Becoming and Being an ASE

Information about the ASE role for new and potential ASEs

Becoming and Being an ASE

Basic job information

The first thing to do if you’re contemplating a move to an ASE role is to take a look at two topics on the Support Engineer job family page in the Handbook:

  1. The ASE role
  2. What is it like to be an ASE (video)

You might also find it helpful to review the [ASE performance factor worksheet template](LINK COMING SOON)

Onboarding tasks for new ASEs

  1. Ask an existing ASE or ASE Manager to:
    1. invite you to the #support_assigned-support-eng Slack channel
    2. invite you to both of the recurring ASE Team meetings
  2. Submit an MR to update your personal yaml file in the Support Team project:

    1. Look for the focuses: header

    2. Add a new focus after your existing ones:

      - name: ASE
  percentage: [percent]
  zendesk: [instance]
  organizations:
  - id: [org_a ID]
    percentage: [org_b percentage]
  - id: [org_b ID]
    percentage: [org_b percentage]
      1. where [percent] is 25 times the number of accounts you have - if you have 2 accounts, put 50
      2. where [instance] is either “global” or “us_gov”, according to whether your ASE accounts work with Global or US Gov Support
      3. where [org_a ID] is the organization ID, in Zendesk, for your first account (Handbook topic for finding the correct ID), [org_b ID] is the same for your second account, and so on
      4. where [org_a percentage] is the percentage of your ASE time that will be spent on org_a, [org_b percentage] is the same thing for your second account, and the sum of the org percentages is 100
  3. Change your job title in Zoom
  4. Update your signature in Zendesk to indicate that you are an ASE

«« COMING SOON »»

  • Balancing between ASE and Global
    • on-call rotation
    • ticket queue
    • pairings and help sessions
  • Learn about how to work with your account (manager 1:1s for now, presentation eventually)
    • managing customer expectations
    • stepping out of the SE box - change your way of thinking about what you should or shouldn’t do
    • prioritize and re-prioritize all the time
    • only attend account meetings in which you will learn or contribute
    • get to know the people as people
      • do lots of Zooms with them and chat as you work a ticket
    • get to know what they’re doing with GitLab and why
  • Link to the customer onboarding page (customer-onboarding.html)
  • Tips from ASEs
Last modified February 4, 2025: Change ref links to regular links (64832a18)
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