The last two weeks of support from a well known storage provider has been abysmal. This prompted me to go through our reports for the last year. Across all of them, all support has been awful, as in catastrophically bad.

I can't think of a single product or service vendor that didn't cause an outage for us in the last year, bad.

These aren't just the low end contracts or low end vendors. This is the major names. Everything about them has been decoupled from the feedback loops which allowed the support organizations to thrive. Every single group now has anonymized support teams where we rarely see the same person twice for subject matter where staff is not easy to replace. Most of our tickets bounce through multiple queues and we are regularly lied to about the status of work or who is doing the work, or if any work was actually being done. The true subject matter experts are often one or two people, if the org is lucky to have even those staff left.

Everything about the support management process has become noticeably worse. This adds pressure on small teams like mine, where we are already stretched and cannot continue to compensate for the lack of engineering level support for complicated products that no longer have accurate, complete or updated product or service documentation.

No wonder people are either leaving IT, or refusing to major in IT related studies. This field is being killed off.