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> Because it's pretty routine for me to get pinged on IRC/slack/whatever by another engineer who's looking for help with something. That's why when we were all
by BeetleB 3y ago
> Because it's pretty routine for me to get pinged on IRC/slack/whatever by another engineer who's looking for help with something.
That's why when we were all colocated in one building, I was logged out. I made it clear they were welcome to drop by my cube whenever they wanted, but I would not be available by IM. It cut the interrupts by half, easily. People use you as a crutch. When you raise the cost even minimally, they are suddenly willing to solve their own problems.
That's the one aspect that COVID destroyed. Now I have to be online as people can't just walk to my cube.
- owenmarshall 3y agoWhat I have started to do is to block an hour every other day, and when someone sends me a Slack message that feels like I am just their crutch, I snooze it until that scheduled block of time. It works like a charm. I still keep an eye on the urgent questions that I have to answer quickly, and many questions have evaporated by the time I come back to them.
- paradox242 3y agoThis is another skill that like knowing when to say no, seems counterintuitive when first entering the working world. Sometimes the correct answer is not to drop everything and slowly explain something for the third time that would have been trivial to Google in the first place. You are not doing yourself or them any favors by being overly available for every little question. The kind of person that does this often has a kind of learned helplessness that they need to be shaken out of from time to time.
- BeetleB 3y ago> This is another skill that like knowing when to say no Logging out of IM when busy is a simpler skill :-)