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In order to refill its ranks, the company has started forcing software engineers and marketers over from their highly specialized roles into call centers, according to Business Insider.
How to keep your talented, educated staff: force them into drudge jobs they hate because you fucked up.
Anybody who hands a customer to an engineer is committing war crimes on both sides. Anybody who wastes a good marketing professional on a call centre is going to lose all their marketing staff.
I think I once or twice gave a customer to an engineer and it was at the engineer’s suggestion each time, typically because this was having a call so they could try to resolve the issue faster and not have the delay of me relaying info between each party. It was always at the engineer’s suggestion and always obvious that the customer was technical enough to speak to the engineer.
But there are also cases where I think it’s good to rotate engineers and other staff through support roles. It can be a way of preventing different parts of the company from getting too distant from the customer’s actual experience. Kind of a related concept to dogfooding your product. Sometimes it’s easier to ignore a problem when you can set an arbitrary threshold and say you need a certain number of complaints before you’ll investigate. It can also be good to get your support people out to events where they will encounter happy customers. When all you’re dealing with is people having problems it can start to give you a negative view of your own products and the people making them, even if the problems are actually pretty rare and only affecting <5% of customers. The company where I worked support used to rotate sending a support person to the trade shows partly for that reason. Generally in our industry the products were beloved. Unfortunately the company was bought by a conglomerate shortly before I started and they put an end to that by the time I could’ve gone.
Sounded like a lovely company
Engineers at customer support might also make tooling after understanding the process flows and struggles which might in turn make support more productive/happy.
In the companies I worked it, engineers were at most at 3rd level support (mainly in places where the users were business experts and advanced computer users) or even the people 3rd level support calls when they can't sort the problem out.
Either way, the vast majority of support calls are filtered by lower support levels out before it gets to them.
Putting engineers as first line support sounds like a spectacularly bad idea, at multiple levels: they're far too expensive to waste doing that job, they generally tend to use expert terms rather than common terms so the users don't get them, what they see as "baseline computing know-how" that they expect users have is still well beyond the computing expertise of most people so all in all they tend to detest doing it.
Sure, I agree with you on that, but I'm more talking about listening in on customer support or just joining their stand-up every once in a while. I think it's bad when people are working in silos and don't understand the different obstacles other parts of the organisation are struggling with.
Well, I've worked directly with end-users often enough, both on the side of getting requirements from them for new features and supporting them for the existing application features (these were expert users) and think it's important for engineers to get that kind of exposure.
However working with a limited number of users who are experts in their domain and have high skills in computing is something very different from manning phone lines to provide first line support for a mass marketed product or service whose users are just average people who don't work on any organized thinking area (so their thinking and ability to express themselves clearly is all over the place) and whose computing abilities are usually pretty low, especially compared to an engineer - the mismatch is so broad that it tends to be an exercise in frustration from which the average engineer will learn very little even if they are open minded and understanding.
We have escalations but in the end engineers are fairly directly seeing customer issues.
If it's a siloed thing-- you'll take 10% of your week on tickets-- I could see some value in that it gives the devs perspective on real user concerns and workflows.
Inevitably, the customers use the product-- any product-- differently than the engineers envisioned it.
Escalation to engineering is different from engineers answering the phones at the front line.
Yep. I did my time in the bullpen. I'm not answering everyday customer questions.
To be fair, I have the luxury of saying no. Not everyone does and I recognize that. It sucks to see folks whose time would be better spent fixing issues for everyone, making the platform more robust, or really (like actually, not executive level pie in the sky bullshit) planning next steps doing customer service.
LMAO, the Swedish company is called Klarna:
After falling flat on his face with the AI gamble, Siemiatkowski is once again trying to set his company apart — this time by becoming the "best at offering a human to speak to."
Ok, while I feel for the engineers this is EXACTLY what everyone predicted when they first announced they were going fully to AI for customer service.
We are a different kind of company that doesn't use AI. Got to differentiate yourself yo.
Couldn't have happened to a nicer company.
Anecdotally, Klarna is the company that bought StoCard, an app for scanning and storing loyalty cards, and replaced it with their own app. I personally liked StoCard and found the microloan bloat of Klarna to be unbearable.
I realize that's not as serious a charge as the predatory microloans themselves, but it does give me some measure of personal satisfaction to read about their self-inflicted wounds.
I realize that's not as serious a charge as the predatory microloans themselves, but it does give me some measure of personal satisfaction to read about their self-inflicted wounds.
I dont think klarna’s part in micro lending is any less despicable than that of the microlenders. They are working together to sell predatory products for a profit. To me, a person selling customers to loan sharks is just as morally guilty as the loan sharks themselves.
I'm not sure I understand this comment. Klarna is a microlender?
Dang. I liked stocard. It’s still installed and I’ve been using it. Sigh. Time to change it out.
Interesting that you were still using StoCard. Some months ago the app broke for me and directed me to download Klarna. My info had been migrated over and everything.
I promptly found a new loyalty card app (SuperCards) once I saw the microloans and other unnecessary garbage in Klarna.
I can tell you. if I was told to answer phones, after they fired the team that used to, I'd do such a shitty job they'd have to fire me.
I'd just offer refunds immediately, for everything
you can't pay the bill? That's ok, you get a refund.
you just wanted someone to shout at because Klarna sucks? Refund
You can't log in? Believe it or not, also a refund.
I had a decent bot convo with dealing with bills. I still pay for Sirius XM because of black outs for sporting events. It’s the only guarantee I have to get a game on audio or video. But every time my bill goes up to 28$ or more. I just hit up support bot and say. “I’d like a better price for my plan.” And it goes “How about 11$ a month for a year?” And I tell it. “Deal!” Works every time.
I hope the customer support only agrees to be rehired if paid the same as the engineers.
Good time to quit
Sure, for double the pay.
Yikes.
I feel bad for those engineers. Hopefully they have people skills.
I've got great people skills, no problem.
Now this is a pretty simple problem to fix. First open your IDE, and we'll need to create a quick node project with a couple dependencies. You don't know what an IDE is... Can you open a pull req... No, don't know what that is either. ok sure but this is entry level... Right ok well maybe we can find a way to do this in an online REPL... click beep beep hello? No? Ok guess they figured it out. Job well done. Ticket closed.
Just run my script, here's a link to my public internal GitHub project, you have GitHub access right? Oh, and you need devx setup, I'm not sure how to get the AWS keys otherwise. Oh, you need to be on a Mac and install coreutils with brew because my script uses GNU's tools instead of BSD's because the BSD ones don't have flags I needed.
engineers
people skills.
Not really two positively correlated things, probably negatively correlated.
I’m an engineer with people skills. We get hired as Solution Engineers. Work for sales teams as technical experts. Great pay. Typically.
My point is that Engineers with good people skills and the patience to provide support to regular people aren't common, not that there aren't any (the business of IT Consultancy, for example, relies on those).
Also they're a lot more expensive than the typical first line support workers.
Grabbing a bunch of random engineers and having them do first line support on a mass market service is thus both idiotic and seriously desperate.
Are you kidding? What I wouldn't give to be my company's customer support.
"Hi-... Wait, hang on. There's a specific thingyyy... we... are.. sup-poooooooost-AHAH. Here it is, okay. [In sarcastic fancy voice] How can I help you? Lol, I should have been like "Welcome to Costco, I love you" right? hilarious. Idiocracy. And we are living it now. Sad. So... How can I help you?"
...
Oh wow, that's quite the conundrum. Hey, you should get assistance. Hah, jk. Gotcha. No this is an easy one. I mean, you've definitely got a PEBKAC issue but no worries. Let's start by-
...
Hey, you and me both. In fact most of the people I work with prefer to work with someone else, hah. But hey, wysiwyg, right? So, let's go. Before we start though, just FYI, it's pronounced comfortable.
...
Uh, actually, no you didn't. You said "I'm not comf-TER-a-ble with you helping me." What you should have said was "I'm not com-FORT-a-ble with you helping me - com FORT a ble. See?
...
Fair enough, but it's not my fault you skipped the first day of pronunciation school. Baby's first grammar lesson amiright? Hello?"
...
Hello?
Whoa, that was under a minute! Mark it on the board. Mark it zero! Donny. Remember that? Oh wait, no, it was Walter! Because he would always say, shut the FUCK up, Donny. That's why I got them mixed up. I always do that with Big Lebowski. Walter. Calmer than you are hah. Good movie. Oh shit, was I supposed to answer that?
Is this how an autistic person communicates because if so I may be one.
I am fully spectrummed, so you may be. But I'm also ADD comorbid with a truckload of trauma so I don't where that puts me any more. I mean, other than psychotherapy. Because that is absolutely figuratively where it has put me. And I can't think of an actual place I'd rather be. You are invited to my birthday party.
OH OH OH!!! I know a lot of really cool bridges. I won't tell you. You have to find them. But you will enjoy them.
Hopefully they have people skills.
Yes. For the job interviews they're doing, to kick this stupid employer out of their lives.
Yeah, the engineers with people skills are probably looking for another job or at least leveraging this to get a raise.
Klarna, eh? The same Klarna doing an IPO soon? https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2025/09/03/klarna-klar-ipo-update-dont-buy-now-or-later/
We would all be better off replacing CEOs with AIs. They’re both simply confident bullshitters.
People keep thinking CEOs are leaders. They actually PR hucksters who get paid a lot of money to pump stock by lying.
CEOs are low level humans but very high quality AIs. This is a concept I can get behind.
This happened where I work a few years ago before the AI boom. We had a massive influx of support queries and leadership decided to pull people from tech product success and sales for a full quarter to work on the backlog.
They then dismantled the success teams after they were temporarily demoted to support, then being fired or permanently demoted after the backlog cleared
Three years later now they are building out that success team again.
What a wild time and such stupid management decisions.
success team
🤮
Yeah what the hell does that mean anyway?
I hope this company just goes out of business. What an absolute retard of a CEO. Pretty much anybody could’ve seen this coming. Maybe: Don’t be a cum nugget of a CEO.
"Forces." How about no.
Good. Hope they all go in the shitter.
"Sure pay me double the salary and I will"
Klarna….of course… What a let down that was.
We should start calling it A.S. , artificial stupidity
That stupidity is 100% organic.
Company Replaces Its Customers With AI - Solves World Hunger