Comment by Devilboy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Devilboy | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a software engineer in a software-centered B2B company. They all use the back-end system, and our clients use the front-end.

During the day I may solve up to a dozen small problems, which might be a small customization of the font-end for a big client, debugging a random bug or two on the spot, querying the database for some new sales stat, and so on. If something comes in to our bug-tracker that I think I can resolve within 30 minutes, I do it immediately. The rest of the time I work on the long term (no deadline) projects to improve the system as a whole. Sure those projects suffer a bit but our clients are always very impressed when we can fix his bug, make his customisation change or implement his new report, literally just minutes after he requested it.

Interesting. That is a common trend I have noticed - there is some class of dev whose job becomes serving the internal business on an adhoc basis

your manager can either stop it by charging your time back to the requestor ( I would suggest you track the requests -send emails sayi g Bob you wanted a new sales report, it's third on list and expect it 9am)

or he can explicitly Market you to the business - what I previously did. And it is a powerful weapon for your manager. The higher ups feel well treated and the department gets all it's interrupts funnelled thru one person, who in your case seems good at it and happy to do it

but I strongly suggest you track the work, and push the marketing value of what you do.

This is not a 'problem' I'm trying to solve. I do this because I truly believe this IS the best value I can add to the company as a whole.

Thanks! Oddly, I'd probably prefer your job in an open office to some of the arrangements I've seen where people have offices--at least you have direct indications that you're making a direct impact to the company and customers, whereas sometimes developer jobs are so far removed from the end customer that they might as well not even be there.

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