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> When you need to ask a colleague something, walk up to his/her desk instead of dropping a message 'Did you get that email I sent you?' Ahhhhhh~ No. Please d

> When you need to ask a colleague something, walk up to his/her desk instead of dropping a message 'Did you get that email I sent you?' Ahhhhhh~ No. Please don't. There's plenty of good advice on this article, but be careful that the things that you do for yourself don't negatively impact other people; that's not be healthy, its being thoughtless and selfish.

aswanson 9y ago
It never ceases to amaze me how much others think they entitled to your time while working. They'll start conversations when all nonverbal signals show you are trying to get something done. Im at the point where I am going to be forced to be outright rude, which is not easy for me, just to be able to work undisturbed.
- oDot 9y ago
  Being upfront is not necessarily being rude, and is much easier on all parties involved.
- laythea 9y ago
  This holds up to a point, but if your role is so demanding that you cannot hold a conversation (presuming a work conversation but also applies to social - up to a point obviously), then your either not very good at your job or your employer sets unrealistic expectations, or your good and the employer is realistic but you just want to get ahead. I've worked with people that are a clamshell. It's not a very nice environment. Nobody in a company works "on an island".
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    None of those, I simply don't like getting dropped out the zone for things that aren't immediately important or can't be done over email. For what it's worth I'm good at my job and my employer doesn't set unrealistic expectations, work time is work time, home time is home time. I don't blur the boundaries, if you want a social chat that's what lunch times are for. I've worked with Germans in the past, they are much more like me (I'm English) in that regard.
  - ctrl-j 9y ago
    > if your role is so demanding that you cannot hold a conversation (presuming a work conversation but also applies to social - up to a point obviously), then your either not very good at your job or your employer sets unrealistic expectations... Or they are a developer. Being interrupted while programming is really rough. It's like being an insomniac and having trouble falling asleep, when someone walks up and starts talking to you riiiight as you're drifting off. Now you're up for another two hours. Another analogy is you're building a house of cards using your mental concentration - someone distracting you causes you to knock the whole thing down. Oh, and the house of cards is due Friday.
    - NikolaeVarius 9y ago
      I don't know why people think devs are special in this regard. Being interrupted is a universal human problem, there is no need for an analogy for something that anyone who works in a professional (or hell even non professional) job experiences.
      - Clubber 9y ago
        Are you a developer? I recall studies that say any interruption costs 30 minutes of productivity for developers. When you put it into cost terms, someone talking in an open office for 30 seconds can literally cost hundreds or thousands of dollars of productivity.
        watwut 9y ago
        I think that his point was that similar drop of productivity happen to other professions. Programming is not the only work that requires focus. Even with programming it does matter what tasks you are working on. Many tasks don't need that much time to get into and out of it, only some do.
        Clubber 9y ago
        >I think that his point was that similar drop of productivity happen to other professions. Oh, I see. Yes, I would wholeheartedly agree with that. To his point, I would say many people on here don't necessarily think developers are special in that regard, but most people are developers and they are speaking on that which they know. I'm a developer (obviously) and I couldn't intelligently speak on how interruptions would disrupt a soft skill profession such as marketing, sales or HR.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  Im at the point where I am going to be forced to be outright rude Our society is at a point where there are large numbers of people who think their feelings trump larger concerns, like those of the workplace, their job, driver/pedestrian safety, and the rule of law. There is a set of ideas that involves executive function, the delay of gratification, the adherence to ideals, and subsuming the petty ego. It's called being an adult. If you think your feelings trump such concerns, take a good, hard look at yourself. Are you a narcissist? Do you really subscribe to an objective reality in your actions? If you are hiring people, look for people who are the opposite to the above.
  - brailsafe 9y ago
    While you do have a point, it's not much of a stretch to go from that point to sacrificing your overall life satisfaction for the sake of the job/work/whatever arbitrary societal standard exists. To elaborate on that (I'm not suggesting this is your message, though it may be), when I was only a few years younger having lucked into a lucrative job, I took work hyper seriously. I looked down on and distanced myself—intentionally and unintentionally—from those that didn't do the same. A year and half ago I lost my job and couldn't find other work (still jobless) and now have a different perspective. Now I look at people who work like I did with bemusement. What I see is people not putting themselves first, or at least not high enough. To do the same again, I'd need to convince myself that this is idea of success is better in some way than my own. That's not about ego, that's about honesty.
    - stcredzero 9y ago
      As in many things, there is a balance. You should put yourself first in terms of the balance of your overall life. You should not put your ego first in terms of the fidelity of information you get from the universe! Those are two very different things. If one starts to conflate one's overall personal goals with how they feel about momentary feedback -- this is one of the roads to madness!
      - brailsafe 9y ago
- ben_jones 9y ago
  Honestly I think you're part of the problem. It sounds like you are being pushed to a brink where you feel the need to be rude. The situation should've been addressed before you felt yourself at the brink. Do you have a manager you can sit down with for ten minutes and explain this dynamic to? It's possible your colleagues don't fully understand the implications of their actions and would happily oblige you if they only knew. Of course I don't know your situation, and given how dysfunctional some office environments are if may be possible that your options are truly limited. In my experience though there usually are options before brinkmanship.
  - loco5niner 9y ago
    Not OP but similar situation. > Do you have a manager you can sit down with for ten minutes and explain this dynamic to? Yes, he disagrees with my position. > It's possible your colleagues don't fully understand the implications of their actions My colleagues do fully understand. >...how dysfunctional some office environments are We just moved into an newly built open office plan RIGHT next to finance (finance has our "loud laugher", you know who I'm talking about). Someone thought this was a good idea....
- l0b0 9y ago
  "Can we talk about this later? I need to get <task> done by <time>." isn't rude (at least by my barbarian standards), and it would be very rude to ignore such a request.
  - EvanAnderson 9y ago
    It doesn't seem rude to my standards, either. I'd be interested to hear others' experiences using it, though. My experience has been that, unless delivered in an exceptionally conciliatory manner (exaggeratedly, actually), this kind of request gets interpreted as rude by a lot of people. For me, at least, I think it comes from many people assuming they have a "quick question" or that their "small" request isn't difficult to fulfill.
    - dahart 9y ago
      When someone walks up to me and opens with "quick question" the hairs on my neck stand up. I had a job where that became an office trend, everyone would start with "quick question". I started responding to "quick question" with "long answer". That and I also hung a sign on my chair with my official office hours. Neither actually worked, and people thought I was rude, but it did make me feel better to try to push back. ;) Long term my takeaway is that while too many meetings drain the life out of people, there's also a layer of communication that needs to happen, and when too much interrupting is going on, it's a sign that the right kind of meetings aren't taking place. Now instead of getting annoyed, I start to track the "quick question" categories, and create new channels for the commonalities, ideally Slack or email rather than a meeting, but in person when it gets big enough.
      - fapjacks 9y ago
        This is really why I prefer remote. I mean besides wearing pajamas all day. If I need to be scarce to get some work done, I can make myself completely scarce. Nobody can route their problem around my barriers by just showing up at my desk.
  - ivan_ah 9y ago
- noir_lord 9y ago
  I moved office to the other side of the site, up some stairs an into a (admittedly vast) office with no windows in part because of this, people don't get programmers, your 5 minute non-important (to either of us) interruption costs me 15-20 minutes of lost productivity after you walk away from my desk. I have a phone on my desk that is set to flash, not ring and only then if it's the boss, everyone else just silently rings (and then I get an email a few minutes later "tried ringing, anyway about <unimportant thing>".
  - HillaryBriss 9y ago
    and, because of their insatiable personal need to communicate by talking (instead of researching the internal wiki, bug database, or documentation on the network), these people become bulls in a china shop. and they don't have a clue how destructive they are. it's such a great example of clashing perspectives. they think they're being friendly and reasonable. the hapless and frustrated programmer thinks they're ignorant, lazy, and annoying.
  - loco5niner 9y ago
    Lucky you. I would love to be able to make that move.
    - noir_lord 9y ago
      Apart from the codebase I inherited I love everything about this job, decent money, 9-5, I get (gently) bollocked for staying late, technical freedom, hardware budget. Best programming job I've ever had and for someone who was damn close to burnout it feels like a holiday!
- lifeisstillgood 9y ago
  That is the main advantage of individual or small offices to work in.
- DesiLurker 9y ago
  Actually I also have problem with people dragging conversations on needlessly. okay so you have interrupted me and I answered your questions but now as adults we should learn visual cues that somebody wants to end conversation without being rude or discouraging to misc conversations in general. taking a hint is a subtle art often missed by engineers.
eighthnate 9y ago
> When you need to ask a colleague something, walk up to his/her desk instead of dropping a message Dev1: "Hey, your last commit's message was only 'fixed bugs'. Which bugs did you fix"? Dev2: "Sure. But I'm working on something right now. Shoot me an email about this and I'll send you the bug list by the end of the day." There is a reason why we have email/messaging. Many times, it just works better. There are things that are better asked in person, there are things that are better asked in an email.
rdiddly 9y ago
When someone asks if I got their email, the answer is often "Probably." (i.e. I'm not going to check that shit for another couple hours yet, if I can help it, but yeah I'm pretty sure it's safe to assume the email system functions correctly)
yeukhon 9y ago
Yes and No. I normally would drop a message and ask if we should meet up. There are a number of coworkers whom I don’t mind them stopping by and vice versa. If in case of emergency I would usually just walk up to their desks and have conversations. Messeaging can be slow and confusing often....
madmax108 9y ago
Seriously, I cannot think of something more irritating than this. I worked with a person who was more senior in my org who had this habit. Not only did that piss me off because I would be in the zone (I usually leave my phone at my desk and close all emal/slack tabs to not be disturbed) when he would totally interrupt for a silly question (a la the "did you get my mail?" question). Please please don't do this. Nothing comes across more selfish and signals that you feel that your time is more important than mine to me than this.
- baby 9y ago
  On the other hand, I feel like people like you make the office a worse place where talking and interacting with people is harder.
  - Tharkun 9y ago
    Why are you at the office? To chat? Or to get work done? They are sometimes mutually exclusive.
    - baby 9y ago
      Both
amelius 9y ago
> 'Did you get that email I sent you?' Just for fun, somebody should write a "track-and-trace" type of website for email. Then whenever somebody asks that question, give them a track and trace code.

aswanson 9y ago

It never ceases to amaze me how much others think they entitled to your time while working. They'll start conversations when all nonverbal signals show you are trying to get something done. Im at the point where I am going to be forced to be outright rude, which is not easy for me, just to be able to work undisturbed.

oDot 9y ago
Being upfront is not necessarily being rude, and is much easier on all parties involved.
laythea 9y ago
This holds up to a point, but if your role is so demanding that you cannot hold a conversation (presuming a work conversation but also applies to social - up to a point obviously), then your either not very good at your job or your employer sets unrealistic expectations, or your good and the employer is realistic but you just want to get ahead. I've worked with people that are a clamshell. It's not a very nice environment. Nobody in a company works "on an island".
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- noir_lord 9y ago
  None of those, I simply don't like getting dropped out the zone for things that aren't immediately important or can't be done over email. For what it's worth I'm good at my job and my employer doesn't set unrealistic expectations, work time is work time, home time is home time. I don't blur the boundaries, if you want a social chat that's what lunch times are for. I've worked with Germans in the past, they are much more like me (I'm English) in that regard.
- ctrl-j 9y ago
  > if your role is so demanding that you cannot hold a conversation (presuming a work conversation but also applies to social - up to a point obviously), then your either not very good at your job or your employer sets unrealistic expectations... Or they are a developer. Being interrupted while programming is really rough. It's like being an insomniac and having trouble falling asleep, when someone walks up and starts talking to you riiiight as you're drifting off. Now you're up for another two hours. Another analogy is you're building a house of cards using your mental concentration - someone distracting you causes you to knock the whole thing down. Oh, and the house of cards is due Friday.
  - NikolaeVarius 9y ago
    I don't know why people think devs are special in this regard. Being interrupted is a universal human problem, there is no need for an analogy for something that anyone who works in a professional (or hell even non professional) job experiences.
    - Clubber 9y ago
      Are you a developer? I recall studies that say any interruption costs 30 minutes of productivity for developers. When you put it into cost terms, someone talking in an open office for 30 seconds can literally cost hundreds or thousands of dollars of productivity.
      - watwut 9y ago
        I think that his point was that similar drop of productivity happen to other professions. Programming is not the only work that requires focus. Even with programming it does matter what tasks you are working on. Many tasks don't need that much time to get into and out of it, only some do.
        Clubber 9y ago
        >I think that his point was that similar drop of productivity happen to other professions. Oh, I see. Yes, I would wholeheartedly agree with that. To his point, I would say many people on here don't necessarily think developers are special in that regard, but most people are developers and they are speaking on that which they know. I'm a developer (obviously) and I couldn't intelligently speak on how interruptions would disrupt a soft skill profession such as marketing, sales or HR.
stcredzero 9y ago
Im at the point where I am going to be forced to be outright rude Our society is at a point where there are large numbers of people who think their feelings trump larger concerns, like those of the workplace, their job, driver/pedestrian safety, and the rule of law. There is a set of ideas that involves executive function, the delay of gratification, the adherence to ideals, and subsuming the petty ego. It's called being an adult. If you think your feelings trump such concerns, take a good, hard look at yourself. Are you a narcissist? Do you really subscribe to an objective reality in your actions? If you are hiring people, look for people who are the opposite to the above.
- brailsafe 9y ago
  While you do have a point, it's not much of a stretch to go from that point to sacrificing your overall life satisfaction for the sake of the job/work/whatever arbitrary societal standard exists. To elaborate on that (I'm not suggesting this is your message, though it may be), when I was only a few years younger having lucked into a lucrative job, I took work hyper seriously. I looked down on and distanced myself—intentionally and unintentionally—from those that didn't do the same. A year and half ago I lost my job and couldn't find other work (still jobless) and now have a different perspective. Now I look at people who work like I did with bemusement. What I see is people not putting themselves first, or at least not high enough. To do the same again, I'd need to convince myself that this is idea of success is better in some way than my own. That's not about ego, that's about honesty.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    As in many things, there is a balance. You should put yourself first in terms of the balance of your overall life. You should not put your ego first in terms of the fidelity of information you get from the universe! Those are two very different things. If one starts to conflate one's overall personal goals with how they feel about momentary feedback -- this is one of the roads to madness!
    - brailsafe 9y ago
ben_jones 9y ago
Honestly I think you're part of the problem. It sounds like you are being pushed to a brink where you feel the need to be rude. The situation should've been addressed before you felt yourself at the brink. Do you have a manager you can sit down with for ten minutes and explain this dynamic to? It's possible your colleagues don't fully understand the implications of their actions and would happily oblige you if they only knew. Of course I don't know your situation, and given how dysfunctional some office environments are if may be possible that your options are truly limited. In my experience though there usually are options before brinkmanship.
- loco5niner 9y ago
  Not OP but similar situation. > Do you have a manager you can sit down with for ten minutes and explain this dynamic to? Yes, he disagrees with my position. > It's possible your colleagues don't fully understand the implications of their actions My colleagues do fully understand. >...how dysfunctional some office environments are We just moved into an newly built open office plan RIGHT next to finance (finance has our "loud laugher", you know who I'm talking about). Someone thought this was a good idea....
l0b0 9y ago
"Can we talk about this later? I need to get <task> done by <time>." isn't rude (at least by my barbarian standards), and it would be very rude to ignore such a request.
- EvanAnderson 9y ago
  It doesn't seem rude to my standards, either. I'd be interested to hear others' experiences using it, though. My experience has been that, unless delivered in an exceptionally conciliatory manner (exaggeratedly, actually), this kind of request gets interpreted as rude by a lot of people. For me, at least, I think it comes from many people assuming they have a "quick question" or that their "small" request isn't difficult to fulfill.
  - dahart 9y ago
    When someone walks up to me and opens with "quick question" the hairs on my neck stand up. I had a job where that became an office trend, everyone would start with "quick question". I started responding to "quick question" with "long answer". That and I also hung a sign on my chair with my official office hours. Neither actually worked, and people thought I was rude, but it did make me feel better to try to push back. ;) Long term my takeaway is that while too many meetings drain the life out of people, there's also a layer of communication that needs to happen, and when too much interrupting is going on, it's a sign that the right kind of meetings aren't taking place. Now instead of getting annoyed, I start to track the "quick question" categories, and create new channels for the commonalities, ideally Slack or email rather than a meeting, but in person when it gets big enough.
    - fapjacks 9y ago
      This is really why I prefer remote. I mean besides wearing pajamas all day. If I need to be scarce to get some work done, I can make myself completely scarce. Nobody can route their problem around my barriers by just showing up at my desk.
- ivan_ah 9y ago
noir_lord 9y ago
I moved office to the other side of the site, up some stairs an into a (admittedly vast) office with no windows in part because of this, people don't get programmers, your 5 minute non-important (to either of us) interruption costs me 15-20 minutes of lost productivity after you walk away from my desk. I have a phone on my desk that is set to flash, not ring and only then if it's the boss, everyone else just silently rings (and then I get an email a few minutes later "tried ringing, anyway about <unimportant thing>".
- HillaryBriss 9y ago
  and, because of their insatiable personal need to communicate by talking (instead of researching the internal wiki, bug database, or documentation on the network), these people become bulls in a china shop. and they don't have a clue how destructive they are. it's such a great example of clashing perspectives. they think they're being friendly and reasonable. the hapless and frustrated programmer thinks they're ignorant, lazy, and annoying.
- loco5niner 9y ago
  Lucky you. I would love to be able to make that move.
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    Apart from the codebase I inherited I love everything about this job, decent money, 9-5, I get (gently) bollocked for staying late, technical freedom, hardware budget. Best programming job I've ever had and for someone who was damn close to burnout it feels like a holiday!
lifeisstillgood 9y ago
That is the main advantage of individual or small offices to work in.
DesiLurker 9y ago
Actually I also have problem with people dragging conversations on needlessly. okay so you have interrupted me and I answered your questions but now as adults we should learn visual cues that somebody wants to end conversation without being rude or discouraging to misc conversations in general. taking a hint is a subtle art often missed by engineers.

eighthnate 9y ago

> When you need to ask a colleague something, walk up to his/her desk instead of dropping a message Dev1: "Hey, your last commit's message was only 'fixed bugs'. Which bugs did you fix"? Dev2: "Sure. But I'm working on something right now. Shoot me an email about this and I'll send you the bug list by the end of the day." There is a reason why we have email/messaging. Many times, it just works better. There are things that are better asked in person, there are things that are better asked in an email.

rdiddly 9y ago

When someone asks if I got their email, the answer is often "Probably." (i.e. I'm not going to check that shit for another couple hours yet, if I can help it, but yeah I'm pretty sure it's safe to assume the email system functions correctly)

yeukhon 9y ago

Yes and No. I normally would drop a message and ask if we should meet up. There are a number of coworkers whom I don’t mind them stopping by and vice versa. If in case of emergency I would usually just walk up to their desks and have conversations. Messeaging can be slow and confusing often....

madmax108 9y ago

Seriously, I cannot think of something more irritating than this. I worked with a person who was more senior in my org who had this habit. Not only did that piss me off because I would be in the zone (I usually leave my phone at my desk and close all emal/slack tabs to not be disturbed) when he would totally interrupt for a silly question (a la the "did you get my mail?" question). Please please don't do this. Nothing comes across more selfish and signals that you feel that your time is more important than mine to me than this.

baby 9y ago
On the other hand, I feel like people like you make the office a worse place where talking and interacting with people is harder.
- Tharkun 9y ago
  Why are you at the office? To chat? Or to get work done? They are sometimes mutually exclusive.
  - baby 9y ago
    Both

amelius 9y ago

> 'Did you get that email I sent you?' Just for fun, somebody should write a "track-and-trace" type of website for email. Then whenever somebody asks that question, give them a track and trace code.