3 ms·

It's just that, a request. You are not obliged to help people straight away if you are deeply engaged in something. In fact most people are polite enough to not

It's just that, a request. You are not obliged to help people straight away if you are deeply engaged in something. In fact most people are polite enough to not ask if it's clear you are busy. But if you're not, having access to that immediacy is a real boon IMO.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
It's a request, but just issuing a request to a developer in a state of deep focus stands a good chance of kicking them out of that focused state, ruining anywhere between half an hour and the rest of the day for them. So you need to be really mindful of the cost of just asking someone if they have time. The usual solutions I've employed or been subjected to in the past are: 1) headphones on == no interruptions of any kind, 2) direct questions and requests to IM (with notifications off), and 3) if you need someone's repeated help during the day, then note your questions on a list, and agree on a period (e.g. every hour on the clock) when you and that someone will go over the list together. In my experience, 3) is magical, because once you start noting questions down instead of asking for help immediately, you'll discover that before the hour is up, you'll have answered most of your questions yourself.
- gmtx725 6y ago
  I feel like you're being a bit precious. If someone asks you 'hey, can you help out with this', and you respond 'no not right now i'm busy', that knocks you out for half an hour to the rest of the day??? FWIW I'm a pretty independent worker and I agree people should try and work things out on their own before asking for help
  - thomaslord 6y ago
    It's not necessarily about having that happen once though. That can happen the many times throughout the day, and 2-3 interruptions in one day can be a lot. I think a lot of the point of not doing open-plan is to engineer an environment where it happens less often. That being said, it's entirely possible that some tasks will require absolute focus and having a 2 minute conversation will legitimately lose you a large amount of productive time. There may also be a subset of people who are more likely to get these particular tasks, and those people will feel the negative effects of an open plan office much more than others working on more easily interruptible tasks.
  - rglullis 6y ago
    Yes, it is that bad for some people. But most importantly, even if it meant "just" 5 minutes to get back into flow, you still have an organization that doesn't know how to share information and you have a manager that is crippling team productivity without even knowing. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/02/12/human-task-switches-considered-harmful https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/02/12/human-task-switche... > I agree people should try and work things out on their own before asking for help That is far from ideal in two ways: - knowledge sharing suffers. You do your research and solve your problem or you don't and you have to ask to someone else more experienced. Knowledge sharing is kept to an oral tradition. Teams quickly start depending on one or two key members and juniors are often with a feeling with being left alone. - you still have this anxiety of "when is it okay to interrupt?" On both ends. Everyone's threshold is different, so there is always someone who will be annoyed by the interruption and suffer. The way to fix this is by promoting collaboration (pair-programming sessions are great and both partners already expect the communication, so "flow" is easier to maintain, also it is terrible to do on open-floor plans) and having a clear written practice to share knowledge and documentation. There is no single situation where an open plan office leads to more team and individual productivity.
    - ryandrake 6y ago
      In my experience, "Being able to be productive while not in The Zone" is a job skill like any other that can/should be learned and improved with practice. I used to be like that, where if you said peep to me while I was focused, I snapped out of it and couldn't work my way back up to productivity easily. This is kind of a "junior developer" problem that IMHO developers just need to overcome with practice. Having a kid helped me a lot. Suddenly there were distractions all day, and I was forced to learn how to be productive in 30 minute spurts. As one gets more senior in their development career, their days will get more and more punctuated with meetings. You start gradually moving from the "maker" to "manager" schedule. So your reality will be a day with a handful of 1 hour time slots available for deep work. In my view you just need to deal with this reality and learn how to be productive in it.
      - rglullis 6y ago

TeMPOraL 6y ago

It's a request, but just issuing a request to a developer in a state of deep focus stands a good chance of kicking them out of that focused state, ruining anywhere between half an hour and the rest of the day for them. So you need to be really mindful of the cost of just asking someone if they have time. The usual solutions I've employed or been subjected to in the past are: 1) headphones on == no interruptions of any kind, 2) direct questions and requests to IM (with notifications off), and 3) if you need someone's repeated help during the day, then note your questions on a list, and agree on a period (e.g. every hour on the clock) when you and that someone will go over the list together. In my experience, 3) is magical, because once you start noting questions down instead of asking for help immediately, you'll discover that before the hour is up, you'll have answered most of your questions yourself.

gmtx725 6y ago
I feel like you're being a bit precious. If someone asks you 'hey, can you help out with this', and you respond 'no not right now i'm busy', that knocks you out for half an hour to the rest of the day??? FWIW I'm a pretty independent worker and I agree people should try and work things out on their own before asking for help
- thomaslord 6y ago
  It's not necessarily about having that happen once though. That can happen the many times throughout the day, and 2-3 interruptions in one day can be a lot. I think a lot of the point of not doing open-plan is to engineer an environment where it happens less often. That being said, it's entirely possible that some tasks will require absolute focus and having a 2 minute conversation will legitimately lose you a large amount of productive time. There may also be a subset of people who are more likely to get these particular tasks, and those people will feel the negative effects of an open plan office much more than others working on more easily interruptible tasks.
- rglullis 6y ago
  Yes, it is that bad for some people. But most importantly, even if it meant "just" 5 minutes to get back into flow, you still have an organization that doesn't know how to share information and you have a manager that is crippling team productivity without even knowing. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/02/12/human-task-switches-considered-harmful https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/02/12/human-task-switche... > I agree people should try and work things out on their own before asking for help That is far from ideal in two ways: - knowledge sharing suffers. You do your research and solve your problem or you don't and you have to ask to someone else more experienced. Knowledge sharing is kept to an oral tradition. Teams quickly start depending on one or two key members and juniors are often with a feeling with being left alone. - you still have this anxiety of "when is it okay to interrupt?" On both ends. Everyone's threshold is different, so there is always someone who will be annoyed by the interruption and suffer. The way to fix this is by promoting collaboration (pair-programming sessions are great and both partners already expect the communication, so "flow" is easier to maintain, also it is terrible to do on open-floor plans) and having a clear written practice to share knowledge and documentation. There is no single situation where an open plan office leads to more team and individual productivity.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    In my experience, "Being able to be productive while not in The Zone" is a job skill like any other that can/should be learned and improved with practice. I used to be like that, where if you said peep to me while I was focused, I snapped out of it and couldn't work my way back up to productivity easily. This is kind of a "junior developer" problem that IMHO developers just need to overcome with practice. Having a kid helped me a lot. Suddenly there were distractions all day, and I was forced to learn how to be productive in 30 minute spurts. As one gets more senior in their development career, their days will get more and more punctuated with meetings. You start gradually moving from the "maker" to "manager" schedule. So your reality will be a day with a handful of 1 hour time slots available for deep work. In my view you just need to deal with this reality and learn how to be productive in it.
    - rglullis 6y ago