Hello, if you're seeing this it means that a programmer who loves you doesn't love how you're contacting them with technical problems. Below are some of the reasons you shouldn't be contacting them directly but instead should enter a ticket into your ticketing system.

Division of labor

There are more than one programmer on our team and if everyone emails me directly it means that one of us could be overwhelmed while the rest of us are playing games and browsing the Internet. By having all the issues entered into our ticketing system we can more easily distribute the work load across everyone and see where things fall in the global priority list.

We might not see it

We get a lot of emails and phone calls every day and it's very possible that we'll miss it in between emails of other issues, pictures of people's new baby, and offers of free food (you do offer your programmers free food right?). By putting a ticket into the ticketing system we can more easily triage your problem and assign an appropriate priority level. If it's sitting in our email it's not going to get done or it's going to be prioritized lower because we're actually targeting number of open tickets. Also, if it's in one programmer's inbox it won't be handled by any of the other programmers who could be working on it.

Our Ticketing System

We've spent a lot on our ticketing system and it's important that we actually use it. By having a ticket entered into the system we can better understand who is doing what and if we need more programmers (of course we do but it's nice to be able to justify it).

We implore you to please please put in a ticket.

Note: The goal of this post is to provide a nice place to send people to when they send you emails (or call you) with issues that should be entered into a ticket system. I'm licensing this under creative commons so feel free to add this as a canned response.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.