It’s support’s job to focus on one thing at a time, meanwhile it’s a coder’s job to try and keep dozens of things in mind at a time. Context switching IS hard regardless, but like you said, one of the roles has it baked into the job description.
The crux here is that Programmer committed to X work done by the end of the week, and Support is effectively subtracting their time to accomplish X. This is a managerial problem, and not an easy one, because it’s not predictable.
My estimate, if you’re a programmer working 40h/wk on a live product, 8h of coding is a good week. Expect the majority of your time to be spent planning, reviewing, and supporting. If you’re sacrificing one of those to get more concentrated coding time, make sure that is communicated. YMMV.
In any case, if you don’t have managerial support to get engineer resources to fix problems, then it’s not support - it’s therapy. Sometimes that’s the best you can do.
The crux here is that Programmer committed to X work done by the end of the week, and Support is effectively subtracting their time to accomplish X. This is a managerial problem, and not an easy one, because it’s not predictable.
My estimate, if you’re a programmer working 40h/wk on a live product, 8h of coding is a good week. Expect the majority of your time to be spent planning, reviewing, and supporting. If you’re sacrificing one of those to get more concentrated coding time, make sure that is communicated. YMMV.
In any case, if you don’t have managerial support to get engineer resources to fix problems, then it’s not support - it’s therapy. Sometimes that’s the best you can do.