The Hidden Cost of Tier 1 Triage (And Why Hiring Won’t Fix It)
Every CFO has approved the same headcount request: “We need two more support engineers to handle the load.” Then six months later, the same request comes back. Here’s why hiring is the wrong lever — and what to do instead.
By Shawn Ennis•June 8, 2026•6 min read
Years ago, I sat in a board meeting where the head of operations asked for four more support engineers. The CFO had pre-approved two. The conversation lasted ninety minutes and ended with everyone agreeing to revisit in two quarters.
Two quarters later, the same person asked for four more engineers. The CFO approved one. And so on. This is the hiring trap, and I’ve watched it play out in every operator I’ve worked with.
Why the math never works
Let’s do the actual math. A fully loaded support engineer in telecom costs roughly $150,000–$200,000 per year. That includes salary, benefits, tools, training, and overhead. Call it $175K to be conservative.
Six new engineers cost you $1.05M annually. Plus recruiting fees ($50K each = $300K). Plus 30% productivity loss in year one as they ramp up ($315K). Plus the time your senior engineers spend mentoring them.
That’s $1.66M to add six engineers, of which maybe $700K will actually do productive work in year one.
And here’s the trap: if 70% of incoming tickets are triage, then 70% of what those six new engineers will do is triage. You spent $1.66M to hire more people to do administrative work.
The compounding problem
It gets worse. As your support organization grows, the triage tax grows with it. Bigger teams mean more handoffs. More handoffs mean more communication overhead. More communication overhead means more coordination work — which is also triage.
I’ve seen support orgs where the lead engineer spends 40% of their week in standup meetings, queue reviews, and “what’s blocking who” conversations. That’s triage at the management layer. None of it requires their technical expertise.
Why “Tier 1.5” doesn’t fix it
The next instinct after “hire more” is “tier them better.” Create a Tier 1.5 layer of less-senior engineers who handle the easy stuff. Free up your senior folks for the hard problems.
This sounds reasonable. It doesn’t work for three reasons:
- Career stagnation — Nobody wants to be a Tier 1.5 engineer for years. Your high-performers move on. Your low-performers stay. Quality drops over time.
- Routing tax — Now you need to triage tickets to decide who handles them. You’ve just added a triage step before the triage step. Net zero.
- Knowledge silos — Tier 1.5 engineers don’t see complex tickets, so they don’t learn. Tier 3 engineers don’t see simple tickets, so they don’t keep current. Both layers atrophy.
The actual lever: reduce demand, not increase supply
Every time we hire, we’re trying to increase supply (engineer-hours) to match demand (incoming tickets). But the math is wrong from the start. If demand is growing 30% a year and 70% of demand is triage, you can never hire fast enough.
The lever is on the demand side. Reduce the volume of tickets that require human time. Specifically:
- Deflect questions that have KB answers — A customer asking how to reset a password should never create a ticket. They should get an answer.
- Auto-close trivial questions — A ticket asking “how do I configure DHCP snooping?” with a clear KB answer should close itself.
- Complete intake automatically — A bug report should never reach a human without logs and reproduction steps already attached.
- Detect false alarms — An “outage” ticket where the monitoring shows green should be downgraded before an engineer is paged.
- Link duplicates — Two tickets on the same issue from the same company should never get worked twice.
What this looks like in dollars
Here’s what changes when you reduce demand instead of increasing supply:
- 40% Tickets deflected
- 15% Auto-closed
- 6 FTEs deferred
That’s not hypothetical. That’s what Frank — the AI-native Tier 1 agent I’ll be writing about in the next post — actually does in production today.
Instead of hiring six engineers at $1.66M to absorb more triage, you spend $50K to eliminate 55% of triage. Six engineers stay productive instead of getting buried. The CFO smiles. The board moves on to other problems.
The hiring trap is real, but it’s a trap because we keep pulling the wrong lever. The actual lever is reducing the demand for triage in the first place. That’s what automation is for.
In the next post, I’ll introduce Frank — the AI Tier 1 agent built specifically for telecom support — and walk through exactly how it works.
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About the author Shawn Ennis is the Founder & CEO of Rapax and Citus Technologies. With 25+ years in telecom operations, Shawn previously founded Assure1 (acquired by Oracle in 2021), holds 12 patents in telecom OSS/BSS, and hosts the Transformation Leaders Podcast. Connect on LinkedIn.
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