
Entry-Level Startup Jobs Are Now Mostly Dead Ends in the Boondocks - coloneltcb
https://backchannel.com/those-entry-level-startup-jobs-they-re-now-mostly-dead-ends-in-the-boondocks-af3b4066f5dd?gi=c797a91ba23#.ipwqgrpop
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laurex
This article is a little hand-wavey. Customer support is definitely
underappreciated in terms of its value. Support is the primary connection to
your product's relationship with customers and a source of research as well as
ambassadors for your brand.

On the other hand, the idea that employees doing one aspect of a company's
work could count on being promoted to another area requiring different skills
is not particularly common in most industries, pre-internet. Most people who
regard doing support as an "in" need to either independently enhance their
skills or choose to work at a much smaller company.

One of the sad things that this article exposes is that so many support people
choose their careers with the same attitude this article criticises; that
support isn't valuable or rewarding to them. Maybe this is akin to people
going into teaching, which paradoxically tends to be a major with lower scores
and grades than average. People go into a job where they help people not
because it's exciting but because they think it's an easier path to working in
tech than coding. Great support people committed to what they do can sometimes
succeed and grow into more senior roles, and that path should be more
rewarded.

~~~
rhizome
Years ago there was an article or case study about a company who had rehomed
their support under Sales to some success. I always thought that was a good
way to balance things, where customer problems don't have to wend their way
through IT/Ops to some meeting where pushback against sales may or may not
occur.

~~~
dragonwriter
When I worked in enterprise support, a significant part of my work was dealing
with misrepresentations made by sales reps, so I can see where moving the
costs of those problems back to Sales would be a productive way to create a
disincentive to causing the problems in the first place, which is more
efficient than having someone else cleaning up behind Sales.

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blakesterz
So Nashville with a population of darn near 2 million is "the Boondocks?" Am I
missing that part of this that had something about a job in someplace that
could even remotely be considered Boondocky?

~~~
mcphage
You see, San Francisco is where the Internet _is_. You might think it's a
globally interconnected network of computers, but in fact it's really all in
one place, and so the further away from it you are, the less you can channel
its power into disrupting markets.

~~~
Apocryphon
Let's hope that this Silicon Valley chauvinism accidentally builds new SVs in
places around the country, who can pick up once this one crashes.

~~~
rhizome
SV stole the industry from Boston, and I think we can assume that if SV wanted
to support remote organizational models that they would have done so more
readily than they have. Best of the best, after all.

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aub3bhat
Well, outsourcing to Nashville is better than having entire work outsourced to
India.

Though I must admit that having lived in Mumbai, Upstate New York and New York
City, the cost of living is low argument is bullshit. It is just sugar coating
the fact that your work/job profile is not important enough for the company to
merit the benefits that living in a metropolis brings.

35K$ per year is a really very low salary, especially for SF, grad students
earn more.

Also

""" It doesn’t make any fucking sense to live in one of the most expensive
areas in the country and work in nonprofit development,” one told me."""

I think she meant cost-center, there is nothing related to non-profit in usual
sense in that article.

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seibelj
I know people who work in enterprise customer support, on expensive software
applications, that are far more complex tickets than just refunds and bug
reports. They make good money.

Another guy I knew moved from support into being a "sales engineer", which is
basically helping to sell software to the more technically minded, demo it
properly, assist with integrations, etc. That's also well-paying.

Bottom-line is, if you come out of college with an English degree and want to
work in tech, you need to get your foot in the door somehow, and support is an
option.

~~~
hkmurakami
I guess it's akin to wanting to join the video game industry and getting your
foot in the door through QA play testing.

~~~
dietrichepp
Well, that's one alternative to learning to code, and taking on more hours for
less pay than your peers. But at least you're making games, right?

~~~
machinshin_
Just finish play-testing that level than rerun the PM's comments about that
new level design!

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cylinder
Why are ten year old billion dollar companies with back offices in other
states still called startups?

~~~
Aloha
Often they're even publicly traded billion dollar companies.

I'd like to propose the phrase "new-economy company" to replace startup.

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josephjrobison
Or "post-startup" or "previous startup" or "startup alum" (like YC alum)

~~~
shardinator
or 'started' not sure if I'm joking

~~~
holografix
Brilliant.

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takno
I hate that customer support in start ups is considered nothing more than a
leg up into a "real" job. It may not be the best paid job in the organisation,
but it's crucial and certainly shouldn't be paid at such a fraction of other
jobs that "promotion" to another department is the only viable option.

~~~
dba7dba
Yup. Every startup bio story and advice hypes up how much you have to have
good communication with customers.

It must be all those MBAs that flock to these companies that don't read up on
HN.

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sciurus
I'm a part of Eventbrite's engineering team in Nashville. I'm really bummed
about this article. I think it's a shame that Lyft told a whole department
"leave SF or lose your job". I agree it's problematic for a company to
segregate customer support in a satellite office. Neither of those are how
Eventbrite handled their expansion to Nashville.

We're growing like crazy here across the business- engineering, finance, HR,
support, sales... Yesterday we had a hot chicken lunch [0] to celebrate two
new engineering hires. Tomorrow we'll christen some temporary office space to
accomodate our newly-added sales team. Within a year, we'll be moved into a
new space more than triple the size of our current office. Trust me, that's
not because we're tripling the size of our support team.

Within engineering, my coworkers in Nashville come from a number of different
backgrounds, Many of them are experienced devs. Others are career changers via
coding bootcamps. Most relevant to the article, some have come from our
customer support team. People tend to stay at Eventbrite for a long time [1].
There may not be as clearly defined a career path as you'd find at a more
established company, but you're not stuck doing the same thing forever.

[0] It's a Nashville thing. If you haven't had it here, you're missing out.
:-)

[1] Although you see the real tenure in the original SF office, in Nashville
no one in engineering has quit yet (if you don't count the guy who left for Y
Combinator, then came back afterwards).

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vr3690
>Another customer service worker I’d talked to from a big software company
decided that if she wanted to stick around the Bay Area, it was time to teach
herself to code.

Just curious. Is that going to help her get a job in Silicon Valley while
competing with grads from top schools for the same jobs?

~~~
Alex3917
> Is that going to help her get a job in Silicon Valley while competing with
> grads from top schools for the same jobs?

Yes, but not with a well-known company as their first gig.

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Aloha
I'd gladly take a paycut to move to a place where the cost of living was 1/4
as much. I might be unique.

~~~
hinkley
Have a little chat with your buddies who grew up in the plains states. They
will politely tell you you're full of shit.

Alternatively, go try it. You could take a paycut to go live in bumblefuck any
time. Why not today? I think you'll discover pretty quickly that the grass
isn't that green over there. They are low rent because there is either nothing
to do, or because they're dangerous.

~~~
nbb
> nothing to do

Yeah, you don't know anything about Nashville.

~~~
DrScump
I think of the major cities in the country, "nothing to do" fits _San Jose 's_
downtown better than most. And I say that as an SJ native. South First
Fridays[0] are about the only time there is a palpable presence in downtown.

[0] [http://www.southfirstfridays.com/](http://www.southfirstfridays.com/)

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tryitnow
Support needs to move out of the Bay Area. Honestly, there's just no way to
live here on the salaries support professionals make.

These are just the facts. If I had my way we'd have a lot more affordable
housing and renter-friendly policies here, but we don't and that's not going
to change any time soon. So let's get real and know that putting support in
low cost of living areas is the right thing to do.

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joshjkim
3 reasons that, in early stages, startups have customer service at their HQs
(IMO), and why it makes (financial) sense to move them to lower cost areas
when a startup reaches a certain size:

(1) at the early stage basically everyone is part of customer support in that
they are addressing/solving a slew of new/unanticipated problems together in
real time and therefore its beneficial/valuable to have everyone in the same
place. they also (usually) don't know how to run a customer service
organization and are learning how it goes on the fly, esp. for the new
product.

Later, the product matures and the majority of customer issues and their
solutions are known and the process for addressing them can be (mostly)
crystallized into a pre-determined set of responses, meaning that the customer
service team can be separated from the rest of the organization. This is
usually identified (or forced) by a more experienced customer service manager
trained at a larger organization.

(2) at an early stage, costs associated with customer service are still
relatively low vs. other investments (ie. product development, customer
acquisition, technical hiring) so it seems relatively cheap to grow (you can
hire 3-4 CS people for the price of one eng. in SF)

Later, as the organization grows, customer service can quickly balloon into a
massive, expensive organization that grows in a more linear relationship with
business/customer growth vs. product or dev teams, which (ideally) can be more
leveraged.

(3) at the early stage, they are focused more on growth than profitability, so
they aren't looking to optimize for lowering customer support costs and are
more focused on the speed at which they are solving customer problems, aka.
resolving impediments to growth.

Later, when it comes time to pay the piper (which is what appears to be
happening with many, many on-demand startups..), customer service is a very
easy place to try and cut costs, esp. when up until this point they had been
run very inefficiently.

conclusion:

Once a company realizes that their support teams don't need to be at the HQ
anymore, that the teams are inefficient and (oh shit!) they want to (try and)
be profitable, it makes a lot of sense to move the customer service team to a
lower cost location, or outsource it entirely. there's a reason most large,
mature corporations do it.

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mcphage
Oh man, having to live somewhere the commutes aren't an hour long (or more)
and you can afford a house, how terrible...

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smitherfield
It's a bit unreasonable to join a tech company as something other than a
technical person or a manager, and expect to quickly be promoted to a top-tier
position. No career path works that way.

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jchonphoenix
Emotions aside, this makes perfect sense.

Working in a commodity job means less opportunity. It's the same reason not
every company has Uber's valuation. Pay is (roughly) correlated to value.

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graeme
>“‘How do we make this cost less?’ Every support case can cost up to $30 for
them. You cost them a lot of money and don’t bring in a lot of revenue.”
Still, “They can’t run the company without you.”

What's the actual average cost of a support request? $30 seems like it would
eat up annual profits of a lot of services fairly quickly.

~~~
jschwartzi
That's the cost of a support incident handled by a live person. If you use
self-service options like the knowledge base or Google then the cost is
essentially zero.

This is why many companies make it hard to call them.

~~~
graeme
And is that the same across mediums...i.e. are email, chat and phone all $30
on average?

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payMDgovt
Dumb article....customer svc is a low man on totem pole job. There is a huge
demand for coders so learn how to code and make a very good living or fight
all ur fellow reps for that one or two PM openings. That's how it goes in the
tech world and in general. Everywhere.

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angmarsbane
"Those are soft skills, and associated with women, they’re not super valued.”

Why are they associated with women? Where does that stem from?

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dtinsley
What is the business reason that Lyft is moving their customer service jobs
here? Wages are not low here. Perhaps it is lack of state income tax? HMMMM

~~~
HillRat
Oh, I think the fact that TN's median income is about 70% that of CA and
Nashville's is about 60% that of SF might have had _something_ to do with it,
along with commercial lease rates being 20% those of SF office space.
Meanwhile, the rest of the company is still commuting to the Mission.

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hanswesterbeek
That article reads identical to the first few chapers of The Circle by Dave
Eggers.

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alexnewman
remote teams, not remote people

