I'm stroking my beard and thinking hard about a problem, trying to sink back into some kind of productivity about being interrupted 3 times in the last 10 mins.

I'm stroking my beard and thinking hard about a problem, trying to sink back into some kind of productivity about being interrupted 3 times in the last 10 mins. Probably stretching my back, feeling the tiredness in my shoulders, noticing my coffee has gone cold, thinking about the next cup; with an added sense of regrets for the wasted time and gut wrenching sadness about how fast I used to be at programming. But honestly the fact is the sheer complexity of the problems I'm looking at requires so much thinking. That complexity wasn't there in the older days. There were also a lot less people involved in a project and that causes added complexity, in fact, exponential complexity to most changes in code, since code has become product. Code is now of biblical importance. In the olden days, it was about getting things done. Today, you write code that could make or break the company. People judge you on 5 lines you've written 6 months ago within thousands of other lines; the more experienced you are, the more ways you can implement something, with many consequences compounded by who's going to use it and how within the next 5 years.