It’s almost been a year since I started this "new chapter."

At the start I was digging into the fundamentals that I lack from not having a CS degree. You don’t really get that experience having fun with personal projects. While I may have pushed the limits in some niche areas (like making the NES play realtime-mixed PCM), I kind of missed out on practical, business-rich software skills. I played mostly with technical nuances, which are arguably quite fun for people like me, but today you’d better be up to snuff with the modern libraries if you want business value.

It was long few months of job hunting, but I’ve been a happy contractor for Crossover for about six months now. I actually didn’t realize the role was a thing until applying, a “support engineer”, where a generic set of tech skills – a generalist, so to say – outweighs skill in a single framework or such. I’m quite the generalist so it was a good pick for me. I’m also grateful they let me in the door, especially with my weak resume. If you’re looking for a competitive, diverse environment and the convenience of remote work. I’d recommend them. My colleagues are good people all around.

Speaking of the support engineer role, it comes with its own challenges, some which I haven’t quite figured out yet. As a software engineer, the scalability is clear as day: if you have thousands of users, then your work is scaled by that much, especially since business typically focuses on features that hones in on a broad audience to maximize results.

As a support engineer, however, it’s not quite as easy to put your tech skill to scale. The job isn’t to improve the product and make everyone happy. The job is to investigate problems that typically only affect a few people. Frankly, I find it hard to believe that I even add value to my company a lot of the time. The problems brought up by edge cases are hard to solve – and for what result? One or two happy clients?

This leads me to believe that the value in this work isn’t quite problem-solving. While problem-solving is a pretty big part, I’d put more emphasis in customer engagement. I could spend ten hours solving a difficult problem, but all the customer sees is a ten-hour response time for their business-critical issue. I think, like most people, they don’t care too much about the technical details – they’d rather know immediately what is being done and what their options are in the meantime.

If you can nail that value while also providing superb problem solving, then you’ve got it figured out. I’ve been leaning more towards customer engagement lately, though boy is it easy to get carried away in solving strange problems.