Hello World!
If you’re in Engineering, Product Management, Sales – literally any department – and you haven’t thanked Tech Support lately, go do it right now. Bring them coffee, give them gift cards, send them memes, or buy them tacos. Because without Tech Support, the whole organization would collapse into a flaming pile of misunderstood error logs and “Did you try restarting it?”
Let’s paint a quick picture. I’m out in the field talking to a customer about “holistic endpoint visibility”, or some other sexy buzzwords that I picked up from this month’s sales deck. I nod sagely. I point at colorful diagrams and flowcharts. Everything is going great until someone in the back raises a hand and says, “We’re still seeing strange traffic on port 443, any idea why?”
That, my friends, is when I smile, casually excuse myself, and immediately ping Tech Support, because I don’t know the answer, but they will. They always do.
They’re the First Line of Defense: When an emotional customer calls in saying “nothing works” (helpful, right?), it’s not me whom they talk to first. Thank God! That’s Tech Support’s moment to shine. They triage, decipher, and – in some dark magic ritual that I’ve never fully understood – manage to extract meaningful information from an irate individual who says, “The screen is blank now.”
And now, let’s talk trouble tickets. If there’s a global issue, who catches the first wave of angry customer emails? Again, not me. I’m in a meeting. Or maybe on a plane. Or perhaps even hiding under my desk. But Tech Support? They’re already digging in. They calmly and cooly figure out what’s real, what’s just noise, and what needs to be escalated.
They Know Our Systems Better Than We Do: I will die on this hill: No one knows the weird quirks and idiosyncrasies of our solutions better than Tech Support. They’ve seen every version, every customer deployment, and every obscure config flag that somehow still exists in 2025 for reasons no one else can explain. They don’t just support the products, they actually understand them inside and out, in ways that make the rest of us look like mere toddlers with a Fisher-Price keyboard.
Give Them a Medal and a Raise: Do you want real cybersecurity? It’s not about threat models, fancy dashboards, and AI-driven firewalls. It’s about having a world-class Tech Support team ready to respond, explain, troubleshoot, calm, contain, and resolve. They are the unsung heroes. They’re the ones who handle the chaos, squash the bugs, plug the leaks, and keep the whole ship afloat.
Tech Support doesn’t just support customers, they support everyone. And best of all, they ultimately make me look smarter than I really am.
Stay tuned for more nerdy columns about my experiences as an SE.
