"Every single engineer does support, on a bi-weekly rotation. Even the founders John and Patrick. We provide support over an IRC channel, email, and through Stripe answers."
This is one of the worst policies I've ever encountered. Companies that I've been involved with often do this at first, because at first, everyone SHOULD do support. After a few years, it's horribly unproductive. It creates a long term crisis culture that is reactive rather than proactive. Many days the entire development team will not be working on their individual development tasks and instead be ganging up on some perceived production crisis.
You need to introduce the concept of triage, not gang-support and no rotating support. Rotating support isn't just bad for your developers, it's a horrible way to support your customers. One week you have a problem that gets resolved quickly because the guy on support actually wrote the code that you are having a problem with. The next week, the same support call takes three days because the guy on support has no idea where that code even lives and has to learn the process. You might say 'oh, but that's how we cross train', to which I, as a customer, point out that those three days I had to wait for an answer were unacceptable, and you should have a better plan on cross training than 'wait til something breaks and throw completely clueless resources at it'.
This is one of the worst policies I've ever encountered. Companies that I've been involved with often do this at first, because at first, everyone SHOULD do support. After a few years, it's horribly unproductive. It creates a long term crisis culture that is reactive rather than proactive. Many days the entire development team will not be working on their individual development tasks and instead be ganging up on some perceived production crisis.
You need to introduce the concept of triage, not gang-support and no rotating support. Rotating support isn't just bad for your developers, it's a horrible way to support your customers. One week you have a problem that gets resolved quickly because the guy on support actually wrote the code that you are having a problem with. The next week, the same support call takes three days because the guy on support has no idea where that code even lives and has to learn the process. You might say 'oh, but that's how we cross train', to which I, as a customer, point out that those three days I had to wait for an answer were unacceptable, and you should have a better plan on cross training than 'wait til something breaks and throw completely clueless resources at it'.