Brian great comments, but I think there are a few things to think about from Jeff's comments.
Having an engineer respond to level-1 support is actually incredibly expensive. Especially, given that you could hire someone else who had a job specifically to respond to those issues.
In the cases where companies do choose to put engineers on frontline (once they've scaled to the point they can afford to hire dedicated support), they need to make a choice about the kind of organization they want to build.
The organizations Jeff is talking about and the one you are alluding too sounds like a pretty horrible place to work, where people are overworked, and resources are not allocated where they need to be to move the product forward.
Building a great organization is a challenge, and we choose to build an organization where everyone on the team has a strong connection to the customer. We do this with a strong understanding of how our team wants to grow and specialize. When done right, all hands customer service can work really well to align the team around the customer.
But you point is well taken, at many startups this idea that engineers should be doing "one more thing", when they are already responsible for "all the things" could be overkill. My advice would be to first figure out how to divide up responsibilities so people could focus, and then have teams interact with their customers every once in a while to remember what it's like to use their product.
I think you'll be surprised at how many engineers actually enjoy talking to the people they are building their product for.
Having an engineer respond to level-1 support is actually incredibly expensive. Especially, given that you could hire someone else who had a job specifically to respond to those issues.
In the cases where companies do choose to put engineers on frontline (once they've scaled to the point they can afford to hire dedicated support), they need to make a choice about the kind of organization they want to build.
The organizations Jeff is talking about and the one you are alluding too sounds like a pretty horrible place to work, where people are overworked, and resources are not allocated where they need to be to move the product forward.
Building a great organization is a challenge, and we choose to build an organization where everyone on the team has a strong connection to the customer. We do this with a strong understanding of how our team wants to grow and specialize. When done right, all hands customer service can work really well to align the team around the customer.
But you point is well taken, at many startups this idea that engineers should be doing "one more thing", when they are already responsible for "all the things" could be overkill. My advice would be to first figure out how to divide up responsibilities so people could focus, and then have teams interact with their customers every once in a while to remember what it's like to use their product.
I think you'll be surprised at how many engineers actually enjoy talking to the people they are building their product for.