This just looks like applying the boy scouts rule to me. She had a reason to update an old library to modern standards, and she did it. That's great! Let's get rid of that tech debt.
We (<20p SaaS) use Intercom with great success. It's hooked up to our support email as well, so users who prefer email can use that, while giving us a central mailbox for it. Most customers really appreciate quick, low barrier chat. We all take turns as operator (we call it Empathy Day).
As you handle support for a while, certain recurring topics appear. We identify these and either use canned responses (macros), or (preferably) improve our product to prevent these questions in the first place. We also have a bot for some basic things like pointing at the docs for certain topics.
We sometimes are asked to jump on a call, but only do that for highly technical support requests and enterprise customers. Since we have customers worldwide and a globally distributed team, synchronous communication is tricky anyway.
Talk to your manager about it. If they're a decent human being they should be able to make it work for you. If not, then you're probably better off somewhere else (also because a manager should respect their people's wellbeing, if they don't then you shouldn't work for them).
Chromatic | Software Engineer | Remote (US or EU timezone) | Full time
We maintain Storybook, the most popular open source tool for developing UI components. To fuel our open source work we build Chromatic, a cloud service for Storybook that automates workflows for UI feedback, visual regression testing and documentation.
We're looking to grow our engineering team. We run a Next.js webapp, an Express/Mongo/GraphQL backend and a Node.js job queue that spins up thousands of headless browsers on AWS Lambda. We also run a CDN for hosted Storybooks on top of CloudFront, provide a CLI and integrate with a bunch of git providers. Work is spread across Storybook and Chromatic.
Why wouldn't they be able to offer stock options to contractors? I'm an EU based contractor for a US (only) based company. I have stock options, as do other contractors and employees. No problem at all, just a bit of paperwork.
Hey, someone from the Storybook team here. We'd love to get actionable feedback about Storybook for documentation. Why is it so much worse that what you're used to? Can you be specific?
For us, FOSS is the start of the funnel for our SaaS. Somewhat in-between the "hosted version" and the "premium features" buckets, but in separate projects.
We employ the two core maintainers of Storybook (one of the most popular FOSS JavaScript projects) who work on it full-time. The rest of us build Chromatic, a SaaS that offers features on top of Storybook, and we occasionally work on Storybook too.
Storybook is a tool for local development, so if a feature makes sense there, we add it to Storybook. If it needs some cloud connection/storage (e.g. for team collaboration), it becomes a Chromatic feature. We have a shared roadmap that doesn't prioritize one over the other, and Storybook has it's own steering committee.
Chromatic.com / Storybook (fully remote, US timezone)
We've just launched a major update to our product and are looking for an experienced DevOps / Software Engineer with Node.js expertise. Our stack is React, Next.js on Express with GraphQL, Mongo, Redis running on Heroku, AWS S3 & Lamdba.
We build tools to help frontend developers build, test and share UI components. We do this by maintaining Storybook and building Chromatic. We're a small distributed team with a lot of experience in open source and UI engineering.