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Is your friend in support engineering truly being interrupted however? I think it has a lot to do with stack depth. Working on task A, then being interrupted to

Is your friend in support engineering truly being interrupted however? I think it has a lot to do with stack depth. Working on task A, then being interrupted to work on task B only to be interrupted again to work on task C is the source of brain damage - particularly for those who care about being productive.

Buttons840 4y ago
"The cost of an interruption is not just the time it takes, but that it breaks the time on either side in half. You probably only have to interrupt someone a couple times a day before they're unable to work on hard problems at all." -- PG
- osigurdson 4y ago
  I (of course) think of it like multi-tasking in a computer. The machine needs to capture the context (stack and registers) associated with one task in order to switch to another. However, for a human this context can be enormous. Depending on the task, it is possible that one will never get back to the state of understanding that they had at an earlier point if working on a particularly complex thing - just the right combination of caffeine, sleep, motivation (more accurately gumption if you have read ZAMM), etc.
  - fipar 4y ago
    The ZAMM reference is spot on to me. The moment I used to get an interruption (typically an incoming call, but not only that), what happened to me was just what Pirsig describe of the gumption leaving you like air from a baloon, psssst. I eventually got into 'the zone' and I was actually quite good at figuring out problems with little context, but my gumption was gone nevertheless, and I was useless for whatever thing I was working on before the interruption for mostly the rest of the day.
    - osigurdson 4y ago
      Yes, I think it is the most important software engineering book by far.
fipar 4y ago
Yeah, he's working in an intense context-switching environment. Also, since he's a very senior team member he gets interrupted frequently for escalations or just for short help requests. The context-switching is what killed me when I did that, and he actually does enjoy it, as crazy as it sounds!
- osigurdson 4y ago
  Well, I guess it is a good thing that there is more than one type of brain out there!

Buttons840 4y ago

"The cost of an interruption is not just the time it takes, but that it breaks the time on either side in half. You probably only have to interrupt someone a couple times a day before they're unable to work on hard problems at all." -- PG

osigurdson 4y ago
I (of course) think of it like multi-tasking in a computer. The machine needs to capture the context (stack and registers) associated with one task in order to switch to another. However, for a human this context can be enormous. Depending on the task, it is possible that one will never get back to the state of understanding that they had at an earlier point if working on a particularly complex thing - just the right combination of caffeine, sleep, motivation (more accurately gumption if you have read ZAMM), etc.
- fipar 4y ago
  The ZAMM reference is spot on to me. The moment I used to get an interruption (typically an incoming call, but not only that), what happened to me was just what Pirsig describe of the gumption leaving you like air from a baloon, psssst. I eventually got into 'the zone' and I was actually quite good at figuring out problems with little context, but my gumption was gone nevertheless, and I was useless for whatever thing I was working on before the interruption for mostly the rest of the day.
  - osigurdson 4y ago
    Yes, I think it is the most important software engineering book by far.

fipar 4y ago

Yeah, he's working in an intense context-switching environment. Also, since he's a very senior team member he gets interrupted frequently for escalations or just for short help requests. The context-switching is what killed me when I did that, and he actually does enjoy it, as crazy as it sounds!

osigurdson 4y ago
Well, I guess it is a good thing that there is more than one type of brain out there!