howeird | Work Foo

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I was in class all day at work. It was a class on a new product which has been in customers' hands for a month, but tech support did not have any training on. The fellow who taught it is one of the system engineers, which is another name for a pre-sales tech support engineer. The presentation went well, but the labs didn't. We apparently don't have a working system in the office. The last 2 hours degenerated when one of the salescreatures and the guy who s writing the new user interface came in and turned it into a design session.

And it looks like I'll be teaching a class again in about a month. The same 4-day class I taught late last year.

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From:

leatherapron.livejournal.com

I wish that all of America could see this post. all too often folks criticise tech support and do not realize the near impossible conditions they operate under.

Good luck.

From:

howeird

Nah, tech support engineers usually have what they need to do their jobs. I've worked in this field for 25 years, at more than a dozen companies, and the current one is right at the top of the "not ready for prime time" list.

The trouble with this company is they started out without a solid product specification, the QA manager was just a rubber stamp, and salescreatures gave away alpha and beta test CDs of the product in a misguided effort to sell something they didn't have yet.

All these conditions still exist today, 5 years later. Except now we don't even have a QA manager. Our chief engineer is in charge of QA.

Compare this to HP, where product specs have to be approved before development can start, QA is done by a different department than engineering, and if the product is not to spec, it is not allowed to be released. Sales people work in another city, they have no way to get their hands on anything except finished product. At least this was true 10 years ago when I worked there. And I had all the tools I needed to do the job well.

From:

leatherapron.livejournal.com

HP sounds pretty cool. I did Tech Support for a telecommunications co. that shall remain nameless and we never knew what the hell was going on until there was a problem.