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You seem stuck in the past and project your problems onto others. For many, IM and chat rooms do not cause productivity problems. Different companies use Slack

You seem stuck in the past and project your problems onto others. For many, IM and chat rooms do not cause productivity problems. Different companies use Slack and other tools in their own way, have their own policies as to what is expected and what not. The client has enough options available you can set as you like as to not disturb you. Email has its own problems. Sometimes you need answers to important questions promptly. @<user> works better then, at the same time, it is less intrusive than a phone call. Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. It is not your leisure time. Some people here talk about work like they think it is their own personal project time.

growse 7y ago
> Email has its own problems. Sometimes you need answers to important questions promptly. @<user> works better then, at the same time, it is less intrusive than a phone call. I think this is a useful way of looking at it - the medium governs the expectation of response. An email basically never expects a response, an "@" in slack expects a response at some point, and a phone call is "I AM MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING YOU MIGHT BE DOING RIGHT NOW TALK TO ME". Slack etc. are obviously useful in filling the middle ground between the two extremes. > Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. I sort of disagree with this. Being expected to drop everything that you're doing and deal with whoever wants to engage with you at any point is a really bad pattern. If someone's got to the point where they're blocked on a single person responding to something, then that's a really bad smell for some process and organisational failings. People should be able to own and manage their time. That doesn't mean they get to close themselves off from the world and ignore everyone, but it also doesn't make them an on-demand slave to their colleagues.
- protomyth 7y ago
  An email basically never expects a response This might be a SV thing, because I can assure you that many, many e-mails require a response elsewhere including government. Failure to respond to some emails will result in a loss of funding or your job.
  - zimpenfish 7y ago
    I think it works better if you modify it to "An email basically never expects an immediate response".
    - protomyth 7y ago
      Yeah, that doesn't work either. As a system admin, I have found folks expect e-mails to show up immediately and judge their response as such. There are certain departments of the US government who expect an e-mail response immediately when they send out one of their queries. You need to jump. Setting up rules on the mail (e.g. bounce the icon on MacOS) is a very smart and healthy thing to do. If you control your own mail server, then paying attention to the logs and having some alerts that deal with it might be very wise.
      - nogabebop23 7y ago
        >> Setting up rules on the mail (e.g. bounce the icon on MacOS) I don't agree with this. You are exploiting a biological imperative intended to prevent us from being attacked by surprise so that I read your email? There goes the 30 minutes I just spent getting into the zone invetigating an evil little bug. If someone has these ridciulous expectations about email I prefer (the still very annoying) follow-up email or physical visit. At least that requires some effort.
        protomyth 7y ago
        If someone has these ridciulous expectations about email I prefer (the still very annoying) follow-up email or physical visit. At least that requires some effort. Yeah, you'll find people who oversee money have many ridiculous expectations and when your grant and the people you are helping depend on you meetings those expectations, then you damn well do everything you can to do so. No government or grant official is going to do "physical visits". The whole point is you do not want them expending effort on you because that will end badly for you. You need to be oil on glass as far as they are concerned.
      - 7y ago
tduberne 7y ago
> Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. It is not your leisure time. I do not agree with that statement. In lots of roles, it does not matter whether you answer now or in one hour, but being constantly disrupted unexpectedly can have a dramatic impact on concentration and productivity. I cannot do any substantial programming or data analysis if I expect to be disrupted. The problem is not someone calling because the house is on fire and I am the only one who can fix it; the problem is someone screaming for my attention to e.g. know if I will participate in an event in 2 months time. Avoiding unnecessary disruptions is not letting people have leisure time, it is allowing them to do their work properly. On that topic I really like that piece: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
- icebraining 7y ago
  > I cannot do any substantial programming or data analysis if I expect to be disrupted. Yet when you're in an office, you can always be interrupted by anyone coming up to you (and that's usually true even if you have your private office). That doesn't mean we don't reduce the actual number of interruptions. The same applies when working remotely.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    Which is why we can duplicate a team of 20 by a team of 2 and get roughly the same output.
  - lejalv 7y ago
    It's a matter of cost-to-interrupt. IM substantially lowers that, the same as home visit is more expensive than snail-mail spam is more expensive than e-mail spam.
- ohduran 7y ago
  This, please. Why on earth EVERYONE is expected to be "on the ready" all the time? I understand it may be the case for some people but...not being on the ready means you're on your leisure time? Somewhere along the road we failed to grasp the idea that some jobs require extreme doses of concentration, and being highly available is a counter to those jobs. Don't pretend that customer support and chess players have the same needs to excel at their jobs.
barrkel 7y ago
> Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. It is not your leisure time. This is excruciatingly entitled logic from the requester. Do you honestly think your coworkers are all taking leisure time if they don't respond instantly to your requests? Does everyone on your slack exist to answer at your beck and call?
- erikbye 7y ago
  I am the answerer as much as the requester. Either way, it is not entitled to expect helpfulness from your professional colleagues.
  - gowld 7y ago
    How do you know whose turn it is to be the helper or the helpee? Do you take shifts? How about pair programming instead of a stream of interrupts?
  - whateveracct 7y ago
    Taking 20-30min to respond is still helpfulness.
    - erikbye 7y ago
      Yes, it is. In my OP I specifically mentioned client (app) settings with this in mind. A lot of times taking 20 minutes to answer is perfectly fine.
cxr 7y ago
> Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. It is not your leisure time. Oh man, the amount of presumptuousness packed into this comment is obnoxious.
- krrrh 7y ago
  It really just reads like someone whose roles have been more focused on a series of time-critical tasks rather than deep work which requires uninterrupted focus. A bit of a lack of experience, or imagination.
  - erikbye 7y ago
    As someone in ops I do both types of work, and having spent the last six years in an open office environment I know all about how distracting interruptions can be. At the same time, you are at work and cannot expect to behave like a recluse.
- erikbye 7y ago
  I think you are misinterpreting. Besides, it goes way. Where I work, and I will take a guess and say it is like that most places, sometimes people need an answer promptly (might not be life or death, but sometimes, in my line of work, it can be), from me, from others. If that is the case, I think an @-interruption is appropriate.
- swat535 7y ago
  Oh I see. I love the double standard of HN. When the discussion is about remote where you can have complete focus alone everyone is suddenly up in arms about constant collaboration and communication along with endless churn of in person meetings and water cooler conversations for socialization; yet when we discuss a tool which you literally put on dnd then it suddenly prevents you from working.. not the endless office chatter. Clearly people just wanna appear to work by going to the office. Oh and to everyone who is suggesting we should use email, you clearly haven’t experienced work email spam, just ask the attorney next door and you’ll grasp it . It ain’t better than slack. At least you get to dnd with slack.
bovermyer 7y ago
That first sentence feels a bit like an ad hominem attack to me. There's no call for that here. Slack, Teams, Mattermost, or any other real time chat application cannot replace email because they are different types of tools. They solve different problem sets, even if they overlap a bit. I fall into the camp of people who believes that multitasking is bullshit and true productivity is only possible given long stretches of uninterrupted focus time. If someone needs something from me, they should talk to my scrum master or manager - that person will be best positioned to know the ideal time to interrupt me and get new work into my flow. Work time doesn't mean anyone is allowed to interrupt anyone else whenever they want. Work is like a fluid, and its flow must be managed, or the plumbing is going to get stopped up or even burst.
- erikbye 7y ago
  > That first sentence feels a bit like an ad hominem attack to me. There's no call for that here. I meant stuck in the past as in unwilling to move beyond email for primary communication, and that second part of the sentence as in not being able to see that his problems with IM might not be others'.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    The fact that "others" might not have OP's problem (or perhaps they're just in denial), does not mean that OP doesn't have the problem, nor that the problem is unimportant.
    - uramfndit 7y ago
      yes it does. it means exactly that.
nogabebop23 7y ago
>> Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, I don't want anyone who's job requires deep, introspective thought on big problems to be constanly distracted by a flashing toast that's probably a non-time sensitive, low-effort inquiry or worse. This applies to my newest junior developer trying to learn a big, hairy code base, our senior product manager working through plans for the rest of the year, the CFO figuring out how we can afford to keep everyone employed or the vast majority of positions outside of those explicitly focused on inbound communication. If you work on the help desk, inbound marketing, tech support or sales, sure a big part of your responsibility is responsive communication. For most other roles responsive does not mean immediate or even really, really soon.
- erikbye 7y ago
  > I don't want anyone who's job requires deep, introspective thought on big problems to be constanly distracted by a flashing toast that's probably a non-time sensitive, low-effort inquiry or worse. Who says he needs to? Your company should have communication policies. They should decide which channels/rooms your junior should join. He's a junior, it is likely no one will urgently need an answer from him for some time, so his settings can reflect that. He does not even need a visible/audible notification for that @-message, he can answer when he feels like it. Also, your last paragraph make it sound like the people in those roles cannot handle their job responsibilities AND a couple of disturbances.
  - jhomedall 7y ago
    > Also, your last paragraph make it sound like the people in those roles cannot handle their job responsibilities AND a couple of disturbances. A distraction during deep work can easily take 15-20 minutes to recover from.
    - erikbye 7y ago
      Yes, I have also heard that repeated ad nauseam. I think it is highly debatable and individual. I also think a lot of people overestimate how "deep" their own work is compared to others. E.g. a lot of programming is just tedious busywork and scaffolding, yet every programmer here seems to think a slight interruption is a destructive event. Maybe the problem is with you, not others. Maybe you are not a good match for working on a team. At many companies, plenty of programmers and engineers do complex, meaningful work in a crowded, very busy setting, with lots of talking over each other's heads. Have you seen how SpaceX or Tesla engineers work? What some people call deep work others do with their hands tied and constant "interruption".
PragmaticPulp 7y ago
> Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. It is not your leisure time. You're lucky that you've only worked at companies with healthy cultures around interruptions and respecting people's time. This is not true for many of us. Scheduling a meeting requires some minimal preparation and coordination with other people's schedules. Sending an e-mail is implicitly asynchronous, with an expectation that the receive will make a a best-effort attempt to answer it as quickly as possible, once they finish their current task. Slack private messages, name tags, and @channel/@here notifications have all of the immediacy of a phone call, but with minimal effort required by the person triggering the interruption. The power balance is asymmetrically tipped toward the interrupters. The squeaky wheel gets the grease ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_squeaky_wheel_gets_the_grease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_squeaky_wheel_gets_the_gre... ) and Slack is a power tool for squeaky wheels to be as loud as possible.
72deluxe 7y ago
I strongly disagree with this. It is impossible to work on a task and engage in concentration to solve an issue with constant interruptions. If you're only doing negligible pithy "problems" then it's fine but for difficult problems you absolutely need to be able to concentrate. Here's some other real-life examples where concentration is important: a. A library. There's a reason it's quiet and not in the middle of a market. b. A car. There's a reason using a mobile phone whilst driving is illegal. c. Exams. There's a reason they don't do exams in the middle of a PE lesson. d. Cubicles or offices. There's a reason they were invented for developers to work in. Open-plan offices are the worst. IM seems to be bypassing this "cubicle" design and still expecting the same type of output, which is impossible. Of course, if you're right that we're "stuck in the past" I expect to see all of these scenarios transform into loud, noisy affairs with constant interruptions. Obviously you feel they will? Some people feel that asking and answering questions is the same as "work" and I worked in a place where there were many teams engaged in generating this "work", but for the developers in the company nothing was worse than constant interruptions. Some people just didn't get it. One guy even bought ear defenders and we'd go "do not disturb" on Skype because else nothing would get done and there would be complaints from these "noisy" types that work wasn't being finished in a timely manner...... ironically they were completely oblivious to the fact that they were the ones slowing down work by asking "is it done?" "how are you doing?" "can I confirm what you're doing?" every 5 minutes. To concentrate, you need no interruptions. On my Slack channels, I get some questions about work (that then typically involve them ringing me anyway even if I answer in text, very irritating) or people posting dumb articles or memes rofl lol garbage.
hinkley 7y ago
For most people. Covid-19 won’t be a problem. Just because something isn’t a problem for the majority doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem. Even a huge one. And I can speak from vast experience: it feels great to help people, and can win you friends and in some cases referrals, but at the end of the year, it’s a crap shoot whether your boss will commend you or vilify you. Most are going to notice the things you didn’t get done, not the things you facilitated. When facilitators get laid off, office morale tanks, but they are still laid off. The number of times I get interrupted for a question while I’m right in the cusp of unraveling some hidden truth about our code or a bug is nuts. It’s easy to get nerd sniped, especially if the other person is talking about breaking something they don’t understand. (Personally, I think your most knowledgeable people should only be booked for like 25 hours a week and the rest of their time earmarked for consultation, but nobody above me in the org chart ever agrees)
- HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
  > I think your most knowledgeable people should only be booked for like 25 hours a week and the rest of their time earmarked for consultation My last job had a lot of problems, but this was one of the things they did well. They realized that the most senior people were more valuable helping others (even others in other departments) than slinging code all day. I wish more organizations recognized that. [sigh]
zarkov99 7y ago
You seem to believe that one person's desire for prompt information is more important than another's think time. That is only true in rare cases.

growse 7y ago

> Email has its own problems. Sometimes you need answers to important questions promptly. @<user> works better then, at the same time, it is less intrusive than a phone call. I think this is a useful way of looking at it - the medium governs the expectation of response. An email basically never expects a response, an "@" in slack expects a response at some point, and a phone call is "I AM MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING YOU MIGHT BE DOING RIGHT NOW TALK TO ME". Slack etc. are obviously useful in filling the middle ground between the two extremes. > Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. I sort of disagree with this. Being expected to drop everything that you're doing and deal with whoever wants to engage with you at any point is a really bad pattern. If someone's got to the point where they're blocked on a single person responding to something, then that's a really bad smell for some process and organisational failings. People should be able to own and manage their time. That doesn't mean they get to close themselves off from the world and ignore everyone, but it also doesn't make them an on-demand slave to their colleagues.

protomyth 7y ago
An email basically never expects a response This might be a SV thing, because I can assure you that many, many e-mails require a response elsewhere including government. Failure to respond to some emails will result in a loss of funding or your job.
- zimpenfish 7y ago
  I think it works better if you modify it to "An email basically never expects an immediate response".
  - protomyth 7y ago
    Yeah, that doesn't work either. As a system admin, I have found folks expect e-mails to show up immediately and judge their response as such. There are certain departments of the US government who expect an e-mail response immediately when they send out one of their queries. You need to jump. Setting up rules on the mail (e.g. bounce the icon on MacOS) is a very smart and healthy thing to do. If you control your own mail server, then paying attention to the logs and having some alerts that deal with it might be very wise.
    - nogabebop23 7y ago
      >> Setting up rules on the mail (e.g. bounce the icon on MacOS) I don't agree with this. You are exploiting a biological imperative intended to prevent us from being attacked by surprise so that I read your email? There goes the 30 minutes I just spent getting into the zone invetigating an evil little bug. If someone has these ridciulous expectations about email I prefer (the still very annoying) follow-up email or physical visit. At least that requires some effort.
      - protomyth 7y ago
        If someone has these ridciulous expectations about email I prefer (the still very annoying) follow-up email or physical visit. At least that requires some effort. Yeah, you'll find people who oversee money have many ridiculous expectations and when your grant and the people you are helping depend on you meetings those expectations, then you damn well do everything you can to do so. No government or grant official is going to do "physical visits". The whole point is you do not want them expending effort on you because that will end badly for you. You need to be oil on glass as far as they are concerned.
    - 7y ago

tduberne 7y ago

> Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. It is not your leisure time. I do not agree with that statement. In lots of roles, it does not matter whether you answer now or in one hour, but being constantly disrupted unexpectedly can have a dramatic impact on concentration and productivity. I cannot do any substantial programming or data analysis if I expect to be disrupted. The problem is not someone calling because the house is on fire and I am the only one who can fix it; the problem is someone screaming for my attention to e.g. know if I will participate in an event in 2 months time. Avoiding unnecessary disruptions is not letting people have leisure time, it is allowing them to do their work properly. On that topic I really like that piece: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

icebraining 7y ago
> I cannot do any substantial programming or data analysis if I expect to be disrupted. Yet when you're in an office, you can always be interrupted by anyone coming up to you (and that's usually true even if you have your private office). That doesn't mean we don't reduce the actual number of interruptions. The same applies when working remotely.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  Which is why we can duplicate a team of 20 by a team of 2 and get roughly the same output.
- lejalv 7y ago
  It's a matter of cost-to-interrupt. IM substantially lowers that, the same as home visit is more expensive than snail-mail spam is more expensive than e-mail spam.
ohduran 7y ago
This, please. Why on earth EVERYONE is expected to be "on the ready" all the time? I understand it may be the case for some people but...not being on the ready means you're on your leisure time? Somewhere along the road we failed to grasp the idea that some jobs require extreme doses of concentration, and being highly available is a counter to those jobs. Don't pretend that customer support and chess players have the same needs to excel at their jobs.

barrkel 7y ago

> Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. It is not your leisure time. This is excruciatingly entitled logic from the requester. Do you honestly think your coworkers are all taking leisure time if they don't respond instantly to your requests? Does everyone on your slack exist to answer at your beck and call?

erikbye 7y ago
I am the answerer as much as the requester. Either way, it is not entitled to expect helpfulness from your professional colleagues.
- gowld 7y ago
  How do you know whose turn it is to be the helper or the helpee? Do you take shifts? How about pair programming instead of a stream of interrupts?
- whateveracct 7y ago
  Taking 20-30min to respond is still helpfulness.
  - erikbye 7y ago
    Yes, it is. In my OP I specifically mentioned client (app) settings with this in mind. A lot of times taking 20 minutes to answer is perfectly fine.

cxr 7y ago

> Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. It is not your leisure time. Oh man, the amount of presumptuousness packed into this comment is obnoxious.

krrrh 7y ago
It really just reads like someone whose roles have been more focused on a series of time-critical tasks rather than deep work which requires uninterrupted focus. A bit of a lack of experience, or imagination.
- erikbye 7y ago
  As someone in ops I do both types of work, and having spent the last six years in an open office environment I know all about how distracting interruptions can be. At the same time, you are at work and cannot expect to behave like a recluse.
erikbye 7y ago
I think you are misinterpreting. Besides, it goes way. Where I work, and I will take a guess and say it is like that most places, sometimes people need an answer promptly (might not be life or death, but sometimes, in my line of work, it can be), from me, from others. If that is the case, I think an @-interruption is appropriate.
swat535 7y ago
Oh I see. I love the double standard of HN. When the discussion is about remote where you can have complete focus alone everyone is suddenly up in arms about constant collaboration and communication along with endless churn of in person meetings and water cooler conversations for socialization; yet when we discuss a tool which you literally put on dnd then it suddenly prevents you from working.. not the endless office chatter. Clearly people just wanna appear to work by going to the office. Oh and to everyone who is suggesting we should use email, you clearly haven’t experienced work email spam, just ask the attorney next door and you’ll grasp it . It ain’t better than slack. At least you get to dnd with slack.

bovermyer 7y ago

That first sentence feels a bit like an ad hominem attack to me. There's no call for that here. Slack, Teams, Mattermost, or any other real time chat application cannot replace email because they are different types of tools. They solve different problem sets, even if they overlap a bit. I fall into the camp of people who believes that multitasking is bullshit and true productivity is only possible given long stretches of uninterrupted focus time. If someone needs something from me, they should talk to my scrum master or manager - that person will be best positioned to know the ideal time to interrupt me and get new work into my flow. Work time doesn't mean anyone is allowed to interrupt anyone else whenever they want. Work is like a fluid, and its flow must be managed, or the plumbing is going to get stopped up or even burst.

erikbye 7y ago
> That first sentence feels a bit like an ad hominem attack to me. There's no call for that here. I meant stuck in the past as in unwilling to move beyond email for primary communication, and that second part of the sentence as in not being able to see that his problems with IM might not be others'.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  The fact that "others" might not have OP's problem (or perhaps they're just in denial), does not mean that OP doesn't have the problem, nor that the problem is unimportant.
  - uramfndit 7y ago
    yes it does. it means exactly that.

nogabebop23 7y ago

>> Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, I don't want anyone who's job requires deep, introspective thought on big problems to be constanly distracted by a flashing toast that's probably a non-time sensitive, low-effort inquiry or worse. This applies to my newest junior developer trying to learn a big, hairy code base, our senior product manager working through plans for the rest of the year, the CFO figuring out how we can afford to keep everyone employed or the vast majority of positions outside of those explicitly focused on inbound communication. If you work on the help desk, inbound marketing, tech support or sales, sure a big part of your responsibility is responsive communication. For most other roles responsive does not mean immediate or even really, really soon.

erikbye 7y ago
> I don't want anyone who's job requires deep, introspective thought on big problems to be constanly distracted by a flashing toast that's probably a non-time sensitive, low-effort inquiry or worse. Who says he needs to? Your company should have communication policies. They should decide which channels/rooms your junior should join. He's a junior, it is likely no one will urgently need an answer from him for some time, so his settings can reflect that. He does not even need a visible/audible notification for that @-message, he can answer when he feels like it. Also, your last paragraph make it sound like the people in those roles cannot handle their job responsibilities AND a couple of disturbances.
- jhomedall 7y ago
  > Also, your last paragraph make it sound like the people in those roles cannot handle their job responsibilities AND a couple of disturbances. A distraction during deep work can easily take 15-20 minutes to recover from.
  - erikbye 7y ago
    Yes, I have also heard that repeated ad nauseam. I think it is highly debatable and individual. I also think a lot of people overestimate how "deep" their own work is compared to others. E.g. a lot of programming is just tedious busywork and scaffolding, yet every programmer here seems to think a slight interruption is a destructive event. Maybe the problem is with you, not others. Maybe you are not a good match for working on a team. At many companies, plenty of programmers and engineers do complex, meaningful work in a crowded, very busy setting, with lots of talking over each other's heads. Have you seen how SpaceX or Tesla engineers work? What some people call deep work others do with their hands tied and constant "interruption".

PragmaticPulp 7y ago

> Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. It is not your leisure time. You're lucky that you've only worked at companies with healthy cultures around interruptions and respecting people's time. This is not true for many of us. Scheduling a meeting requires some minimal preparation and coordination with other people's schedules. Sending an e-mail is implicitly asynchronous, with an expectation that the receive will make a a best-effort attempt to answer it as quickly as possible, once they finish their current task. Slack private messages, name tags, and @channel/@here notifications have all of the immediacy of a phone call, but with minimal effort required by the person triggering the interruption. The power balance is asymmetrically tipped toward the interrupters. The squeaky wheel gets the grease ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_squeaky_wheel_gets_the_grease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_squeaky_wheel_gets_the_gre... ) and Slack is a power tool for squeaky wheels to be as loud as possible.

72deluxe 7y ago

I strongly disagree with this. It is impossible to work on a task and engage in concentration to solve an issue with constant interruptions. If you're only doing negligible pithy "problems" then it's fine but for difficult problems you absolutely need to be able to concentrate. Here's some other real-life examples where concentration is important: a. A library. There's a reason it's quiet and not in the middle of a market. b. A car. There's a reason using a mobile phone whilst driving is illegal. c. Exams. There's a reason they don't do exams in the middle of a PE lesson. d. Cubicles or offices. There's a reason they were invented for developers to work in. Open-plan offices are the worst. IM seems to be bypassing this "cubicle" design and still expecting the same type of output, which is impossible. Of course, if you're right that we're "stuck in the past" I expect to see all of these scenarios transform into loud, noisy affairs with constant interruptions. Obviously you feel they will? Some people feel that asking and answering questions is the same as "work" and I worked in a place where there were many teams engaged in generating this "work", but for the developers in the company nothing was worse than constant interruptions. Some people just didn't get it. One guy even bought ear defenders and we'd go "do not disturb" on Skype because else nothing would get done and there would be complaints from these "noisy" types that work wasn't being finished in a timely manner...... ironically they were completely oblivious to the fact that they were the ones slowing down work by asking "is it done?" "how are you doing?" "can I confirm what you're doing?" every 5 minutes. To concentrate, you need no interruptions. On my Slack channels, I get some questions about work (that then typically involve them ringing me anyway even if I answer in text, very irritating) or people posting dumb articles or memes rofl lol garbage.

hinkley 7y ago

For most people. Covid-19 won’t be a problem. Just because something isn’t a problem for the majority doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem. Even a huge one. And I can speak from vast experience: it feels great to help people, and can win you friends and in some cases referrals, but at the end of the year, it’s a crap shoot whether your boss will commend you or vilify you. Most are going to notice the things you didn’t get done, not the things you facilitated. When facilitators get laid off, office morale tanks, but they are still laid off. The number of times I get interrupted for a question while I’m right in the cusp of unraveling some hidden truth about our code or a bug is nuts. It’s easy to get nerd sniped, especially if the other person is talking about breaking something they don’t understand. (Personally, I think your most knowledgeable people should only be booked for like 25 hours a week and the rest of their time earmarked for consultation, but nobody above me in the org chart ever agrees)

HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
> I think your most knowledgeable people should only be booked for like 25 hours a week and the rest of their time earmarked for consultation My last job had a lot of problems, but this was one of the things they did well. They realized that the most senior people were more valuable helping others (even others in other departments) than slinging code all day. I wish more organizations recognized that. [sigh]

zarkov99 7y ago

You seem to believe that one person's desire for prompt information is more important than another's think time. That is only true in rare cases.