5 ms·

Maybe I'm off base here, but to me, meetings are not nearly as big a disruption to my IC work as random interruptions from teammates. Meetings are usually plann

Maybe I'm off base here, but to me, meetings are not nearly as big a disruption to my IC work as random interruptions from teammates. Meetings are usually planned and able to be worked around and scheduled for. There is typically an agenda, and if there isn't, it's very simple to ask for one. If it's not valuable, don't go, or leave. If you must go, you can often get the meeting rescheduled - people in engineering organizations are surprisingly accommodating of the maker's schedule. A random interruption by an engineer when you're trying to focus is much more disruptive because it's unplanned and often pulls you right out of the zone. Often times, especially for more senior engineers, an enormous amount of patience has to be practiced as you listen to someone ramble on as the context in your head flutters away, while they go in circles explaining the problem to themselves. This is all part of the job though. People don't have all the answers and the questions are often poorly defined. My skills wouldn't be nearly as valuable if the problems were so cut and dry that I could just program a solution straight through without interrupting anyone for clarity. I don't quite get the hang wringing over being interrupted. It happens, and it happens especially more as you get more senior. Some of the best solutions to problems I've come up with have not been technical, but have come about by talking to people and realizing that maybe the technical solution we were pursuing wasn't the best one, and we could save a lot of time and money by solving the problem a different way.

yoodenvranx 8y ago
A loooong time ago I worked in an open office space with the following rules: - no headphones: you can talk to me - headphone covers one ear: you can talk to me if it is important - headphone covers both ears: only talk to me when the building is burning It's not perfect by any means but it worked quite well.
lovich 8y ago
The individual meetings aren't a big interruption on their own, but their scheduleing is usually the problem. I frequently will have half hour meetings in a day but sprinkled throughout the day, which means I am always just getting back into the zone when trying to work. When you combine that with coworker interruptions and the need to eat I can end up with an entire day where I can't solve anything more than trivial problems. I can always stay late or work on the weekends but I don't really have any desire to eat into my free time because management wants to constantly hear updates from me every day about how the very work they are interrupting is going
- softawre 8y ago
  Have you tried telling management that them asking for updates is slowing the work down? You can't expect them to read your mind.
  - lovich 8y ago
    The people calling the meetings don't have any of their goals tied to engineering productivity and the issue isn't big enough in managements view to come in and deal with it. The issue has been brought before and ignored. It's one of the perils of being in a cost center
  - mitchty 8y ago
    I find it easier to just block off 4 hour chunks of my day as a way to convey: I'm only working during these times no meetings. In manager land a block of free time is fair game, so play by those rules and make your own meeting with work. When any manager asks why you just tell them and explain. Seems to work fine.
  - gobrarian 8y ago
    I have. I actually provided hard data on how daily status updates were impacting the project schedule. They didn't care. Didn't stay there long.
- smileysteve 8y ago
  This is one of my big stressors right now. A Product asks the dev manager how soon something can get done, so he urgently messages me asking for an eta. At a similar time, a product person messages me asking for the same thing. And this is after the work is planned, pointed, and ready to work. Worst of all, at the same time my product team is asking an eta, they're working with the marketing team to change the story!
draw_down 8y ago
Totally agree about the hand-wringing. While it’s good to minimize interruptions however makes sense, they’re going to happen and they’re going to be more frequent the more senior you are. That’s part of the challenge of the job, remaining productive despite those interruptions.
city41 8y ago
I usually find adhoc interruptions are due to someone being blocked and spending 5 minutes with them can really turn their next few hours around. It's good for the team as a whole. Meetings on the other hand are minimum 30 minutes and usually involve half a dozen people. The bang for buck on interruptions is way higher than meetings. At my current job I have about 10-15 meetings every week, and I'm an IC. It drives me crazy. I feel like I have to fight tooth and nail to get time to work on the project I'm assigned to.
- daveFNbuck 8y ago
  This depends very much on your position and the structure of your company. 5 minutes is fine if you're getting one a day. If you have dozens of ad-hoc interruptions every day, you're getting interrupted for hours. Placing these interruptions randomly throughout the day means you don't have any solid blocks of time in which to get work done.
  - bluGill 8y ago
    This is one of the reasons that your best engineer should be on the least important project: everybody knows he can answer your complex questions fast, and they know what he is doing isn't very important so even if it can be definitively proven that your interruption caused his project to be late nobody will care.
    - daveFNbuck 8y ago
      Why would your best engineer stay at your company if they're given unimportant projects and treated as tech support for your worst engineers?
      - singingboyo 8y ago
        I suspect it would be better worded as 'least urgent' project. Some of the most interesting projects I've done have been long-term things that didn't need to make it out for 6 or more months, and really only needed a month to implement - but they did really need to make it out at the end of those 6 months. With things like that, though, you can a) pull the engineer off for truly urgent 'done by Friday or we lose the customer(s)' issues, and b) losing some time due to interruptions isn't really world ending. For (a) to work you'd also probably want to stop having them interrupted.
ninkendo 8y ago
The best companies I’ve worked for establish a bit of a circadian rhythm around periods of collaboration and periods heads-down time. You need time for cross-pollination and free flow of conversation and ideas, but you also need contiguous time to execute and converge those ideas. It’s best if the people you work along side all establish this same rhythm so you don’t have some people interrupting others who are in a heads-down period, or on the other token, people missing important meetings because they’re catching up on their work. It’s even better if these periods correspond with your sprint/development schedule as well. We’ve started enforcing this at my current company by having a calendar bot that automatically deletes meetings on certain days if engineers are on the invite list. It was painful at first but everyone eventually got on the same rhythm and now I can actually get the time to complete my work.
dahart 8y ago
> This is all part of the job though. People don't have all the answers and the questions are often poorly defined. Yeah, agreed. I've started watching the balance between meetings and interruptions, and I've noticed that too many interruptions is often an indicator of too few meetings and/or poor planning, while too many meetings is often an indicator of not enough one-on-one communication in the office. I'm fantasizing about something to schedule micro-meetings. Not a heavy hammer like days of quiet time, just something lightweight that only protects my flow-time a little bit, not a lot, by design. I want to and expect to have to talk to people, I'd just get a small amount of control over when, instead of an interruption right in the middle of my thought.
- matte_black 8y ago
  Perhaps a program that can detect when a user is in a state of flow and allow others to inquire if it is a good time to contact that person. A flow guardian.
  - dahart 8y ago
    OMG, that's a great name for the app. FlowGuardian! Yeah, I just want to be able to fence off 10-20 minutes of flow at a time, and let a couple of questions queue up so I can answer them both at the same time. The worst days are when I'm getting single interruptions every 5-10 minutes.
gwbas1c 8y ago
Well-run meetings really depends on your company's culture and management support. I find that a lot of bad meetings are driven by procrastination: The person holding the meeting is doing it as a way to get out of work. Other times, the person holding a bad meeting has an inflated ego and thinks a whole bunch of people need to pay very close attention to something that doesn't really matter. If your organization doesn't have these problems, then great!
- smileysteve 8y ago
  Another meeting problem is not delegating or assigning decisions. So you have a meeting where everybody shares their opinion, but in the end, nobody knows which opinion was solidified on and who is implementing it.

yoodenvranx 8y ago

A loooong time ago I worked in an open office space with the following rules: - no headphones: you can talk to me - headphone covers one ear: you can talk to me if it is important - headphone covers both ears: only talk to me when the building is burning It's not perfect by any means but it worked quite well.

lovich 8y ago

The individual meetings aren't a big interruption on their own, but their scheduleing is usually the problem. I frequently will have half hour meetings in a day but sprinkled throughout the day, which means I am always just getting back into the zone when trying to work. When you combine that with coworker interruptions and the need to eat I can end up with an entire day where I can't solve anything more than trivial problems. I can always stay late or work on the weekends but I don't really have any desire to eat into my free time because management wants to constantly hear updates from me every day about how the very work they are interrupting is going

softawre 8y ago
Have you tried telling management that them asking for updates is slowing the work down? You can't expect them to read your mind.
- lovich 8y ago
  The people calling the meetings don't have any of their goals tied to engineering productivity and the issue isn't big enough in managements view to come in and deal with it. The issue has been brought before and ignored. It's one of the perils of being in a cost center
- mitchty 8y ago
  I find it easier to just block off 4 hour chunks of my day as a way to convey: I'm only working during these times no meetings. In manager land a block of free time is fair game, so play by those rules and make your own meeting with work. When any manager asks why you just tell them and explain. Seems to work fine.
- gobrarian 8y ago
  I have. I actually provided hard data on how daily status updates were impacting the project schedule. They didn't care. Didn't stay there long.
smileysteve 8y ago
This is one of my big stressors right now. A Product asks the dev manager how soon something can get done, so he urgently messages me asking for an eta. At a similar time, a product person messages me asking for the same thing. And this is after the work is planned, pointed, and ready to work. Worst of all, at the same time my product team is asking an eta, they're working with the marketing team to change the story!

draw_down 8y ago

Totally agree about the hand-wringing. While it’s good to minimize interruptions however makes sense, they’re going to happen and they’re going to be more frequent the more senior you are. That’s part of the challenge of the job, remaining productive despite those interruptions.

city41 8y ago

I usually find adhoc interruptions are due to someone being blocked and spending 5 minutes with them can really turn their next few hours around. It's good for the team as a whole. Meetings on the other hand are minimum 30 minutes and usually involve half a dozen people. The bang for buck on interruptions is way higher than meetings. At my current job I have about 10-15 meetings every week, and I'm an IC. It drives me crazy. I feel like I have to fight tooth and nail to get time to work on the project I'm assigned to.

daveFNbuck 8y ago
This depends very much on your position and the structure of your company. 5 minutes is fine if you're getting one a day. If you have dozens of ad-hoc interruptions every day, you're getting interrupted for hours. Placing these interruptions randomly throughout the day means you don't have any solid blocks of time in which to get work done.
- bluGill 8y ago
  This is one of the reasons that your best engineer should be on the least important project: everybody knows he can answer your complex questions fast, and they know what he is doing isn't very important so even if it can be definitively proven that your interruption caused his project to be late nobody will care.
  - daveFNbuck 8y ago
    Why would your best engineer stay at your company if they're given unimportant projects and treated as tech support for your worst engineers?
    - singingboyo 8y ago
      I suspect it would be better worded as 'least urgent' project. Some of the most interesting projects I've done have been long-term things that didn't need to make it out for 6 or more months, and really only needed a month to implement - but they did really need to make it out at the end of those 6 months. With things like that, though, you can a) pull the engineer off for truly urgent 'done by Friday or we lose the customer(s)' issues, and b) losing some time due to interruptions isn't really world ending. For (a) to work you'd also probably want to stop having them interrupted.

ninkendo 8y ago

The best companies I’ve worked for establish a bit of a circadian rhythm around periods of collaboration and periods heads-down time. You need time for cross-pollination and free flow of conversation and ideas, but you also need contiguous time to execute and converge those ideas. It’s best if the people you work along side all establish this same rhythm so you don’t have some people interrupting others who are in a heads-down period, or on the other token, people missing important meetings because they’re catching up on their work. It’s even better if these periods correspond with your sprint/development schedule as well. We’ve started enforcing this at my current company by having a calendar bot that automatically deletes meetings on certain days if engineers are on the invite list. It was painful at first but everyone eventually got on the same rhythm and now I can actually get the time to complete my work.

dahart 8y ago

> This is all part of the job though. People don't have all the answers and the questions are often poorly defined. Yeah, agreed. I've started watching the balance between meetings and interruptions, and I've noticed that too many interruptions is often an indicator of too few meetings and/or poor planning, while too many meetings is often an indicator of not enough one-on-one communication in the office. I'm fantasizing about something to schedule micro-meetings. Not a heavy hammer like days of quiet time, just something lightweight that only protects my flow-time a little bit, not a lot, by design. I want to and expect to have to talk to people, I'd just get a small amount of control over when, instead of an interruption right in the middle of my thought.

matte_black 8y ago
Perhaps a program that can detect when a user is in a state of flow and allow others to inquire if it is a good time to contact that person. A flow guardian.
- dahart 8y ago
  OMG, that's a great name for the app. FlowGuardian! Yeah, I just want to be able to fence off 10-20 minutes of flow at a time, and let a couple of questions queue up so I can answer them both at the same time. The worst days are when I'm getting single interruptions every 5-10 minutes.

gwbas1c 8y ago

Well-run meetings really depends on your company's culture and management support. I find that a lot of bad meetings are driven by procrastination: The person holding the meeting is doing it as a way to get out of work. Other times, the person holding a bad meeting has an inflated ego and thinks a whole bunch of people need to pay very close attention to something that doesn't really matter. If your organization doesn't have these problems, then great!

smileysteve 8y ago
Another meeting problem is not delegating or assigning decisions. So you have a meeting where everybody shares their opinion, but in the end, nobody knows which opinion was solidified on and who is implementing it.