Frustrated with (internal) support rotation because too often the answer is "you don't know how to do your own job"
Posted by Morazma@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 24 comments
As the title says. Too often the answer to support queries is that the person doesn't know how to do their job and hasn't spoken to their time.
So support queries come in and I can't be bothered to look into it.
Also I had to build something for internal staff recently and it got really political because these people are too dumb to have more than one window open at a time. They literally complained that two windows is too much for them to deal with on a previous project.
I know there are a lot of things I can do personally to solve and address these things, but I just wanted to rant about the fact that other people put zero effort into their job and it comes to us to ensure they never have to think.
Rant over. Anybody else had similar?
ILikeTheSpriteInYou@reddit
Wait, so what are you building that requires two windows to work with? Not that I don't understand the frustration of incompetent users, but what is the limitation requiring you to have 2 windows for something your building? Are the data or processes in a walled garden of a platform with no APIs or DBs to pull the data from? Just asking because, when given the opportunity to build it myself, it has never occurred to me to require a multi-window experience unless that's the requirement.
Morazma@reddit (OP)
I wasn't building it to require 2 windows, but I was building it in a very generic way thay would allow it to work side by side with various other systems. Hard to explain without giving away my identity.
Building it this way made it far more useful far quicker than trying to integrate one specific platform.
Like I do get the point of a 1 window workflow being ideal, but I couldn't believe that these people literally couldn't handle more than 1 window at a time.
ILikeTheSpriteInYou@reddit
That makes sense.
chrisrrawr@reddit
if you are even moderately self motivated, disciplined, and actively using and honing your skills, then the average person across all walks of life in all positions is going to be disappointing to you if you try to characterize them through the lens of competence or even attempting to better themselves.
you can either lament it, rail against it, and be let down over and over until you become bitter and misanthropic,
or you can accept it and school your expectations. cater to the lowest common denominator and push yourself in terms of both design and implementation. 2 screens is too hard? make it an overlay. have it autocomplete. build a macro playbook.
automate their role entirely.
have an LLM write their kudos board farewell.
Goodie__@reddit
I have similar feelings to you, but I tend to try and temper my view of others.
Maybe 2 screens is too hard, because the support team already has 5 windows open and adding another is silly (phone, chat, knowledge base, ticket, actual system). Maybe the business cheaps out on second monitors.
Maybe the person is competent, but really it's a tier 1 role with a lot of heavy rotation, and they are just passing through. Not checked in. Not payed enough to be checked in.
Maybe the person is new.
What is a way that takes my disdain for them and redirects it somewhere else, that allows me to empathise with them.
chrisrrawr@reddit
you could absolutely go the route of sympathetic empathy and take on a huge cognitive burden trying to wrestle your natural reactions into pretzels.
but why?
it doesn't generally make you happier to know or interact with these people and they are definitely not extending the same courtesy in return. even if someone is "competent" but "checked out," the OP obviously isnt checked out.
Working with people who aren't meeting you at your level of investment is easily one of the worst ways to approach a crashout. and if you dont have control over the levers of their investment, you at least have control over where your own investment will be spent.
at the end of the day youve had 24 hours, and spending them on people who are checked out, or lazy, or incompetent, or even malicious -- even to disdain them -- isn't worth it. if you can't work with peers who appreciate your efforts and make efforts you appreciate in turn, then you should at least work in ways that ultimately please you.
Goodie__@reddit
But why? Because kindness is a strength and not a weakness. Because I like who I am when I am kind.
But if you want someone to hate: Sure. It's management for cheaping out on shitty laptops and not enough equipment. Management is checked out of giving them a second monitor. Management understaffed the team so they are all burned out and worked. at 120% and don't have time for some developer to come along and tell them how to do their job.
In that framing, Op being at a business, checked in, when management can't even spend some money to give people the right equipment, starts to look a little sadder. You're pushing yourself into hating others, so people can make their quarterly bonus by reusing the same laptop from 10 years ago for the 20th time.
chrisrrawr@reddit
I never implied being unkind or hating was what you should do.
unless your kindness comes with no material or behavioral components, there is a limit to how "kind" you can be, and that limit comes long before self detriment for most people. I keep my kindness for animals and people who appreciate and reciprocate it. spending it on coworkers after they have shown they will not reciprocate and do not appreciate it seems absurd.
there is a difference between kindness and being polite or maintaining a working relationship as well. what you've presented makes me think you see a binary between kind and unkind, with no room for indifference, performativism, etc.
you are also making up a scenario in your head with no evidence. all we know is that OP is invested in their work enough to be upset when others arent. is your mismanagement fantasy "kind" to anyone?
CandidateNo2580@reddit
Both of you make good point in the frame of reference of your job. You do the same things and get the same outcomes regardless of framing. I think in terms of life that kind of empathy and understanding of your fellow humans takes you further and leaves you less dissatisfied and disappointed so to me it's worth it even if maybe there's nothing to be gained strictly in the workplace.
chrisrrawr@reddit
can you expand on how you are less dissatisfied and disappointed when empathising with people who are primarily mogivated by e.g. fesr and other base motives?
to me, empathising with people like this makes me more disappointed. I gain so much mental health from not thinking about how these sorts of people think, how they view the world, what they prefer to consume, why they act the way they do, etc.
empathy is a tool we use to understand why and how others are motivated to behave. understanding does not mean acceptance. it doesn't create a bond. it doesnt make you enjoy what they enjoy, etc.
to me it is 100% vital for a healthy mental state to surround yourself with people who aren't dissatisfying or disappointing, both in your life outside work and in the workplace, rather than trying you force yourself to be satisfied with less.
Several_Trees@reddit
We can't always control who we have to interact with though, and acceptance is a powerful tool for improving mental health.
I kind of agree with you that actively empathizing with every person that frustrates me would take a lot of energy that I don't want to spare. But I do think that actively dwelling on frustration is equally draining. My own approach is more accepting that I can't change this person and choosing to work within the bounds of the relationship that they are able to provide. At least, when I'm able to do that, it helps a lot
chrisrrawr@reddit
so we go back to my original post. you can either rail, or accept. if you accept that they are the way they are (this is not empathy, but apathy) and you still desire progress, achievement, improvement, etc., then you must reckon what to spend your time on.
it is almost always better to move orthogonally to these people. dont waste your time addressing every one of their concerns, and simply work around them on a strategic level. "using a simple tool is too hard" -> "remove the need to use the tool"
qkthrv17@reddit
While I try to keep a positive attitude like the one you're defining, what I found really useful is to assume every system should be built to demand as little effort from the users as possible.
This is something we all feel when dealing with anachronistic bureaucracy, be it from the state or from an old as time institution such as $bank $infrastructure_provider.
Things should be easier, and having frictionless systems lets me do more with less. I want that for my users and I want that for everybody. The more effortless a system is the better for everyone.
ProfBeaker@reddit
I've had more empathy since dating someone whose company gives them a single small monitor, and a laptop loaded up with so much monitoring that it barely runs.
She would tell me it takes forever to load anything. I was a little skeptical. Then I watched over her shoulder as she opened an Excel sheet from a local file. A tiny one - like 100 cells total. That machine loaded half of the Excel window, then chugged for 5 seconds to render the other half. And every. single. interaction. on that machine. was like this. I would consider that machine flat-out unusable, but that's her mandatory daily driver.
They were forced into using VOIP phones instead of real phones. The VOIP phones would crash out multiple times a day, which IT would blame on the internet. The CRM software would crash out for hours, which IT would blame on internet until the next day when it would turn out to actually be the server. Every problem would be blamed on their internet - despite being able to pretty much prove it's not that.
After a few years of being forced to use tools that are utter shit and being gaslit that it's your fault, anybody would check out.
dminus@reddit
the worst part of being on support rotation (IME) is the tendency for the usually-fairly-smart-in-their-own-way people who are your users to bring you XY problems, that require you to unwind their faulty logic and figure out what they really want instead of trying to add the olive to their shit sandwich
simon-brunning@reddit
When a dev thinks their users are all stupid, I've usually found that it's not the users who are the problem.
puremourning@reddit
This.
But like. Users really are stupid. Accepting and embracing that makes you a better dev.
The irony.
Morazma@reddit (OP)
I am pretty dumb tbf
MyPotatoSenpai@reddit
My solution to this is alerting the support staff manager when there's a pattern of dumbassery(always give proof) she always coaches the people who need it, the ones who don't learn usually get the boot. Also you can coach them too, it's annoying but again if you keep track of patterns you can alert managers about poor performers
BitNumerous5302@reddit
That's burnout logic. You need a vacation.
Intel_Chip2061@reddit
SOPs??
pl487@reddit
I used to look at it like that, but then I understood.
What we call thinking is something that most people find to be fundamentally unpleasant and difficult to do correctly. They also see it as a social role that is below them. It's our job to think, it's their job not to. That's why we're answering the support line. If we ask them to think, to them it feels like the janitor asking them to sweep. They choose not to.
Imagine what it feels like. Use two windows, no! Accept it.
MyStackRunnethOver@reddit
If you’re building internal apps, or handling internal support, your coworkers are your users. Users can be stupid. So design systems and processes to account for that, just like you would for a public facing app
Which-World-6533@reddit
I completely relate to this.
The amount of stuff that is dumbed down so the stupidest user can use it is insane.