Limegarden.net Personal site of Wouter Lindenhof

I’m a developer!

One of the things that I would like to shout on various occasions is: "I'm a developer! Not first line support!"

The downside for working for a small company is that all the phone calls and emails almost always get directly to me and the majority is first line support work (assign rights, explaining the user how to do something and on some terrible occasions I sometimes have to do the user his work for him). Now I don't the social part of my work, but I have always taken pride in what I do and that is developing, writing code et cetera. And when I'm doing that I don't want people calling me or except me to deliver support directly especially when it is something trivial like assigning rights. There is a perfectly fine right management system in the application, so please, ask your supervisor to grant you more rights instead of calling me.

As I said I don't mind the social part of my work, I even enjoy it, but my main task is to deliver the next quality product as soon as possible and for that I need silence and absolute focus. I always like to think that developers are similar to god. Where god, according to the bible, created the universe and everything in it, I create software. Now imagine how god would be if after the second day (his schedule of seven days) someone came up to him and said: "Well look here god, see that water?" as he pointed to the blue oceans, "Yes, well here is the problem, I don't like that color. Could you make it blue?". Personally I would throw a lighting bolt like Zeus does and ask him (post-mortem) to just send me a mail next time.

I just wish that some people would just send me a mail instead of calling me when it's not important. Now I'm really starting to dislike phones, in fact I'm afraid that each call might be for me .

_{Image from: Peter Alfred Hess on flickr. The following rights apply on the image: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic}