Engineers Should Spend a Day Each Week in Support and Sales

Kinda funny but I learned to "go native" in that area by working on products aimed at sales managers and later on doing a lot of business development work myself. I'm so happy to be working at an organization that has salespeople reporting in every all hands meeting even though it's embedded in a university.

You mean, like... make also politicians swap job for 1 day a week with someone who works?

LONG ago I worked at a company that had the engineering team work in support for roughly a week each year. Those who didn't find a way out of it were by far the best engineers as far as handling escalated support cases. It was like night and day, you could always tell if they had any support experience. Without fail the engineers with support experience solved problems faster and more accurately.

But like all such initiatives it vanished as it's hard to show how awesome it is and your average engineering manager's incentives are not to make support (the red headed step child of most orgs) better :(

It should apply to sales too. I often tell this story:

I was working tech support and a sales guy calls me up and says "Hey my customer is upset that you haven't fixed their problem." I look it up and it's a Priority 3 problem. I tell them, "I have 5 P1 tickets, 12 P2 tickets, and more P3 tickets." (Gave them a run down on our response metrics and so on too.)

They tell me to make their customer's ticket a P1. So I do.

They call back an hour later with the same complaint. I tell them "I have 6 P1 tickets ...."

I eventually got that sales guy and his customers taken care of and gave him a bit of an education on the processes and how to run through the escalation process more effectively. Even so it's amusing how hard it is for folks who don't juggle things like that to understand how that works.