There’s a phrase floating around that support work is “dead-end” — that it has no room for growth, no career progression, and that doing it means you never “move up”.
I think that take is not just wrong. It’s dangerously out of touch with where the world is heading.
Why support is quietly one of the hardest jobs in tech
Being a genuinely good support assistant is not “the easy way out”. It demands a huge body of knowledge: you have to understand the product deeply, the edge cases, the workarounds, the internal systems, and — crucially — how real people actually use the thing you built.
That last one is the part a lot of people miss. Support sits at the sweet spot where you hear criticism and feedback first-hand. A product manager, an engineer, or an executive reads dashboards. Support reads the actual words of the people using your product, frustrated, at 9pm. That access is a superpower most roles don’t have.
The calculator mindset
I keep thinking about an analogy. There’s a type of person who takes pride in being able to do calculations by hand — pen and paper, no calculator. They’ll tell you that using a calculator “freezes your brain” and makes you lazy. So to prove it, they refuse to touch one.
But here’s the reality: you are now allowed to bring a calculator into exams. And if there’s a maths exam that doesn’t allow one, that exam is the problem — it’s testing the wrong thing. You shouldn’t be taking that exam in the first place.
AI is exactly the same. If a company refuses to let you use AI, that company is the one that’s wrong — not you. You don’t need to be working somewhere that’s testing you on “remembering” instead of “doing”.
Glamour vs. actually solving problems
Our culture loves fast glamour. We reward the title, the optics, the easy win. There’s a familiar figure: someone who calls themselves a “Senior Software Developer”, who loves the sound of their own job title — but who doesn’t actually solve real-world problems. Meanwhile, doing the unglamorous, repetitive, detail-heavy work of actually making something work for someone else? That’s looked down on.
But let’s be honest about what that mental model rewards: a person who can proudly answer one exam question with a pen, while leaving the other thirty-nine unanswered. What’s the point of the one perfect answer if the whole exam’s been abandoned?
The world is changing. Use the tools.
Problems are changing. New problems are being born. And the tools to solve them are being handed to us. The only real failure is refusing to pick them up.
Tools exist to be used, not feared. The world is changing whether you want it to or not. If you don’t change with it, you become irrelevant. And someone who doesn’t solve any of the world’s problems — however impressive their title sounds — isn’t contributing. A human being who adds no value has no place in this world.
So no, support isn’t a dead-end. It’s where real problems meet real people, and where you get to actually fix them — with every tool you’ve got.
