You're right, I've seen the type of Orgs in SF where 15-18/hr is the base wage and it's not healthy (for the organization or the people who are working there).

For the most part, I've seen that the type of Orgs with those support wages are likely just trying to throw bodies at support volume. $16/hr for another human to answer X amount of tickets with a Y% satisfaction over Z amount of time. Their customer base is probably B2C or B2B with a large SMB base.

The model is bound to fail, particularly for communication reasons. The type of Org that employs this position is also likely to not have the product feedback loops that connect Support (reactive) with the Product/Eng teams (proactive...hopeuflly). This means product is not addressing bugs quickly or fixing usability issues that support agents frequently work around and explain to frustrated users. It also means they likely don't have adequate internal tooling to solve problems in real-time.

It's a form of technical debt that is REALLY hard to measure - I believe this is because there's too much focus on "standard" support metrics like NPS, FRT, # of touches... Yes these are important, but they are surface level stats for maintaining a basic, "good" support experience. Great support experiences require tighter integration with other teams with better data.

There's no one right answer, but likely a spectrum of options that need to be analyzed for which works best for you. - Have an international customer base? Maybe outsourcing could be a great option to keep costs low and cover more timezones - Not interested in outsourcing? Stay in the US and build a new office with talent outside the Bay Area (check out Lyft's Nashville office) - Do you absolutely need Support to be in HQ? Make the commitment to higher wages and staying lean and effective, not just as a Support team but as 1 company together.

I would also draw a distinction between B2B businesses with Customer Success needs and B2C businesses. Perhaps I should modify the blog post to reflect the assumption that this is basic question-answering support, rather than technical support.

You can get that in low-cost areas where there's more smart people than IT jobs. A nearby city has all kinds of technical people working at that or similarly low rates. They usually have accessed to a higher-paid person who does the real, heavy lifting when it's necessary. It's usually not, though. The cheap, young people learn more as they go with constant turnover but a steady number staying at any given time to train or help newest. Also, many companies start people aiming at better jobs in such support roles claiming it's the grind that "everyone goes through." ;)

If they don't want that, they can try to get one of the few, high-paying jobs in specialist work with almost no experience or take the risk of a move on whatever college or broke people have saved up. Most take the local job at least to start with.