For an engineer who started their career in product support and after years of experience, gained an interest for it, how difficult can it be to switch careers? The main reason behind switching careers is not lack of interest in the current job, but the difference in pay scale. There's no question on the demand for software engineers in the Bay and the pay scale definitely matches the demand. Then there's another argument whether money being the only motivation behind switching careers is healthy or not.
I'm trapped in this job as well with nowhere to move up in the current company I'm in. You can also move into team lead and management I would think at a good company
What is your current salary in product support? My base is 67k. Total comp including weekend rotations and shift differential puts me around 82k ish. I'm in Utah.
Its not great and I see other companies are offering more so think it's time to make a move. Around 70k
I'm a bay area resident and based on the cost of living, they pay over 100K plus some stock bonus. You are right about the career options. Plus switching careers can be tough because although we can learn to code, when we try and apply for a position involving coding, I'm not sure if our past support experience will be of any help.
Do you actually code or just do technical support? I don't code anything but have to use Mongo and sql
We don't have to code in our team. It's mainly learning the product and all the third party partner tools.
Product support is a difficult job and hence the pay. The title doesn’t do justice the problems/issues you face and resolve on daily basis while meeting SLAs
Yeah I feel like a lot of companies still just consider it support (that can be sent to India for cheaper) and lowball you on the pay
Yeah. It's viewed as a cost center ... Until there is a critical issue with huge impact that needs to be fixed asap .... Then all of a sudden you're the most important person in the world.. And you'll have sales people and TAMs (that probably get paid more than you) constantly pinging you asking for a status update and reminding you how urgent the issue is. ....And you'll be pulled into conference calls to discuss the issue with 6 different managers from three different organizations along with sales guys and TAMs... And you'll be reminded by everyone every 5 minutes how urgent and impactful the issue is. .... And throughout all this drama I'm telling myself. "Wow. The work I'm doing right now seems to be pretty God Damned critical. How much am I getting paid again?"
I feel you. I worked as a TSE and that was one of the most challenging and humbling experience I had. What I did is updated my profile on linked in and kept looking for other opportunities. If you’re supporting a product then you automatically become an SME for that. Try to find jobs in companies who uses your product. For example, you’re helping a customer and he/she really liked the way you resolved the issue. You can add him on linked in and then ask them for a referral if you find a great opportunity in their company.
I live in dallas and there’s a bunch of college hires with engineering backgrounds they’re luring into product support roles with 85K base salaries + stock/benefits etc. We soon found out this is not a glamorous job.. I’m applying to Dev roles now after a year before I get stuck in support with too many years of experience
A colleague enrolled in a coding bootcamp and it seems quite helpful for networking/job fairs/convincing employers you’re earnest and qualified for a job change and you have fresh projects-hackathon experience to back it up
Wow 85k base salary in Dallas? That's pretty good for Dallas. For New college hires, with little experience? What product are they supporting? 85k is almost high enough for me to move to Dallas.
Could also go sales engineer route.
At Microsoft as with the other large Fortune 500 companies there are product support tracks that take you all the way from level 58 (about 85k) to level 65 (about 200k). College grads with a B.S. in CompSci usually start at level 61-62 and make 110-130k a year + bonus & stock at MS. If you are good at debugging, then you can make senior roles in 2-4 years. If you want to be a consultant instead (we call that PFE at MS), you can go that route where are doing support + design + rollouts which is much more satisfying then just support queues with customers.
Product support can make up to 200k? Are joking? Are there very many Microsoft products that require the support engineers to have deep Linux/unix skills? If so, what are those products?
Just so we are clear what I am referring to is Enterprise Support (not Help Desk) at Microsoft where you are supporting Windows Server, SQL, Exchange, Azure, etc. These are SysAdmin level support roles where you are dealing with deep technical issues and need to be able to read network traces, Topp traces, .etl traces, OS logging traces, etc. So what we look for are people who are razor sharp and have been Sysadmins themselves, or who have a CompSci degree.
I've been in product support for a while too. From what I've see these are two paths to take after product support. - customer success manager or technical account manager. - Some kind of system admin type role (dba, OS sysadmin, network engineer, something like that) ..... From what I've seen sysadmin type roles are absolutely dominated by H1Bs.... So if you're not h1b then good luck moving in that direction. I'd also like to hear the input of others on this. But if you work for the right companies, product support salary is not too bad. Here in Utah you could potentially make up to 85k as a senior support engineer with companies like Dell/emc, and oracle. But that's pretty much the very top range.
I would like to share that I’m a technical account manager, but depending on the product and group that’s just a fancy name for a support engg with customer facing aspect. The salary I make is a bit more than the op and others shared but the customer facing aspect brings in politics and responsibilities that are very much outside your control. And what next after TAM ? The answer I’m still searching. I was a TSE and moved to a TAM . Hope this helps
Thanks for your input. Why did you move from support engineer to TAM? At Microsoft, does the TAM roll have a higher salary ceiling than support engineer? Which job do you like better? In most companies product support is usually considered a cost center (not revenue generating). But what about TAM at Microsoft? Is it considered revenue generating or cost?