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Like any skill, some people will naturally be better than others, as an expression of Evolution. Those with an aptitude may find it beneficial, while others may
by stephengillie 10y ago
Like any skill, some people will naturally be better than others, as an expression of Evolution. Those with an aptitude may find it beneficial, while others may find it torturous. Sometimes articles like these feel like they're written by the latter.
Capitalism specialized labor where it was cheaper - mass production. This has since been automated. Subject matter experts have always been valuable, but
such diverse experience is hard to come by.
Moreso it's about having to wait for the technology. Waiting for the page to load. Waiting for the program to load. Waiting for the IDE to load. Waiting for 1 million FOR loops. And having something else to work on while you wait. Or just something to read, or watch. Maybe even for a personal project in an unrelated field, or just to be a more interesting person.
> A person who dominates a set of skills in both breadth and depth. In other words, this person possesses a lot of skills but excels in 1 exclusively.
Better to excel in all skills in the field than one exclusively. Even better to excel in a multitude of skills across numerous fields. But such diverse experience is, of course, hard to come by.
- tluyben2 10y agoYou can discuss the definition of multitasking: let us call it task switching until we can actually analyze properly what our brain is really doing. That said: I am very good at it; I get way more done than if I would focus. This is because of the nature of my work and the way I am (raised?). I can switch between a lot of things while keeping context including coding. I do notice this processs list has a maximum though: with 3-4 in depth project chats, 1-2 business chats, coding and browsing (the latter usually relating to all the former) I notice I am full. And I also notice that textual discourse is far less load than oral or oral+visual on task switching. If I do meetings in person or skype calls I basically get nothing done: it is slower and I cannot switch (a lot) because I miss things.
- stephengillie 10y agoThanks for the anecdote supporting my point.
- thesz 10y agoWhat things do you code?
- tluyben2 10y agoWeb, apps, embedded for work and for hobby apps, (toy) programming languages, games, retro assembly and Arduino hardware.
- thesz 10y agoI think you should see different number of tabs/windows open for different problems. There are things in you list that need communication with someone (web and apps - I'd wager they are underspecified). I think you do not need communication working on retro assembly. I am working on IDE supporting two dirty old languages, VHDL and Verilog. I need three things opened: Visual Studio, PDF of standard under question and orthodox file manager [1] in the tests directory. Having internalized a great deal of VHDL, I do not need it's PDF opened too often. So, there are two things for me to work with: run tests in VS, occasionally look at problematic source code with OFM. I also need a great deal of silence around me, otherwise I cannot concentrate deep enough to make good decisions and implementation of dirty old languages badly needs extremely good decisions. [1] http://softpanorama.org/OFM/index.shtml http://softpanorama.org/OFM/index.shtml
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]