Developer Support Versus Technical Support
One thing that I'm pleased with in my position as Director of Developer Support is my insistence that all company language and literature be changed to no longer refer to the department as Technical Support.
To me, technical support is someone you call, chat, or e-mail when you're having a problem with your TV or cell phone. The technical support staff typically looks up your problem in a knowledge base or internal FAQ and reads back the solution. Yes I'm sure that many companies' technical support departments do much more. But I bet they don't read and write code.
The Infragistics Developer Support staff helps developers develop.
When a developer calls, chats, or e-mails Developer Support at Infragistics, you get someone that will, yes look through our kb for a possible answer, but will also read your code and work to write code to solve your problem or understand it well enough to describe the issue to our developers to see if it's a bug. Our customers/developers, more than ever before are on tighter and tighter deadlines and are expected to understand everything instantaneously. And everyday (24-hours, Monday - Friday), Infragistics Developer Support is in the trenches alongside our customers working together to find solutions and ensure success. Some of the Infragistics Developer Support Engineers transfer in our company to become junior developers, qa engineers, technical documentation writers, trainers, consultants, evangelists, and even eventually a product manager. I'm pleased to recently see a number of our outstanding team members move on in to new roles and to welcome a batch of new fresh faces that I'm confident will quickly rise to the challenge of working in Developer Support at Infragistics.
What prompted all this? I saw a want ad from a competitor for Developer Support Engineers to work in their Technical Support department. I'm pleased to see others agree with my designation. Of course it's certainly not an original idea as a quick Google will show, but I'm hopeful that more and more companies in our industry will recognize the importance of developer support and the vital role it plays in helping customers learn about the rewards of using our components.
Infragistics works hard to hire only the brightest, most promising people. Jim Whittle our director of recruiting tirelessly continues to find the best the industry has world wide. The people that join my staff as Developer Support Engineers are learning our products and new technology constantly. It's rewarding to see how many bright individuals want to work at Infragistics and start in the Developer Support department. We have to turn many applicants away but we always make our best effort to suggest how they can improve and re-apply when they're more prepared for the rigors of the Infragistics challenge.
Currently listening to Joplin by Bryan Zentz from the album Joplin (Single)