The Two Sides of Insourced Software Support

It's amusing the disconnected conversations you can find for yourself in the blogosphere if you look hard enough.

Just the other day, I was reading Joel Spolsky's take on Customer Service: "When we handle a tech support incident with a well-qualified person here in New York, chances are that’s the last time we’re ever going to see that particular incident. So with one $50 incident we’ve eliminated an entire class of problems."

And this afternoon, skimming through the javablogs email, I found arrghh's frustrated entry on the same subject (quoting a response to a desired rewrite): "No thanks, the support team rely upon the money that comes in from all the calls. $100 a call then $50 for each hour they spend on it works up to a good holiday a year for each of them"

So there you go. I guess it depends who you work for.