Jon Seeley wrote
| Tony Hussein wrote
Developers who spend too much time in support are developers who develop poor software. When I develop software, I make it easy to use, has good user usability, extensive help and so on. Even my error messages are verbose.
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Wow... are you God? Seriously dood get off your high horse and come down to the real world. The other posts here are accurate -- development is really only a small percentage of coding and the rest is maintenance (of which support plays a huge part). I make my software "easy to use" with "good usability" and "extensive help", etc., but I still spend at least half my time in my day job performing support. Why? Because people are generally inept when it comes to software.
I think what you're really trying to say is that developers who spend a lot of time resolving BUGS as their support are the ones who develop poor software. Yes, a program chock full of bugs can be considered poor software but a piece of software that has a lot of support calls does not necessarily make it bad.
Your mileage may vary. Your productivity vs mine may vary. Like I said.. I empower the user to help themselves. I create good help screens, tool tips, video tutorials, step by step turorials, getting started tutorials, install forums so users help each other.. etc. Hire minions to do trivial support issues. Do whatever you can so that support issues trickle down to very little. Don't be surprised that most developers just code and expect everyone to be able to use their software.
I downloaded thousands of software, most of them sucked in terms straight of out useful help. Make the thing easy to use. For example, if an option is disabled, put a tootip and explain why it's disabled. NOBODY is this world does this yet it's a very useful usability issue. In my emails, my sig has links to resources. I can go on and on giving tips on how to create great sofwtare. Most developers just want to code and ignore proper documentation because it's boring and time consuming. Most developers suck in designing good screen layouts, user interfaces. They need to be reading non programmiung books to expand their skills.
I don't create software used by millions of users and I don't have to deal with many support issues. If you work in a big company, let IT people take care of mundane support issues. I am also a fast typist and read qucikly. I can reply to tens of emails in a very short time. YMMV.
That's why Joel Spolsky hires developers who are 10 times as productive as the average developer but can to pay them 1.5 as much. Learn about time management skills. GTD skills. How can people like Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman have time to be sooo productive and peolpe wonder if they ever sleep. Enough said.
Maybe one day I will have my own horse!