We are a startup with just a few people and the hardest position of all is tech support, from filling it to retention. The requirement is that you need to be a mid-developer at least but also do support all day.<p>We're having a super hard time finding someone that wants to do this even when paying over the mid-dev rate.<p>Developers hate support or any kind of prolonged client interaction, support guys don't have technical experience. Besides that, it takes 2 months minimum of training for a tech support position to get remotely productive, it actually starts at 3-4 month mark.<p>After all the time the team spends on training them and they start to actually deliver something, we're seeing them fleeing away to a full dev job on some other place.<p>We just spent months on interview and training and they leave exactly when they start to become helpful. Since we're a very small company of 7, this affects us a lot.<p>I'm very frustrated about this. Do you guys have any idea on how to handle this?
I'd fold the function in to the team and spread the load.<p>You have 7 people, so if you took a week each you'd have a schedule of 6 weeks of "regular" work and 1 week of support.<p>And allocate some time to reducing that learning curve - a 3-4 month ramp-up is pretty extreme, so there must be work you can do to lessen that considerably. Whether that's through automation, bug fixes, documentaion, adding features so customers can self-serve instead of having to resort to support, it'll probably take some time to figure out the most effective combination of all of the above.<p>The same goes for the amount of support needed. A full-time role in a team of 7 is also pretty extreme. What is it about your company/product that needs so much? There must be things you can do to bring that down by an order of magnitude.