Technical Support Engineer | What I Learned for 3 Years Experience

Feb 24, 2023

Hey! I have been following the articles on this site for a long time and noticed that many people write their personal work experience, as if they are analyzing it. I also decided to do a little review of my last job, namely a technical support engineer, where I worked for about three years.

Before starting, I want to note that you should not judge the profession as a whole by my opinion, this is my personal opinion, which is based on my worldview and my feelings. I share my experience and do not want to negatively influence the choice of readers. Now that I've said that, let's get started.

Background

Before I found a job as a technical support engineer, I wanted to work in the Data field, because I had all the necessary minimum skills to start. I'm talking about SQL and Python. Then it seemed to me that these hard skills would be enough for me to get the position of Junior Data Analyst, which I so dreamed of, but no. The job search process in this area dragged on, and I decided to accept the position for which I was invited, the position of a technical support engineer.

Work Experince Meme

My knowledge and skills were highly valued there. I easily built complex database queries, I innovated in the company where I worked, automating some processes, with which my knowledge of Python helped me. In general, everything was easy for me, I saw my great contribution to the team and to our role in the company, and I expected encouragement for my work and efforts.

Responsibilities

What did I do in this position? I worked with integrating partners into our hotel metasearch engine. I would really like to name the company I worked for, but after reading other articles on this site and realizing that no one does this because it is not ethical and wrong, I will not do it either. I will say this - I worked in the hotel industry.

Our company made it so that the user could search for all possible hotels in one place, a kind of analogue of booking.com, but specializing in the market in Asia. I think those who traveled around Asia already understood what company I worked for. So, I was involved in the integration of partners, solving their questions about disconnecting them from our site, sometimes even looking for these partners on my own, although this was clearly not part of my responsibilities.

I also analyzed and monitored the traffic of these partners, that is, how well they perform in our search engine, what kind of sales, are there any bugs and problems when redirecting to the partner’s website, and so on. In a word, I did everything to make the company earn as much as possible and at the same time users were satisfied with error-free bookings and our services in general.

Time

As I showed myself, my working day became longer and longer. According to the contract, it was the standard 8 hours a day, but there was not a day when I worked so much. There were very few people in our team, only 7. At the same time, there were a huge bunch of partners - everyone needs support, integration and a solution to a personal problem. Because of this, I had to work very hard, sacrifice sleep and dinner.

Overwork Meme

I didn’t even have 5 minutes free, after solving one problem, for example, an incorrect hotel reservation date passed to the API, another problem immediately appeared, for example, on our website it is indicated that pets are allowed in the hotel, but in fact it is not.

Such a crazy schedule drove me crazy. I was still doing well, so I was hoping for either a promotion after a while, or just a pay raise. This gave me an incentive and forced me to turn a blind eye to obvious overtime and workload. But there was no salary increase or promotion. This was the first reason I left.

Project Manager

The second reason is the team, namely our project manager. Naturally, I will not give his name and will not give a link to the social network, although it would be funny. But nothing will prevent me from expressing it here. This was a person who was clearly trying to suck up to higher-level managers, and this sucking up took place in a very interesting way, in saving human resources.

It is foolish to deny that the goal of any company is to earn or save money in order to earn more in the long run. So the manager of our team tried to please the top management and manage with 7 employees, while this job requires at least 12 people. I did not understand this right away, because I was not experienced and this was my first job, but I will remember this experience for a long time - as a person, in order to maintain his position, he sacrifices the personal time of each employee, forcing him to recycle.

It was not surprising to me why others did not notice this. They worked with him for a long time, and obviously this processing has become a habit with them. They either didn't notice it or didn't want to notice it. All of them are super professionals whom I still respect and appreciate very much. Unfortunately, they had no luck with the project manager. I hope they understand it.

Monotone

The decisive factor for me was the monotony of work. I understand that 90% of work, any job, not just in IT, is monotonous work that comes down to doing the same things day after day, month after month. However, as a young professional, I wanted more.

At first, it seemed to me that the work was really diverse, I had many different tasks and responsibilities. And so it was. It wasn't until two months later that I received my first duplicate of my problem, technically speaking. And that made me happy. I thought - is it really always like that, different tasks - it's so interesting. But over time, they began to repeat themselves more and more often, and more often my work turned into a routine.

I perfectly understand that work in the field of support implies the monotony of activities, but still I hoped for the best. The monotony would not be noticeable if it were for the support of a project manager or a clear time frame for the working day, but I had neither. This was another reason why I left.

Conclusion

In this text, I tried to describe the main problems of the technical support engineer position. It's probably not like that everywhere, but that's how it was for me. I do not regret my experience, I got a lot of new knowledge and skills, including learning to better understand people and that not all of them are fluffy. I don’t want to push someone away from their chosen career path, just don’t make my mistakes, learn from others!