&gt; <i>I do think that many people would be better off doing a tour of &quot;civil service&quot; in retail or food service before going off to fancy jobs.</i><p>A thousand times, yes. I&#x27;ve moved into &#x27;devops&#x27; from support, and it&#x27;s just as clear on this side of the divide just how little esteem developers have for support staff.<p>One bit of schadenfreude from the past: I worked in a 2-person support team in a small company, and constantly had requests for improvements (both support- and client-friendly varieties) rebuffed, basically with the &#x27;eh, what would support know about products&#x27; attitude[1]. I ended up leaving that place, and the other support guy had already booked a month-long sojourn on the other side of the planet, leaving the developers to now support their own product. The company ground to a halt and no-one could do a thing as the half-dozen strong dev team struggled to do support with the shitty environment they gave us to work with. Apparently on the other guy&#x27;s return, better support tools shot to the top of the devs&#x27; priority list.<p>I also remember hearing about a wine distribution company in Western Australia where every new hire, <i>regardless of position</i>, spends a week half on support calls and half in shipping, so that everyone is exposed to the difficulties of packing and shipping wine, and dealing with customer breakage. I love this idea, and wish it was more widespread. Dealing with the public is hard, but there&#x27;s not much you can do about that. Dealing with the undeserved contempt of your coworkers is also hard, and it doesn&#x27;t take much to expose people to the more human aspects of the crappy positions in a company; raising empathy can really help.<p>[1] I&#x27;ve always found this bizarre, that the department that has the most client contact when something goes wrong is so routinely ignored when developing the product further.