osivertsson

Customer support needs to handle edge cases. They are not documented because the company does not even know they are problems yet. Many companies win and lose here. Customers that bother going to customer support are often loyal and have valid concerns or insights. Use this information to win!

In my career a few customers that bothered enough to contact customer support helped us find hardware problems that slipped through at the factory and that caused problems for thousands.

Customer support can also feedback frustrations back to dev teams allowing them to build products that feel polished even when it could be labeled as not-a-bug.

My point being: There is a huge signal in customer support. Don’t just waste it by slapping AI on it.

Understand the business thoroughly to know what value you create. Transition within that framework, where in this organization and with what tools can I provide more value?

If you take a moral stand against LLMs understand that your relative value will decrease.

However, with 10 YoE you should be able to quickly evaluate code and ideas proposed by LLMs for correctness and fit into your code-base. In this way you are in a better spot than junior devs.

Limit complexity. LLMs sure allows complexity to get out of control, especially when people stop caring and just wants to get things out of their hands quickly.

If you really were to transition somewhere else it has to be to something you really feel the urge to do because it gives you a real sense of joy or fascination. Something you can’t resist dabbling with already today. From your message I can tell it is not embedded or AI.

If it really is fully open-source please make that more visible on your landing page.

It is a huge deal if I can start investigating and deploying such a solution as a techie right away, compared to having to go through all the internal hoops for a software purchase.

When leadership makes decisions that are so out of touch with their customers it also severely impacts internal morale.

Yeah, so they reversed eventually. But the technical and support people at Synology probably tried to fight this and lost. That feeling of being ignored despite having given this company your everything for many years. I bet many woke up feeling that the magic that made Synology a good place to work is gone.

My guess is they will continue to lose the most valuable employees unless they replace management with some internally well-respected staff that understands their customers well.

Laws of physics hasn't changed since the early 00s though, we could build very low latency point to point links back then too.