My first dev job in 1991 required that I do at least 4h of phone support and 4h of walk-in support a week. Feeling user pain and answering the same dumb questions over and over made me a better developer and also led to a bunch of innovation:
- Mainframe Mail Woes? Develop SLIP/PopMail, give away on floppy
- Xmodem problems? Add hqx attachment support.
- Need access to Apple's techinfo CD? Get it via Gopher.
- Indepth howtos? Publish newsletters like you see below.
You don't have to answer the phone to help people today. You can engage externally on mailing lists, on G+ and more. Just remember to follow the guidelines in