeesn't have any introduction or training

What I love about the story is how not strange it is in the support community. People come to this work from all sorts of places. I've worked with and hired people who had been chefs, librarians, public school teachers, artists, writers, musicians, and so many other interesting careers and backgrounds. I've worked with people who had studied computer science and people who had studied rhetoric and people who had studied literature. I've worked with college dropouts and high school dropouts and people with piles of advanced degrees.

The backgrounds of Support Professionals are so varied partly because there's no formal path or training into this field. There's no "technical support" curriculum in college, no trade school to help ramp you up for it, no support bootcamps that I've seen.

The only way to start working in support is to get a job in support. This is helped a little bit by the fact that a lot of entry level jobs at a lot of companies are on the support team. There are downsides to this, of course, but the upside is access. People who want to do this work have a path to doing it. It's not always easy and a lot of hiring managers are bad at hiring new talent, but it's the only way in.

Why do we get into this?

But does anyone really want to work in support?

I have heard this question, verbatim, more times than I care to remember. It stings because I want to work in support. I chose to leave not just a job but also a career as an aerospace engineer to work in technical support. I love this work. This craft. Engineering was my stepping stone into support, not the other way around.

And I'm not alone! A lot of people use support as a way to level up some skills to jump to the real job they want - an engineer or a project manager or a copywriter or something. That's great for them. But a lot of people genuinely love support work and want to do it and do it well. They want to keep improving at it because it brings them satisfaction. I frequently shock people when I tell them that not everyone is trying to leave the support team. More people than you realize would prefer to stay and do the job if there was a better career path here.

After a few years working the queue as a tech support engineer, I became the team leader. The company was growing and leadership created a more formal hierarchy within the organization, and I was picked to be the VP of Support. I was in the right place at the right time.

In my role as the VP of Support, and in similar roles at other companies in the following 10 years, I hired a lot of people. In hiring for support positions, I've interviewed a few hundred people. And one of the first questions I ask is, "Why do you want to do this job?" Not at the company, specifically, but support in general? Why this?

After many years of listening to people answer that question, I think I can break down the common reasons that people get into support into a handful categories. They aren't mutually exclusive; most people will be drawn to more than one of these reasons.

Problem solving

Some people love puzzles, and support often feels like working on a couple of complicated puzzles simultaneously. When I was a kid, my parents had a two-sided jigsaw puzzle with a cartoon caricature of Richard Nixon on one side and a caricature of Spiro Agnew on the other. I don't know why they had it and I don't know why I enjoyed putting it together as a child. But support often makes me think of it because you had to figure out which side is which and then where the piece goes. It was two puzzles at the same time. It's frustrating but satisfying in the same way that solving tech support problems across multiple axes is satisfying.

Service

Helping other people feels good. It's not the same for everyone, in kind or degree, but a lot of people find it gratifying to work in the service of others. To help people when they need help and somehow make a career out of that. Not all service jobs are gratifying, or gratifying in the same way. However, the draw of serving others is what brings a lot of people to this field.

Learning

Most of support work involves learning new things. You learn about the product or service you're supporting, the ways people use it, the other things people are using it with, and the industry more generally. In order to solve problems and help people, you usually have to learn a lot of new things quickly. Some people see this as an opportunity to get paid to learn things they're interested in. You do some research on your own to get a foundational understanding, then you get a job and learn from the people doing it. There's really no better way to learn about PaaS databases than by working on the support team of a PaaS database provider, for example.

Career growth

This is the one every non-support person thinks is the reason we all work in support. The idea is that the goal is to not be in support, but to learn enough about the industry, the product or service, and the company to "get promoted out" of support. A lot of people do, in fact, get support jobs for this reason.

And that's not bad!

As long as someone is dedicated to doing a good job at the job they're currently hired to do, then I don't mind if their five year plan is to leave the team and do something else. They're not "using" me, as someone once described it to me. This is capitalism, we're all being used.

Accommodations

Lastly, support roles are often regimented and (in the tech sector) remote-friendly. This means that you might have defined hours to work and be able to do it from your home in some non-coastal city (read as: not San Francisco). It's a great opportunity for someone who wants a good job that pays well and doesn't require moving. It's a good job for accommodating a lot of different lifestyles and needs, honestly.

And again, that's not bad!

If someone tells me the reason they want the job is because it's the best option for them to pay the bills and spend time with their family, I'm not gonna fault them for that. I have absolutely had people tell me that, but every one of them also had other reasons why a support job was better than any alternative. They were problem solvers or they liked working with people. The point is that we should acknowledge that people have to work to pay bills and that it's a valid motivation for doing work - even support work.

Support is a team sport

All of these differences in where people come from are a benefit to you - to all of you, whether you're a Head of Support, a team lead, or an entry level Support Professional answering phones all day. Because Support is a team sport. We do this work together. Even though we often think of our work as being us and a customer (and many people think that's all the job is), the truth of it is more interesting.

A lot of time is spent working with your teammates, solving problems together. And the more perspectives you can bring to the team, the better that team will perform in these situations. Not everyone is there because they love working with people, but maybe they love complex problems. And maybe the person who doesn't love the complex problems is great at working with other teams to get more insight into what solutions are available. The team does best by having a mix of skills - a mix of people who have varied strengths and weaknesses. If you hire by cloning your "top performer", you'll inherit and magnify whatever that person's weaknesses are.

I'm sure there's a great sports metaphor here, but I'm not a sports person. I'll leave that exercise for the reader.

Wrap it up already

Many of us are in support because we love it. We love it for all sorts of reasons, even when some days we hate it more than you can possibly imagine. It's a job that can be a career. It's a skill that can be a craft. I'm still here after eleven years because I want to work with people and help solve their problems. Now that my customers are other Support Professionals I feel like I hit the touchdown zone. (Am I doing that right?)

I don't know why you're in support. Maybe you also love people. Maybe you needed a job you could do from Missoula and being a 'content creator' didn't work out. Whatever the reason, I'm glad you're here. You're in good company.