| May 2006 |
| By Shawn Ritchie |
So... you're a pretty decent tech. You know your way around a Linux box or Windows 2003 IIS server. You can troubleshoot a qmail config gone haywire with a fast Google finger and ten years of institutional memory of how this stuff is supposed to work. But, and possibly more importantly, you can also talk to the most irate customer known to man and calm them down from "I want my last year's worth of bills credited and I'm cancelling, too!" to "Wow, thanks so much, I didn't think your company would ever get this fixed" in less time than it takes you to down an extra-large coffee. The younger techs at your workplace come to you for advice, help and guidance on a regular basis. So do the folks from the non-technical departments, be it for help with a Sales proposal or because they can't print their favorite Successories poster from the printer for some reason.
If this sounds like your day-to-day job life, you already are or probably should be a Technical Support Manager.
I work for a business customer-focused Internet Service Provider in downtown Chicago. I run the Tech Support crew. I'm not the best sysadmin or network engineer to ever walk the earth, but I can perform both of those roles in a pinch. I can get the necessary answers out of Human Resources for any questions one of my techs may have in short order. Customers like me because I understand where they are coming from, what they want, and how to balance their expectations against what they're actually paying my company for. I can deal with upper management, Sales and Billing without resorting to fisticuffs. I can hire employees that have the necessary skills and personality fit to succeed, which keeps them happy and keeps the company functioning. When everything goes to hell, and it will, I can keep my team from freaking out, on task, and directed to the most useful area for each of their skill-sets until the fire is out. I also have a decade of practical experience at doing their jobs in my own work history to draw upon when they hit a roadblock and need assistance to get through it.
To do this job, you have to be humble and arrogant all at the same time. You have to accept that, on your team, there's going to be a better Perl coder, a better UNIX guy, an amazing router guy... if you don't have better people at particular skill positions within your team, you're not hiring right. On the flip side, when that Perl coder has a customer riding roughshod over him because they want a script that isn't secure or practical put into place, you will be the one with the skills to explain to that customer why their desires aren't necessarily in their own best interests - at the same time as you keep sales and upper management from breathing down that tech's neck in order to "get it done" when "it" is something that is actually just going to cost your company time, money and reputation down the line.
You're also going to be the person who can find and hire these people, train them on whichever aspects of the "Jack of All Trades, Master of Some" nature of the Technical Support world they didn't come to you with prior knowledge of, and schedule them so that you have the appropriate mix of talent on-staff during the various shifts your team will have to cover, each of which will generally have a different focus. Your excellent UNIX geek may need to be softly convinced that the graveyard shift is the best place for him as it involves a lot more backup-tape rotating, shell-scripting and SNMPc monitoring and response than it does customer interaction. Showing them how a few months in that role will prepare them for greater overall success down the road rather than instant failure on the customer-heavy day shift out of the box is where the Technical Support Manager's skills come into play.
The benefits of the job are legion. The greatest satisfaction I take in my job is when I get to promote a tech who came to me as a crude pile of talent with no time-management skills or professional experience into a full-time career as a network engineer or systems administrator a few years later. I am constantly exposed to the latest and greatest technologies across the entire spectrum of our industry, be it new hosting/database APIs, co-location infrastructure, backhaul configuration... and my company is willing to pay to train me to get conversant in all of them. God bless 'em, I even like my customers as I've been doing this long enough to know what it is they actually need and can translate their imperfect desires into a practical product that my team can successfully implement and support for them.
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