<story><title>Programmer interrupted: The cost of interruption and context switching (2022)</title><url>https://contextkeeper.io/blog/the-real-cost-of-an-interruption-and-context-switching/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wpietri</author><text>&amp;gt; no slack, no zooms, no one tapping your shoulder, no conversations about the weekend distracting you on the periphery&lt;p&gt;My teen jobs were in stores, restaurants, and manufacturing. In those contexts, everybody understands that when you&amp;#x27;re working, you&amp;#x27;re actually working. Even managers understand that even small discussions need to be fit neatly into the flow of the work, and actual meetings require careful planning to not disrupt operations. The space too was carefully designed to maximize effectiveness.&lt;p&gt;So American office culture seems absolutely wild to me. Especially in software, where we are expected to fit our actual work into a sort of calendar Tetris. Oh, a grand poobah would like another status meeting, plus a lot of time spent coming up with estimates that are not going to change anybody&amp;#x27;s behavior in the slightest? Gosh, do you think that might have an effect on the completion date? And sure, why don&amp;#x27;t you put me next to the salespeople making calls all day. I&amp;#x27;m not making any progress anyhow.&lt;p&gt;The only conclusion I can come to is that in a lot of places, productivity is much lower on the list of observed priorities than stated priorities.</text></item><item><author>asdff</author><text>If I know I am going to have my day broken into sub 1hr chunks thanks to meetings and such, I pretty much write off the day entirely. It takes time to get into the flow state, some studies cite over 20 minutes, and once you are in it you want to stay in it for like four hours. No emails to follow up with, no slack, no zooms, no one tapping your shoulder, no conversations about the weekend distracting you on the periphery, just you and your task at hand.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s pretty ironic, because this is how a lot of people study in the library at college,show up and stay all night grinding in the flow state with your phone shut off. Yet when you graduate to the work place, you seldom have the opportunity to work like how you&amp;#x27;ve been training to work for all your advanced schooling ever again.&lt;p&gt;With respect to the article and maintaining context while coding for different projects, I find having a tmux session for each individual project super helpful.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>klibertp</author><text>And then you&amp;#x27;re finally fed up with all this and go full remote, if the company allows it. Congrats, now you lost access to 80% of what is going on and fell out of the loop for anything important, and you&amp;#x27;re now guaranteed to lose in any power struggle that could happen.&lt;p&gt;In one of the companies I worked for, it was comfortable in the beginning - there were offices, 2-3 programmers in each, not too crowded, but close enough to see when the coworkers were focusing on something and when it would be ok to do a quick &amp;quot;hey, do you know how to...&amp;quot;. The company grew, moved to a bigger building, rooms became larger, now there were 4-5 programmers in each. It was still OK then. Calls and longer talks were done in separate rooms, and a quick chat with the guy next to you could be done like you&amp;#x27;d do it in a cinema - quietly.&lt;p&gt;When I was leaving the company years later, it was after it moved to a place with one huge open space and a set of rooms that you needed to book days in advance to use. Some of them were permanently occupied by &amp;quot;important&amp;quot; people even though they had their own offices. That resulted in everybody and they&amp;#x27;re cat making calls and meetings and sometimes even plannings right in the middle of the open space or in the kitchen. Finally, a &amp;quot;hot desk&amp;quot; system was implemented, and you had to &lt;i&gt;book your desk days in advance&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;I asked the CTO who I&amp;#x27;ve know for quite some time - WTF man? He said that he likes it, because he can see at a glance that everybody is working. I was reminded of storehouses with special elevated rooms that had a view on all that happens on the floor. Saying that I got disillusioned doesn&amp;#x27;t even begin to describe what I&amp;#x27;ve felt then...</text></comment>
<story><title>Programmer interrupted: The cost of interruption and context switching (2022)</title><url>https://contextkeeper.io/blog/the-real-cost-of-an-interruption-and-context-switching/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wpietri</author><text>&amp;gt; no slack, no zooms, no one tapping your shoulder, no conversations about the weekend distracting you on the periphery&lt;p&gt;My teen jobs were in stores, restaurants, and manufacturing. In those contexts, everybody understands that when you&amp;#x27;re working, you&amp;#x27;re actually working. Even managers understand that even small discussions need to be fit neatly into the flow of the work, and actual meetings require careful planning to not disrupt operations. The space too was carefully designed to maximize effectiveness.&lt;p&gt;So American office culture seems absolutely wild to me. Especially in software, where we are expected to fit our actual work into a sort of calendar Tetris. Oh, a grand poobah would like another status meeting, plus a lot of time spent coming up with estimates that are not going to change anybody&amp;#x27;s behavior in the slightest? Gosh, do you think that might have an effect on the completion date? And sure, why don&amp;#x27;t you put me next to the salespeople making calls all day. I&amp;#x27;m not making any progress anyhow.&lt;p&gt;The only conclusion I can come to is that in a lot of places, productivity is much lower on the list of observed priorities than stated priorities.</text></item><item><author>asdff</author><text>If I know I am going to have my day broken into sub 1hr chunks thanks to meetings and such, I pretty much write off the day entirely. It takes time to get into the flow state, some studies cite over 20 minutes, and once you are in it you want to stay in it for like four hours. No emails to follow up with, no slack, no zooms, no one tapping your shoulder, no conversations about the weekend distracting you on the periphery, just you and your task at hand.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s pretty ironic, because this is how a lot of people study in the library at college,show up and stay all night grinding in the flow state with your phone shut off. Yet when you graduate to the work place, you seldom have the opportunity to work like how you&amp;#x27;ve been training to work for all your advanced schooling ever again.&lt;p&gt;With respect to the article and maintaining context while coding for different projects, I find having a tmux session for each individual project super helpful.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ashton314</author><text>&amp;gt; And sure, why don&amp;#x27;t you put me next to the salespeople making calls all day.&lt;p&gt;I’ve worked next to people with zero volume control and who like to take calls on speakerphone.&lt;p&gt;I decided there and then that cubicles has material benefits over open offices.</text></comment>