from Hacker News

Don't ask someone to file a ticket

by nelsonfigueroa on 11/5/24, 5:58 PM with 1 comments

• by shortrounddev2 on 11/5/24, 6:07 PM

  If you allow people to go directly to you for support rather than the official support channels, they will simply learn that they can get what they want by shortcutting directly to the engineer. Maybe this is fine once, but they will continue to monopolize your time if you allow them to.

  Instead of writing the ticket for everybody who asks for your help, instead create a more realtime channel for reporting problems in a less formalized way, but in public. At work, all of our users are internal so we have a #troubleshooting channel. Whenever there are problems, they can go there and ask for help. We have a triage guy whose job it is to reply to these messages and create tickets as necessary but anybody can reply if they think they can help quickly enough. I try to have all conversations in public if I can, because it lets others jump in to help and also creates a record of the steps taken to solve the problem