
Ask HN: How to Survive in Customer Support? - data_ders
Those with experience in customer support, how to survive&#x2F;thrive in customer support without burning out?<p>After a graduating a coding bootcamp, a friend took a role in customer support in the hope that they could use the experience to eventually transition to software development. However, now they feel burnt out and trapped by the &quot;nature of the role&quot; with its never-ending pile of tickets and goose-chasing in getting problems solved.<p>I&#x27;ve been solutioning with them to to try and find a way to make the work more bearable, but they are of the opinion that the problem is the job itself.<p>Context: they work at a &lt;1000-person B2B marketing start up.
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duxup
I did various forms of tech support for 20+ years before deciding I wanted to
move on.

It isn't for everyone for sure. Being tied to a desk and a phone can be
hard...and if you are at the lower end of the spectrum you're going to get
worse customers generally.

Also many support orgs have poor management and are seen / treated as
inconvenient cost centers....

It is possible the job actually sucks.

For me I worked the issue and let the chips fall where they may.

If I was called away because of some silly issue and something else wasn't
going to get fixed...so be it, that's just the way we were staffed. I didn't
take sides or take it personally.

I worked hard and took pride in my work but didn't sweat it if the system was
insane. I did advocate for improvements but didn't hold my breath.

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mjmj
I coped with drugs and alcohol before finally getting a job as a QA engineer
an managed to escape. Tech support takes a thick skin and strong personality
to not personally take home the never ending queue of angry customers, it’s
generally thankless.

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troydavis
I don't have an answer, but I might have a path to an answer. There's a
fantastic Slack community of customer support/success people and they're very
supportive of newcomers:
[https://supportdriven.com/groups/](https://supportdriven.com/groups/)

Many have worked through the same problem as your friend.

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data_ders
thanks for the resource, I'll pass it on.

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runawaybottle
If your friend wants to transition out of support, the only way to do that is
to leave support. There is no nice path from tech support over to development,
at least not in my experience.

