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Ask HN: How do you stop people from running to developers for every question?

1 points by neilkelty ↗ HN
It's extremely distracting for developers to be sidetracked by random, non-urgent customer or business problems all day. Do you use a ticketing system, have a rotating "bother this guy" schedule, create some sort of "I'm busy" signal that the office respects, or something else?

3 comments

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manuscreationis
It will always be a problem, especially in smaller startups.

The problem isn't that people don't respect a developers time (ok, some don't), but rather that when you lack proper IT infrastructure, the devs are the first likely choice to be pinged for any kind of computer related issue.

If your devs are constantly getting "My printer doesn't work" / "Why can't I get on the wifi?" style problems, you need to get a systems/network administrator in house to run interference on those types of issues.

If it's other business concerns, thats a tougher one. Sometimes they'll need to be pulled aside for a specific task, or to weigh in on certain decisions from the perspective of the team building and maintaining the code base, but ultimately it's the person in charge of the team who needs to make sure his team members aren't being too distracted.

shyn3
It is incredibly hard to convince an older organization and its users to use the help desk ticketing system for all inquiries. Even setting up an email like hd@company.com doesn't work all the time.

Commenting to see the kinds of ideas that this thread will come up with.