Ethics of Capacity Management for Tier 3

It can be easy to hire a dedicated team of engineers to say they are the ones who should be looking at all of the problems, trying to solve them and only talking to developers when further assistance is needed. The question to ask here is: what would the mental health and morale of this team be if this is their sole job?

Tier 3 teams should always be composed of hybrid members who are not only performing Tier 3 duties, but also moving towards their next career goals.

Hybrid Roles

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Tier 3 is becoming a less common role in companies going forward as we move more towards developer accountability of new problems. It is important anyone in this role have an eye towards the future and what they want to be doing next in their career. For the members of your team: understand where they are going next, and work with them to gain the needed skills in those areas.

DevOps / SRE: engineers headed in this direction might be best suited for automation of problems, solving issues with infrastructure and its architecture, frameworks and deeper analysis into reliability issues.

Developer: Tier 3 who wish to do more coding can pair with developers on triaging items to learn more of the code base and technologies.

IT / Information Technology: any infrastructure and networking problems should be given to these engineers so they can pair up with IT folks in understanding and fixing the underlying issues causing these types of problems.

Time Management for Additional Training

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Admittedly Tier 3 can be a very rapid fire quick paced job as there are SLAs to meet for customer facing problems. It can feel as though there is never enough time to be working on these new skills. Try these things to carve out that needed time:

• Pairing with individuals from the specialties they are looking to train towards while they solve the issues.

• Document what they are learning and teaching others in knowledge share sessions.

• Block out time during their days (30 minutes to 1 hour) which is dedicated to additional training and learning.

• Company paid training outside of work on the dedicated specialties they are looking to focus on. Have engineers take classes together as the peer pressure will help them to stay on track and focus.