Alerts, in the way they are available in meetings, are only to remind certain people about the event some time before it is to happen.
From this perspective - there's no point in adding alerts to Tickets. Instead - subscriptions or applets is what should be used there.
There are two possible scenarios:
1. You create a ticket and assign it to a certain employee (contact, with epesi user assigned). Next time that person visits dashboard and checks his/her Subscription applet, there'll be a notification that new ticket was created.
This is because each ticket that is created is automatically set to be subscribed by every person assigned to it.
2. You create a ticket without anyone being assigned to it, simply expecting one of the programmers to claim the ticket. If that's procedure you're using, make sure that each programmer has added tickets applet on their dashboard that displays tickets that are not assigned to anyone.
Ideally, you'd like to have that list empty most of the time - with every ticket you create claimed as soon as possible. But if there's a ticket no one is interested in - you can still edit it and assign it to one (or few) particular person. That person will be notified about being assigned to the ticket via subscription applet again.
Hope this help,
Arek