{"id":1795,"date":"2023-03-27T10:22:40","date_gmt":"2023-03-27T10:22:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.infobip.com\/developers\/?p=1795"},"modified":"2023-09-11T14:29:48","modified_gmt":"2023-09-11T14:29:48","slug":"working-in-support-made-me-a-better-developer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.infobip.com\/developers\/blog\/working-in-support-made-me-a-better-developer","title":{"rendered":"Working in\u00a0support made me a better developer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Timotej<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Support is hard. You can probably imagine that working long hours and handling often unreasonable requests is not a really fun thing to do. It’s easy to either burn out <\/strong>or get to the point where you simply want to get out and change the environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When this happened to me, I approached my manager to discuss the future of my career development. He gave me an answer I thought was cliche \u2013 “You’re an important part of the team!<\/em>“, “You’re not ready yet” and<\/em>  “There’s so much you have yet to learn here<\/em>“.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was not happy with that, to say the least, but I was not experienced enough to give up on Infobip just yet and try my luck elsewhere, so I decided to go with it and stick around for a bit longer. As it turned out, I made the right decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An unexpected internship<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

It was 2015, and I was still in college and looking for an internship. At that point, I liked development but wasn’t a very hard-working student. My project portfolio had more cobwebs than projects, which meant I didn’t have much to show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After many e-mails (some polite rejections, many more complete ignores), landing a development internship, or my first job, seemed nearly impossible. That’s when I received a call from Infobip HR about an interview for the Infobip Support Academy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was an interesting concept – 3 weeks of full-time (9 to 5) lectures in a remote village in Istria<\/strong>, focusing on the support department, the company, and the Telco industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The learning part was a bit overwhelming because of the sheer amount of information we were given, but this was expected because of the niche industry in which Infobip was operating. Who would’ve thought you could have a company that sells SMS to other companies?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jack of all trades<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Once the academy ended, I was offered a role of a Junior Support Engineer<\/strong>. The job title sounded kind of made up (you can check my LinkedIn profile<\/a> for more details<\/em>), but hey, which one doesn’t today?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the beginning, my day-to-day job was handling customer complaints, the most common one being “Why wasn’t my SMS delivered?<\/em>“. In retrospect, this seems pretty mundane, but it was a great foundation, and as time went by, my scope broadened.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mentors from the academy did a pretty good job with onboarding and explaining things, so I sort of knew what I was getting into, but it wasn’t until after about 6 months that the realization kicked in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wasn’t just a supporter<\/strong>, I was also:<\/p>\n\n\n\n