Into What Role Does a Software Support Engineer Grow?

Part of the answer is they grow into a COO. Like Chief Operating Officer or another role that reports to the COO. The other part is that a Software Support person touches every part of the organization. Sales, Operations, Engineering. And so it is possible for a support person to grow into any of those fields that they are passionate/inclined/skilled at. So they could end up as a CEO-type, COO-type or CTO-type.

But the reason that the likely role for a Software Support Engineer is most likely to end up as COO role, is if one sticks to the core responsibilities of a Software Support Engineer (for example triaging customer issues, Solving customer issues, using/testing software, promoting software, and many others), then one will be doing jobs that are considered operations. I mentioned in a previous post, Ramblings on Whether There Will Ever be a Standard Job Title for a Software Support Engineer, that in the Support industry a Support Person is sometimes viewed as an infantry. Indeed, there are parallels between Military/Police/Government-Executive-Branch-Type roles and Software Support. So if a Software Support Engineer excels at these, then they could naturally move towards a position of an operations role.

For example in the Support Driven podcast episode. 04, at 14min.,55sec. someone mentions that the support manager’s boss is the COO.

To conclude, because of the breadth of the software business that they touch, a Software Support Engineer role can grow into many career roles in Sales, Engineering or other, but more specifically, an appropriate role for a Software Support Engineer to grow into is COO or a role that reports to COO.

*2014-12-05 edit: previously published at http://w̶i̶e̶l̶d̶l̶i̶n̶u̶x̶.̶c̶o̶m̶/?p=881

*2015-07-30 edit: edited whitespace to improve this post’s readability and also fixed a broken hyperlink

[2020 edit: Moved to: https://i̶n̶v̶e̶s̶t̶o̶r̶w̶o̶r̶k̶e̶r̶.̶c̶o̶m̶/2014/... .html.]