I did that for a couple of years and I could agree that <i>occasionally</i> it may be useful for engineers to feel first-hand pains of the user. However in my experience it quickly devolves into engineers spending whole days on customer support, which is terribly expensive for the company and terribly unfullfilling for employees.<p>The company pays significant money for the guy, who instead of creating persistent value (in a form of software), spends days in meetings with customers, clicking around their servers to setup the software or solve some configuration issues.<p>The employee goes through boring and exhausting meetings with customers, and after those few years feels completely burned out. Furthermore with most of the time consumed by such meetings, any changes to the software will be done ad hoc, without any further consideration, because there's no time for consideration, when the customer always wants the change to be done ASAP.<p>The same job can be done much cheaper and by someone who actually enjoys day-to-day interaction with customers.
I work as the CTO for an ecommerce startup and I love handling support. I identify problems with our current business process and come up with ways to tune the tech to make them go away.<p>There's also the feeling I get when I calm an irate customer down only by showing them that I care.<p>Working support keeps me connected to the most important stakeholders in our business and I keep finding ways to improve their experience. I think everyone should work support.<p>If you're not good on the phone, answer tickets. Ultimately it helps build a company culture around customer satisfaction.<p>Then again, I could be wrong since it's only been about six months since we started operations. I guess I'll know for sure in a year.