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Donald Knuth on email: "Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of t

Donald Knuth on email: "Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration." http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html

p4wnc6 10y ago
I've never heard of or been part of any organization (academic, non-profit, corporate, open source, etc.) that respects the basic need of developers for uninterruptible concentration. Note also that it is a particular word choice by Knuth: uninterruptible ... not uninterrupted. It harkens back to what Paul Graham wrote in both Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule and in Great Hackers -- even just having a mid-morning meeting on the calendar at all can prevent you from even attempting something hard at the start of your day, because you know the time is already interrupted. You need more than just happenstance of not being interrupted in a given time window. You need to know that you can't be interrupted, at least not unless it's a sky-is-falling kind of emergency (and you need to be able to trust that your colleagues know the difference). This is far and away the number one thing I need as a developer. I can write passable software that I'm not proud of if it's loud, violently anti-privacy, over-saturated with "collaboration" generally in some ultra-Agile open-plan nightmare setting. But the only times I've ever written software that I was proud of -- software that made huge, huge differences in the organizations I was part of -- was when I could finally find a loophole or something to create a situation when it was not possible to interrupt me with the usual bullshit. It amazes me that even still, status effects and incredibly poor understanding of where the value of software engineering resides leads to so many organizations that not only have interruption-is-the-norm open-plan disasters for offices and a million Agile meetings, but actually praise that garbage and hold it up as if it is an example of positive collaboration or effective engineering, despite it being the very antithesis of positive collaboration or effective engineering.
- GnarfGnarf 10y ago
  Very true. I hate being interrupted when I'm programming. I'm fortunate that I work alone (except when my wife comes into my office). I think programming is a Zen state of concentration. Either that, or the trance that programmers get in, is a type of hypnosis. Einstein's wife was forbidden from entering his study.
- jackmott 10y ago
  Oh, it isn't just me! My wife doesn't understand why i have a horrified look on my face whenever she opens my office door to look for something or pass through.
  - kbenson 10y ago
    I have a small office in a large closet upstairs that I use at night for work, my SO has a converted room downstairs as her office for her home business, so there's not a lot of cross traffic. Unfortunately, that means she IM's me quite a bit, which since it's even lower cost than walking 20-30 feet if she's already at a computer, I'm not entirely sure isn't worse. :/
    - p4wnc6 10y ago
      The number of people here who have both a private home office and a significant other depresses me.
      - notliketherest 10y ago
        Start saving your money.
        p4wnc6 10y ago
        I've been unemployed for a long time, despite working hard on a job search.
      - kbenson 10y ago
        Why else would you want a private home office? If you don't have a significant other, there's no need for a separate private space. In my case, I work from home two days a week, and I have children. I separate space is essential to get work done. It's a matter of having a private space that allows me to be home if needed, and save time for with my family, or not being productive enough to make it economical for the business to allow.
- gleenn 10y ago
  I agree with most of your sentiments. Unfortunately Agile is getting to be a pretty watered down term, but in theory a bunch of "Agile meetings" is very against the whole meaning of Agile. Agile suggests "standups" because you're supposed to actually stand at the meeting, get tired, and go back to 'getting shit down'.
  - douche 10y ago
    Question: if the point of an "Agile" standup is to share status and keep abreast of what is going on, why does it have to be done synchronously, at some always inconvenient time? Could everybody just send a chain email with their "this is what I did, this is what I'm doing, here's my roadblocks" rote answers. Takes two minutes to type up, thirty seconds to read, instead of having to go stand around and listen to people ramble on for half an hour, with yet another meeting slicing your time into ribbons.
    - matthewmacleod 10y ago
      I don't think it's an 'either-or' proposal though. You're contrasting 'here's my ideal asynchronous system' with 'horribly long rambling meeting at the worst time.' Here's my company's typical morning, for example: - Arrive at the office. Catch up on email, Basecamp, maybe do some code review, that kind of thing. - Have a stand-up meeting that lasts ~ 5 minutes, where developers and product people discuss what they are currently working on, any blockers, things that they anticipate will be needed from others etc. - If there are any issues that require further discussion, agree a time or channel to discuss them. It's great. Everybody is fully aware of everything that's going on, who's working on what, and any upcoming issues. It takes basically no time and serves as the launch point for the day's work. I appreciate that it doesn't always work – may be more of an issue for teams that are geographically distributed. But I also absolutely see it working really well in practice, so I'm suspicious of reasons for discarding the idea so easily.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - 10y ago
- johngalt 10y ago
  This is why many devs work odd or late hours. To avoid the commotion of an active office. Every office has at least one person who abuses the communication channels. E-mail -> Calls -> Texts -> At your desk inside of 30mins asking "Hey did you get my email about <trivial thing>?"
  - p4wnc6 10y ago
    The problem is you still have to show up and be an unproductive body in a chair during normal hours (especially if you work for a "progressive" company that talks a lot about how you don't need to keep regular hours) in order to get status points and be seen working. Then you have to stay late or work extra remotely to get the actual work done. So then you're just trading the productivity loss of an unhealthy, poor workspace for the productivity loss of unhealthy, poor hours, fatigue, and burnout risk.
- studentrob 10y ago
  > I've never heard of or been part of any organization (academic, non-profit, corporate, open source, etc.) that respects the basic need of developers for uninterruptible concentration. What do you think is the cause of that? Could it be because organizations aren't led by people who've experienced this problem themselves? Or do they just fail to prioritize it? Certainly there's a need for quiet periods. There's also a need for periods of communication. Could it be as simple as dividing the day further, where X hours are reserved for no-communication time? Or, providing a separate no-interruption room for those who want to use it? Or is it just a matter of building trust with colleagues, as you say? Perhaps voice these sentiments within your company. If nobody says anything, how will they know?
  - mjevans 10y ago
    A phone ringing is an interruption. Being expected to check your emails is an interruption. Someone entering or leaving past you is an interruption (this is why open plans and shared offices of any sort don't work well for tasks requiring open ended concentration). I don't actually believe that most people understand these issues, they don't understand the difference between the simple menial tasks, the small steps of implementing little details you've done a thousand times, and the large leap to actually keeping your mind full of a problem to solve.
    - studentrob 10y ago
      > I don't actually believe that most people understand these issues Right. What I'm asking is, why don't people and organizations understand these issues? There is a solution. I'm not sure we've identified all the details of the problem.
      - p4wnc6 10y ago
        I think many organizations only pay lip service to the idea of valuing productivity. The management and executive layers have all kinds of opportunities for weird forms of rent seeking based on status, often boiling down to viewing their subordinates as a collection of pretty office decorations or the human equivalent of trading cards. They talk a lot about productivity, but actually don't care to consume productivity out of you, so they don't want to pay any costs related to productivity. Staffing up for an acquihire event is a form of this. Designing a gaudy open-plan office with ridiculously opulent amenities yet no privacy is a form of it. Even the long-known fact that physically attractive people get hired, paid, and promoted more than equal-or-better performing, less attractive colleagues is a form of it.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I've certainly never seen a large organization that is consistently good about this. What I have seen, and valued enormously, are side-channel concessions to this need. One of the better formulations is having lots of small conferences rooms (or corner chairs, or anything isolated) that anyone can grab, with bonus points for doors. It's not a complete replacement for respecting flow, but it's a great way to let people with some urgent, complicated code task get a truly isolated setting to get things done. A lot of everyday code can be written passably in counterproductive settings, so even occasional, high-urgency access to good workspaces seems to be a huge step up.
  - p4wnc6 10y ago
    Actually, I think the bookable conference room or slightly private cubby/carrel "solution" is terrible and is a form of explicitly codifying disrespect for developer needs, which is itself a form of codifying the fact that business values more how you look on paper, your credential, and your appearance in the office than your actual labor product. It also leads to problems where you receive status penalties in the eyes of peers and managers if you are the weird guy who always books conference rooms. It also creates problems if you work in a situation where you cannot move your workspace. For example, I also consider it to be absolutely basic to have at least two 24-inch monitors, my ergonomic keyboard, ergonomic desk chair, and trackball. Why should I be forced to use poorer tools, like a crappy laptop screen, portable mouse, crappy conference room chair, etc., just to get quiet or private space. It's unreasonable to give up either adequate equipment or adequate privacy. In some jobs, I've also worked with large workstations and needed to be physically present at them, remotely logging in to them was not always feasible for some tasks. Finally, you end up running into booking conflicts all the time. And anyone with more seniority or status than you gets to kick you out (thus interrupting you hugely and ruining your plans) and anyone with a meeting gets to kick you out. And it also leads to artificial scarcity -- there's no need for coworkers presumably working towards the same goal to be competing with each other for the scarce resource of blocks of spacetime in conference rooms. It's outrageously cheap and easy for the company to provide all of them with adequately private conditions. Allowing a super generous work-from-home option is maybe a better solution -- as long as the company is also willing to pay for you to have equipment in your home office that is equally as ergonomic as what you get in the company office. But then you're contending with different kinds of status issues for not being physically present, some jobs still require a physical presence for various reasons, etc. The minimal acceptable solution is for companies to simply spend the money that it costs to provide healthy amounts of private working space and give employees more autonomy in structuring how they work with regards to private time. No half-assed compromise should be given even the slightest legitimacy as a workable alternative and no company should get any credit for anything other than the minimally healthy option of actually providing access to private conditions.
rrecuero 10y ago
+ 1 on this. It reminds me to the two systems that Daniel Kahneman talks about in his book: Thinking Fast and Slow. The human brain is only good at multitasking simple things. You can only perform one complex task at a time.
- studentrob 10y ago
  > You can only perform one complex task at a time That may be, but is email the culprit? I think it depends on what your emails contain. They can be stressful, challenging problems, or simple ones. For me, the longer I am at an organization, the less stressful communications become, assuming I've built good relationships. It's the first period that's tough to get through. You're getting to know both the people and the business, software architecture, or whatever the job entails. During that time, we often blame email because we get email from strangers. Make the strangers friends, and email becomes a lot easier.
  - chme 10y ago
    > They can be stressful, challenging problems, or simple ones. For me, the longer I am at an organization, the less stressful communications become, assuming I've built good relationships. I like to communicate with customers always short and to the point via emails, because I value my and their time. But with friends, I like to write more interesting and funny emails, that takes me more time. But because they are my friends I am willing to spend it. Writing those mails to friends takes more concentration and allows more reflection about them and myself, in order to express myself correctly and in a nice way. I would see the culprit more in todays Twitter culture, where people are force to write short messages without much reflection. Maybe even the onscreen keyboard in most smartphones are another reason. Nobody wants to write more expressive messages with them.
    - studentrob 10y ago
      > But with friends, I like to write more interesting and funny emails, that takes me more time That's interesting that you find being funny more time consuming. Some people would say work/business/math is harder than humor. You've proven my solution wrong. I can't think of anything more to say other than "some emails are easy, some aren't". And then, there will still probably be someone who says all their emails are a challenge, like Don Knuth, lol
sbardle 10y ago
When I was studying in the early 2000s, email wasn't a problem. I went to check my email at the computer centre on campus twice, maybe three times a day. With smartphones, I probably check my email 40 times a day. It is very distracting, but you have to keep on top of it for work. I'm sure it gets in the way of more meaningful thinking and has ruined my attention span.
- puranjay 10y ago
  Switch off email notifications Cut down my stress BIG time
- ChrisLTD 10y ago
  If your job is to answer email, that seems reasonable. But if you're a programmer, I can't see how you'd need to check your email more than once an hour, or maybe half hour. Otherwise you'll never actually be programming.
  - kwhitefoot 10y ago
    Once a day should be enough. Anyone who needs you more urgently than that can phone or perhaps even drop by.
  - Cthulhu_ 10y ago
    If you're a programmer, your primary task isn't churning out code; at least for me, an important part is to first understand the customer or user's wishes, and second to make sure my colleagues are up to speed and aren't blocked by, for example, missing some knowledge that I possess. Mind you, most of that is done in person, not via e-mail; the Knuth comment (which I'm probably extending to your statement) seems to be about any kind of external influence, including emails, PRs, slack messages, people, or whatever. That's fine to isolate yourself from that if you define your own problem and solution for it and work alone, but really, how many people do that? That's a thing reserved for idk, university researchers and people with their own projects.

p4wnc6 10y ago

I've never heard of or been part of any organization (academic, non-profit, corporate, open source, etc.) that respects the basic need of developers for uninterruptible concentration. Note also that it is a particular word choice by Knuth: uninterruptible ... not uninterrupted. It harkens back to what Paul Graham wrote in both Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule and in Great Hackers -- even just having a mid-morning meeting on the calendar at all can prevent you from even attempting something hard at the start of your day, because you know the time is already interrupted. You need more than just happenstance of not being interrupted in a given time window. You need to know that you can't be interrupted, at least not unless it's a sky-is-falling kind of emergency (and you need to be able to trust that your colleagues know the difference). This is far and away the number one thing I need as a developer. I can write passable software that I'm not proud of if it's loud, violently anti-privacy, over-saturated with "collaboration" generally in some ultra-Agile open-plan nightmare setting. But the only times I've ever written software that I was proud of -- software that made huge, huge differences in the organizations I was part of -- was when I could finally find a loophole or something to create a situation when it was not possible to interrupt me with the usual bullshit. It amazes me that even still, status effects and incredibly poor understanding of where the value of software engineering resides leads to so many organizations that not only have interruption-is-the-norm open-plan disasters for offices and a million Agile meetings, but actually praise that garbage and hold it up as if it is an example of positive collaboration or effective engineering, despite it being the very antithesis of positive collaboration or effective engineering.

GnarfGnarf 10y ago
Very true. I hate being interrupted when I'm programming. I'm fortunate that I work alone (except when my wife comes into my office). I think programming is a Zen state of concentration. Either that, or the trance that programmers get in, is a type of hypnosis. Einstein's wife was forbidden from entering his study.
jackmott 10y ago
Oh, it isn't just me! My wife doesn't understand why i have a horrified look on my face whenever she opens my office door to look for something or pass through.
- kbenson 10y ago
  I have a small office in a large closet upstairs that I use at night for work, my SO has a converted room downstairs as her office for her home business, so there's not a lot of cross traffic. Unfortunately, that means she IM's me quite a bit, which since it's even lower cost than walking 20-30 feet if she's already at a computer, I'm not entirely sure isn't worse. :/
  - p4wnc6 10y ago
    The number of people here who have both a private home office and a significant other depresses me.
    - notliketherest 10y ago
      Start saving your money.
      - p4wnc6 10y ago
        I've been unemployed for a long time, despite working hard on a job search.
    - kbenson 10y ago
      Why else would you want a private home office? If you don't have a significant other, there's no need for a separate private space. In my case, I work from home two days a week, and I have children. I separate space is essential to get work done. It's a matter of having a private space that allows me to be home if needed, and save time for with my family, or not being productive enough to make it economical for the business to allow.
gleenn 10y ago
I agree with most of your sentiments. Unfortunately Agile is getting to be a pretty watered down term, but in theory a bunch of "Agile meetings" is very against the whole meaning of Agile. Agile suggests "standups" because you're supposed to actually stand at the meeting, get tired, and go back to 'getting shit down'.
- douche 10y ago
  Question: if the point of an "Agile" standup is to share status and keep abreast of what is going on, why does it have to be done synchronously, at some always inconvenient time? Could everybody just send a chain email with their "this is what I did, this is what I'm doing, here's my roadblocks" rote answers. Takes two minutes to type up, thirty seconds to read, instead of having to go stand around and listen to people ramble on for half an hour, with yet another meeting slicing your time into ribbons.
  - matthewmacleod 10y ago
    I don't think it's an 'either-or' proposal though. You're contrasting 'here's my ideal asynchronous system' with 'horribly long rambling meeting at the worst time.' Here's my company's typical morning, for example: - Arrive at the office. Catch up on email, Basecamp, maybe do some code review, that kind of thing. - Have a stand-up meeting that lasts ~ 5 minutes, where developers and product people discuss what they are currently working on, any blockers, things that they anticipate will be needed from others etc. - If there are any issues that require further discussion, agree a time or channel to discuss them. It's great. Everybody is fully aware of everything that's going on, who's working on what, and any upcoming issues. It takes basically no time and serves as the launch point for the day's work. I appreciate that it doesn't always work – may be more of an issue for teams that are geographically distributed. But I also absolutely see it working really well in practice, so I'm suspicious of reasons for discarding the idea so easily.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - 10y ago
johngalt 10y ago
This is why many devs work odd or late hours. To avoid the commotion of an active office. Every office has at least one person who abuses the communication channels. E-mail -> Calls -> Texts -> At your desk inside of 30mins asking "Hey did you get my email about <trivial thing>?"
- p4wnc6 10y ago
  The problem is you still have to show up and be an unproductive body in a chair during normal hours (especially if you work for a "progressive" company that talks a lot about how you don't need to keep regular hours) in order to get status points and be seen working. Then you have to stay late or work extra remotely to get the actual work done. So then you're just trading the productivity loss of an unhealthy, poor workspace for the productivity loss of unhealthy, poor hours, fatigue, and burnout risk.
studentrob 10y ago
> I've never heard of or been part of any organization (academic, non-profit, corporate, open source, etc.) that respects the basic need of developers for uninterruptible concentration. What do you think is the cause of that? Could it be because organizations aren't led by people who've experienced this problem themselves? Or do they just fail to prioritize it? Certainly there's a need for quiet periods. There's also a need for periods of communication. Could it be as simple as dividing the day further, where X hours are reserved for no-communication time? Or, providing a separate no-interruption room for those who want to use it? Or is it just a matter of building trust with colleagues, as you say? Perhaps voice these sentiments within your company. If nobody says anything, how will they know?
- mjevans 10y ago
  A phone ringing is an interruption. Being expected to check your emails is an interruption. Someone entering or leaving past you is an interruption (this is why open plans and shared offices of any sort don't work well for tasks requiring open ended concentration). I don't actually believe that most people understand these issues, they don't understand the difference between the simple menial tasks, the small steps of implementing little details you've done a thousand times, and the large leap to actually keeping your mind full of a problem to solve.
  - studentrob 10y ago
    > I don't actually believe that most people understand these issues Right. What I'm asking is, why don't people and organizations understand these issues? There is a solution. I'm not sure we've identified all the details of the problem.
    - p4wnc6 10y ago
      I think many organizations only pay lip service to the idea of valuing productivity. The management and executive layers have all kinds of opportunities for weird forms of rent seeking based on status, often boiling down to viewing their subordinates as a collection of pretty office decorations or the human equivalent of trading cards. They talk a lot about productivity, but actually don't care to consume productivity out of you, so they don't want to pay any costs related to productivity. Staffing up for an acquihire event is a form of this. Designing a gaudy open-plan office with ridiculously opulent amenities yet no privacy is a form of it. Even the long-known fact that physically attractive people get hired, paid, and promoted more than equal-or-better performing, less attractive colleagues is a form of it.
Bartweiss 10y ago
I've certainly never seen a large organization that is consistently good about this. What I have seen, and valued enormously, are side-channel concessions to this need. One of the better formulations is having lots of small conferences rooms (or corner chairs, or anything isolated) that anyone can grab, with bonus points for doors. It's not a complete replacement for respecting flow, but it's a great way to let people with some urgent, complicated code task get a truly isolated setting to get things done. A lot of everyday code can be written passably in counterproductive settings, so even occasional, high-urgency access to good workspaces seems to be a huge step up.
- p4wnc6 10y ago
  Actually, I think the bookable conference room or slightly private cubby/carrel "solution" is terrible and is a form of explicitly codifying disrespect for developer needs, which is itself a form of codifying the fact that business values more how you look on paper, your credential, and your appearance in the office than your actual labor product. It also leads to problems where you receive status penalties in the eyes of peers and managers if you are the weird guy who always books conference rooms. It also creates problems if you work in a situation where you cannot move your workspace. For example, I also consider it to be absolutely basic to have at least two 24-inch monitors, my ergonomic keyboard, ergonomic desk chair, and trackball. Why should I be forced to use poorer tools, like a crappy laptop screen, portable mouse, crappy conference room chair, etc., just to get quiet or private space. It's unreasonable to give up either adequate equipment or adequate privacy. In some jobs, I've also worked with large workstations and needed to be physically present at them, remotely logging in to them was not always feasible for some tasks. Finally, you end up running into booking conflicts all the time. And anyone with more seniority or status than you gets to kick you out (thus interrupting you hugely and ruining your plans) and anyone with a meeting gets to kick you out. And it also leads to artificial scarcity -- there's no need for coworkers presumably working towards the same goal to be competing with each other for the scarce resource of blocks of spacetime in conference rooms. It's outrageously cheap and easy for the company to provide all of them with adequately private conditions. Allowing a super generous work-from-home option is maybe a better solution -- as long as the company is also willing to pay for you to have equipment in your home office that is equally as ergonomic as what you get in the company office. But then you're contending with different kinds of status issues for not being physically present, some jobs still require a physical presence for various reasons, etc. The minimal acceptable solution is for companies to simply spend the money that it costs to provide healthy amounts of private working space and give employees more autonomy in structuring how they work with regards to private time. No half-assed compromise should be given even the slightest legitimacy as a workable alternative and no company should get any credit for anything other than the minimally healthy option of actually providing access to private conditions.

rrecuero 10y ago

+ 1 on this. It reminds me to the two systems that Daniel Kahneman talks about in his book: Thinking Fast and Slow. The human brain is only good at multitasking simple things. You can only perform one complex task at a time.

studentrob 10y ago
> You can only perform one complex task at a time That may be, but is email the culprit? I think it depends on what your emails contain. They can be stressful, challenging problems, or simple ones. For me, the longer I am at an organization, the less stressful communications become, assuming I've built good relationships. It's the first period that's tough to get through. You're getting to know both the people and the business, software architecture, or whatever the job entails. During that time, we often blame email because we get email from strangers. Make the strangers friends, and email becomes a lot easier.
- chme 10y ago
  > They can be stressful, challenging problems, or simple ones. For me, the longer I am at an organization, the less stressful communications become, assuming I've built good relationships. I like to communicate with customers always short and to the point via emails, because I value my and their time. But with friends, I like to write more interesting and funny emails, that takes me more time. But because they are my friends I am willing to spend it. Writing those mails to friends takes more concentration and allows more reflection about them and myself, in order to express myself correctly and in a nice way. I would see the culprit more in todays Twitter culture, where people are force to write short messages without much reflection. Maybe even the onscreen keyboard in most smartphones are another reason. Nobody wants to write more expressive messages with them.
  - studentrob 10y ago
    > But with friends, I like to write more interesting and funny emails, that takes me more time That's interesting that you find being funny more time consuming. Some people would say work/business/math is harder than humor. You've proven my solution wrong. I can't think of anything more to say other than "some emails are easy, some aren't". And then, there will still probably be someone who says all their emails are a challenge, like Don Knuth, lol

sbardle 10y ago

When I was studying in the early 2000s, email wasn't a problem. I went to check my email at the computer centre on campus twice, maybe three times a day. With smartphones, I probably check my email 40 times a day. It is very distracting, but you have to keep on top of it for work. I'm sure it gets in the way of more meaningful thinking and has ruined my attention span.

puranjay 10y ago
Switch off email notifications Cut down my stress BIG time
ChrisLTD 10y ago
If your job is to answer email, that seems reasonable. But if you're a programmer, I can't see how you'd need to check your email more than once an hour, or maybe half hour. Otherwise you'll never actually be programming.
- kwhitefoot 10y ago
  Once a day should be enough. Anyone who needs you more urgently than that can phone or perhaps even drop by.
- Cthulhu_ 10y ago
  If you're a programmer, your primary task isn't churning out code; at least for me, an important part is to first understand the customer or user's wishes, and second to make sure my colleagues are up to speed and aren't blocked by, for example, missing some knowledge that I possess. Mind you, most of that is done in person, not via e-mail; the Knuth comment (which I'm probably extending to your statement) seems to be about any kind of external influence, including emails, PRs, slack messages, people, or whatever. That's fine to isolate yourself from that if you define your own problem and solution for it and work alone, but really, how many people do that? That's a thing reserved for idk, university researchers and people with their own projects.