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Were you sitting in on my meetings last week? :). This has been a hot topic on my team the last few days. We are trying some things out. 1. DDDD (do not distu
by sheraz 10y ago
Were you sitting in on my meetings last week? :). This has been a hot topic on my team the last few days.
We are trying some things out.
1. DDDD (do not disturb developer days) twice a week. The general rule is that no one outside the team is supposed to interrupt unless production is on fire. A good idea in principle but it does not seem to be working too well. It is a lot to ask a 100 person company to remember which days they are allowed to interrupt.
2. A developer room with desks and monitors and a door. The idea here is that if you really need uninterrupted focus time the you can relocate you laptop in there and still have a full dev station ready to go. Room for two for pair programming. We will try this in the new year. Outcome is unknown.
3. Yeah, headphones, but that is like putting a screen door on a submarine.
My hypothesis is that a lot of interruptions are simply questions and answers that should live in a Knowledgebase. Get the knowledge in there and then make it searchable. Support dialog like stack overflow does with iteration towards answers/workarounds/ etc.
The behavior should change for all of us employees to turn to a search bar when we have a question about the company, data, or anything (dev or otherwise). We already to that with google, amiright?
My solution to this problem will be to implement a company-wide QA site like stack overflow. We use atlassian products internally, so I will be evaluating their Answers product.
My goal is to package and sell this idea to management in the new year.
I've done this in the past for smaller orgs for b2c on the support side, and it works well (so long As someone inside your org "owns" it. )
- closeparen 10y ago>A developer room with desks and monitors and a door I think you will have a hard time distributing this equitably. Since "everyone" wants a private office and needs to focus "all the time" I expect this will go to the person who shows up earliest/has the most social capital to not get kicked out.
- sheraz 10y agoActually this is a room that will be booked not unlike conference rooms.
- alexakisalex 10y agoI agree that a company-wide knowledgebase could reduce interruptions. However, the assumption is that most of the data people need will be there. Not sure how easy that would be. Definitely not the case in my company. A slackbot that does pretty much what you are describing is this one https://butter.ai/ https://butter.ai/. Haven't tried it yet though but seems promising.
- sheraz 10y agoI think that assumption needs to be tested. For this particular company it would seem that there is a lot of duplicate and triplicate questions that get floated. And let's not forget about developer on-boarding into enterprise products with lots of technical debt! New devs can benefit greatly from reading threads that rationalize what _seems_ like a bad decision but is reality works well for a number of non-technical reasons...
- afarrell 10y ago> My solution to this problem will be to implement a company-wide QA site like stack overflow. I feel like quora has the ideal interface for this. At every company I've ever worked for, I've wished that I could deploy a company-local version of it. Incidentally, does anyone here know how Quora makes revenue?
- JamesBarney 10y agoIf you have a do not disturb a developer day, why not just let them work from home? They save a commute, and it's suddenly a lot easier for everyone else to remember that they shouldn't bug a developer except for emergencies.
- imauld 10y ago> 1. DDDD (do not disturb developer days) twice a week. The general rule is that no one outside the team is supposed to interrupt unless production is on fire. A good idea in principle but it does not seem to be working too well. It is a lot to ask a 100 person company to remember which days they are allowed to interrupt. We have "no meeting" days which are meant to keep non-devs from bugging the devs. As a dev I hate them. It's extremely aggravating to actually need a meeting with some other departments to have to wait a couple of extra days to get something straightened out.