What tasks are involved in a job of Software support?

Question

As in desktop support one troubleshoots common computing problems, what does one do in case of software support? As it is said that the experience gained by one in BPO/KPO industry is not applicable or considered valid in Core development industry, does this holds true for the case of Software support also?

Answer 1

Most of users will complain "oh it wouldn't work, please help asap" (and with lots of typos) every day, nag on the phone, ask to come to the customer site and make it work. The engineer needs to localize to problem - what exactly isn't working and how to resolve.

If the problem is between keyboard and chair (software misuse, misconfiguration, some known problem, some easily detectable environment problem) he gives assistance on how to resolve. If it's some unknown problem the engineer asks for and helps gather info on how to repoduce the problem and escalates it to developers.

The key difference between this and "desktop support" is IMO that there're developers easily reachable in case of necessity and the engineer needs to know more on how the software works inside.

Answer 2

As it is said that the experience gained by one in BPO/KPO industry is not applicable or considered valid in Core development industry, does this holds true for the case of Software support also?

I don't know what BPO/KPO means.

Two ways in which support can be valid experience for development:

• My first job was as a "software maintenance engineer", in which I "supported" software which had already been released and whose development team was working on other things. In this case, supported meant debugging: getting bug reports (especially log files), finding the cause of the problem, changing the source code, testing, and submitting the patch for release.
• At another job, the customer support staff helped to test the latest software versions before they were released: good test for the software, good training for the customer support people; and this (QA or software testing) is at least a little relevent to development (but might probably be seen as only slightly relevent).