I'm giving myself away to anyone who's worked with me before by going into detail. Good thing I don't care.
Personally, it was a mistake for me to apply for the Technical Support Level 2 position. I should have waited for a better role more suited to me such as a QA Engineer or a Jr Java Developer. I thought, indicative of the term "Level 2" and the fact that they have Level 1s that we would be a proper escalation point. Nope. They're using Level 1s to do one thing and Level 2s to do another. Which means Level 2s are right there on the front lines to get interrupted in the middle of their highly involved investigation and drop everything to deal with that. Insane.
There are two different Tech Support Level 2 teams for two different products: SelectSite and Contract Director. I started with SelectSite and that effectively crushed my motivation to care about anything to do with that place. I may still be there right now if I started with Contract Director, because at least they make regular use of SQL Server and eventually get into coding .NET via C#. But both teams ended up fighting over me, so a compromise was made where they wanted me to be some "hybrid" role that supported both applications (at the same pay as everyone else {which I know because I asked people how much they made}), starting with SelectSite and eventually I'd be moved to Contract Director. When the decision was made to finally move me to Contract Director permanently (because they knew that I was not interested in learning SelectSite in an end-user application-support capacity... you can hire other trained monkeys to do that, thanks), I was told I'd still be stuck in SelectSite for two months while the new poor saps got trained. Oh, and we're going to reduce the shift I was on down to a 2 man crew again. Have fun! By this time, I was already burned out of Tech Support and customer support in general, so I put in my two weeks.
The job description and even the questioning during the interview processes made it seem like there would be way more hands-on technical experience put into practice. Why ask me about SQL or if I have solid Java/object-oriented experience if you're never going to use it? I feel like I was lied to and that the position was NOT as advertised. It was an utter waste of my time and my skill set. And this was voiced to management several times.
With SelectSite, you're basically learning how to use their bloated, hyper-customized-based-on-continuous-customer-feedback platform/application and support end user questions about it. Even long timers (5+ years) are still learning new things about it because it's just so immense. The integrations alone would require someone to sit you down and illustrate all the finer points. And this is the easy part!
The hard part is trying to learn this on your own because THERE IS NO TRAINING. They have NO processes. And the processes they are trying to put into place (after the fact) are half-baked ("yeah, just sit with this guy for now"). No one has time to invest into putting time and thought into making things better because everyone is overworked and stressed out. And, most of all, miserable. And yet, everyone there thinks this is just, "oh, you should have seen what it used to be. it'll get better. this is just how it has to be." Really?
I think they just wanted someone who was very smart to be able to come in and pick things up faster than anyone else. The problem is, you could be a 20 year software development veteran, or an MIT graduate, or even a rocket scientist, and still have the SAME difficulty curve of learning their ridiculous platform because it is a nuanced piece of software with no sense of intuitive, end user learning (i.e. badly designed in terms of UX). It's like trying to learn the intricacies of stamp collecting. No thanks.
