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    I think making support for a project in development isn't bad. Talking with client is good. But if you work on 7 projects with 7 different deadlines and urgency... After a while it's seriously not really good. it kind of suck very badly. Commented Jan 12, 2011 at 1:29
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    I have also seen shops where developers who miss their deadlines just shrug and say "I had a lot of support time this week. No bugs, the users just needed hand holding." Typically there was no way to tell whether that was happening or the developer was just slow that week. As long as you control for that, I'm in favour of developers supporting their code, but not as front-line phone answering support. Commented Jan 12, 2011 at 1:43
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    There should be a front-line support layer to catch the RTFM questions, leaving only the questions with useful technical content/feedback for the developers to field. Commented Jan 12, 2011 at 4:05
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    @Christopher: Self-describing systems are a nice ideal to strive for, but difficult to achieve in practice. There are many people factors and stakeholder pressures that conspire against doing them well, and there will always be users that "don't get it." Commented Jan 14, 2011 at 0:18
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    An excellent answer. My company finds a nice middle ground - each dev spends one day on 3rd line tech support, rotating through the team. If you're on tech you can be interrupted within reason, but everyone else is immune unless something major crops up. During our days on tech, we tend to do lighter bug fix, admin stuff etc to avoid being in something complex when interrupted... So basically we all get a day to do the crap developers hate doing but have to do, but know that we get occasional support calls to break it up. More importantly, it's great knowing you're immune the rest of the time! Commented Oct 24, 2014 at 1:19