I have been working since I was 13, since you said "skilled" I will count QA, Project Manager, Sr Manager, Developer, Dev Lead only. Development for me has the

I have been working since I was 13, since you said "skilled" I will count QA, Project Manager, Sr Manager, Developer, Dev Lead only. Development for me has the highest cost for task switching. The ramp up also takes longer. If I have 15 minutes before a meeting and I have not started writing code, I won't even bother starting. If I compare that to being a Sr Manager, the cost of task switching is much lower, so was the ramp up time. Essentially it was a "let me get my notes, or the doc/email/presentation" and then I was set. That's maybe 1 minute. I think the biggest difference is that as a developer you either have to come up with something that doesn't exist, or you have to read something that someone wrote that has never existed before and then you have to figure out what the mistake was. The closet thing that resembles that for non developers is other abstract sciences, like Math, Chemistry, Physics or purely creative writers. So imagine you are a creative ghost writer. You are asked to write Chapter 8 of this fantasy book. By the way Chapter 7 and Chapter 9 exist. Your writing has to match the style of chapter 7 and 9, including character names. Chapter 9 was written 16 months ago, and the guy left. Chapter 7 was never edited, but it will while you are working on chapter 8. You also wrote chapter 5 a month ago, but since then 4 other authors have updated chapter 5 to make it better. Do you think interruptions would help or hurt? This is why developers complain about losing flow state. The cost of getting it back it too high.