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People like you are the reason I personally don't want to be in an office. > asking quick questions and getting an instant answer. vs chat where I may not get

by ath3nd 3y ago

People like you are the reason I personally don't want to be in an office. > asking quick questions and getting an instant answer. vs chat where I may not get an answer for hours. Basically like having a toddler around. Sorry for the negative take here but how it's written it feels like you don't necessarily realize that some people do need deep work, and prioritize your quick satisfaction to other's focus. Or I might be projecting, but I simply can't stand incessantly being asked questions, I view it as a type of interruption. > running ideas by others. This doesn't happen on chat for me, and VC is too scheduled. Yes, because who needs order in their time when somebody just wants to ask the group from their opinion, without even bothering to write it down. Also, whoever is sick that day and missing from the office, that's on them, whatever discussion happened, no evidence of it, so sucks to be them I guess. > I don't feel connected to me team at all working from home I...am sorry.

spike021 3y ago
>Basically like having a toddler around. Unnecessarily condescending response to the OP, to be honest.
- ath3nd 3y ago
  Fair take. I am not trying to be condescending here, but it's hard to view this behavior as anything but overly disruptive. https://www.businessdit.com/distraction-work-statistics/ https://www.businessdit.com/distraction-work-statistics/ Instead of "just a quick question", the OP could prepare a list of their questions, and ask them all at the allocated time. A scheduled deep dive into the questions the OP has might even be more productive than multiple unscheduled disruptions of others' time. And in an open office, even if you ask only a single person something, others might hear it too, despite the question not being intended to them. We are talking about multiple people's brain cycles being dragged out their focus space, we are talking multiple conversations happening next to you, we are talking about click clack of people's keyboards next to you, and people moving going to take a coffee in your peripheral vision. It's a nightmare. https://theconversation.com/returning-to-the-workplace-heres-how-to-stay-focused-in-a-noisy-office-158186 https://theconversation.com/returning-to-the-workplace-heres... https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-truth-about-open-offices https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-truth-about-open-offices
  - cauch 3y ago
    So what you are asking is that OP destroy their own "deep work" a lot just that you don't get a mild distraction in yours. > And in an open office, even if you ask only a single person something, others might hear it too, despite the question not being intended to them. I guess I'm special, because when I'm in a "deep work", I just don't hear people around me. I know it's not the case of everyone, some of my colleagues just put noise-suppression headphones, which is yet another easy way to solve your problem without forcing others to cater to your needs. Of course, open space can be bad, and there are numerous examples of crazy open space situations. But what OP was describing is clearly not to the extend of what you are talking then.
    - ath3nd 3y ago
      > So what you are asking is that OP destroy their own "deep work" a lot just that you don't get a mild distraction in yours. Yes! I believe the OP should write down all their questions in a structured format, and then schedule a meetings with 1 person helping them onboard, where they can discuss the questions at length and go on any tangent, rather than interrupt colleagues ad hoc. That's a normal, grown up thing to do, and it will also help them crystallize and distill what knowledge is missing. > I know it's not the case of everyone, some of my colleagues just put noise-suppression headphones, which is yet another easy way to solve your problem without forcing others to cater to your needs I do put noise suppression headphones, but they can't stop the people moving in front of me nor the taps on my shoulder. > without forcing others to cater to your needs Not wanting to be interrupted is not forcing others to take care of your needs.If you are unsure what I mean, let me call you in the middle of the night because I want to have a conversation with somebody and discuss economics. You not wanting to pick up is completely normal, right, or are you forcing ME to cater to your needs of being left the heck at peace? How dare you forcing me to have normal boundaries and call you at reasonable times! No, it's the people who interrupt others and forcing to drop everything else so they answer "just one tiny question" and expecting it to be done on the spot. That's forcing people to take cater to their needs! Hence me liking the OP's behavior to that of a toddler.
      - 3y ago
matsemann 3y ago
I think I would be fine not having you in the office, given your condescending response.. > Basically like having a toddler around. I changed jobs during lockdown. When I've joined other companies earlier, everyone knew to step in to help the new guy. So people would constantly ask me how I was doing, see if I were struggling and ask to help me, or I could just poke someone in the room. But getting onboarded remotely during lockdown (in a non-remote-first company), I didn't know who to ask. No one could see me being stuck. I couldn't just ask out in the open room. Writing a message in a chat channel meant it could take ages before I got any help to get going. Yay to me for at least not "disturbing" people. But the tradeoff here is that the whole team suffers as a team, just so people can have personal productivity. Which I think lessens speed in the long run. We're not code-monkeys picking Jira-tasks and dishing out features. We're working on a project together.
- laserlight 3y ago
  When I read your account of your onboarding at two different companies, I can only see a company with a good culture and another company with a poor culture. If you had onboarded the first company remotely, I bet you would have got check-in messages. Similarly, if you had onboarded the second company on-site, nobody would have cared about how you were doing.
  - matsemann 3y ago
    Yes, but that's the company culture the one I'm replying to is advocating for. A culture where you never should dare asking anyone for help, as you're inconveniencing them. Just sit silent with your problems and schedule a meeting the next day, and they might find it in their heart to help you. Or also get annoyed by "all the meetings destroying their focus time"..
    - ath3nd 3y ago
      I advocate for another culture, as I've seen everybody beihg happy with it. I advocate for a culture where onboardings are mostly self service and most documentation is up to date, frequently available, and easy to access. A culture where people are not afraid to ask questions, but they rarely have to, because most of the stuff is at the docs, and they never wonder who to ask, because they've been told who their onboarding "buddy" is. The person being onboarded is also aware that it's probably a good idea to batch their questions into a list, so they can discuss them with their buddy during their scheduled meetings, but is also not afraid to ad-hoc ask questions, because no documentation is perfect. If these ad-hoc questions are too much and too often, it might be that something in the self service is missing, and that is remedied accordingly. In the culture I advocate, everybody's satisfied, learned well, and mindful of each other's time and flow, and it has nothing to do with being in the office or not. In fact, I have anecdotally noticed that in-person companies are more likely to use existing people's time and attention as crutches for compensating for a the lackings of a comprehensive on-boarding plan, which is what I believe the OP experienced and wrongfully thought to be the solution.
lnxg33k1 3y ago
This shit about being connected is killing me, people goes to work as part of their social life and are ruining everyone else existence, if people doesn’t have connections therapist is where they should go not coworkers
- ath3nd 3y ago
  To be fair, I was a bit overly harsh with the OP, and it's purely due to reactionary reasons, as I've been far too often on the receiving end of a barrage of questions from multiple sides, while trying to meet deadlines. And I don't blame the newcomers, they are simply finding their way in a bad situation, I blame the company. The funny part here is that the companies expect you to help onboard new employees AND do your other work at the same time, while at the same refusing to give you the time to build on a proper onboarding, with documentation to read, what software to install, etc. In my current company we assign a "buddy" to the new onboarders, we have a handbook + a (supported and tested) onboarding installation toolkit, and pretty good documentation. The buddy does the handholding via scheduled and ad-hoc sessions, the onboarding material does the rest. During the pandemic we got to test this approach out on people who haven't even visited the office, and we improved it iteratively on every new onboardee. It's surprising how just improving such a small thing makes onboarding so much more pleasant for everybody, and how this, when done well, works both for office AND remote new employees.
- harwoodjp 3y ago
  I agree that this is the case, though the causes are pathological to the system, not the individual. You have to spend all your time at work, so you depend on it for social stimulus.
cauch 3y ago
[flagged]
- laserlight 3y ago
  > mildly inconvenienced Judging by GP comment, they sound like they are heavily inconvenienced. Am I reading it wrong?
  - cauch 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure that if you write down a list of inconveniencing things, this cannot be anywhere but at the bottom. The fact that some person will cry and shout that it is very very inconvenient seems to just confirm this person is acting like a toddler. But in fact you are right, "mildly inconvenient" may not be the best way to put it, it could have been "because otherwise you are as inconvenienced as they are if they follow your wish". After all, that is my point: I don't say it's not inconvenient for you, I'm just asking why should a group prefer the solution where A is inconvenienced and B not inconvenienced over a solution where B is inconvenienced and A not inconvenienced.
    - 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
      I think one is more inconvenienced than the other. If someone doesn't answer your question immediately, search harder. The answer is out there somewhere.
    - ath3nd 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - cauch 3y ago
        Hm, one could as legitimately argue: if the person who has the knowledge FAILED to document it properly and give it to the person who needs it. Then the person who has the knowledge is the one who deserve to have their flow disrupted instead of the person who notice they haven't done their work. Why should the person who demands the knowledge pays for the other person failure? But more importantly, a grown-up would say: the two persons are collaborating, they are not fighting each other. The person who has knowledge is a grown-up, they will want the work to progress correctly and they will want to see their colleague succeed professionally and socially. The person who needs the knowledge is a grown-up, they will not ask over and over again when they see it disturbs the person who has the knowledge (and no one here is against that, obviously). That's a sad way of seeing professional relationship, but also not a very smart way too: in real life, your own position is biased: when Mr X asks Mr Y a question, it is because Mr X truly believe it's a legitimate question. But maybe Mr Y has written the doc somewhere and Mr X missed it (which can and will happen). In which case, Mr Y will think Mr X is "wrong". But how Mr X can be sure he is not "wrong": Mr X does not know what he does not know. Or maybe Mr Y has written the doc, but badly. In which case, Mr Y will incorrectly think Mr X is "wrong". Or maybe ... In short: grown-ups understand that communication is messy and that "counting points" is just ridiculous, inefficient and just something that a person who has poor understanding of the reality will think is fine.
ffgjgf1 3y ago
> you don't necessarily realize that some people do need deep work, and prioritize your quick satisfaction to other's focus Surely there must be ways to balance these things? When you want to ask someone a question it shouldn’t be too hard to infer whether it’s a good time to do that now or you should wait (if it is, well it’s exactly a very hard skill to learn if you put in some effort)
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  You need it to be a good time for all 6 people
  - Broken_Hippo 3y ago
    No, you don't. You need to communicate it effectively to 6 people and be open enough so they aren't waiting for the 15 minutes you claim to have free. IN general, if folks have a question and can easily see that you don't want to be interrupted right then, they'll wait a bit.
- fzzzy 3y ago
  Yes. It is easy to balance these things. Ask the question in an asynchronous medium.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  I feel like that's exactly what email or pinging someone in a group chat is for, or at least that's how I prefer it. If I'm deeply focused on something else, I'll just ignore the notification, if I'm available I'll respond. Bonus points for just posting it to a team group chat or CC-ing everyone involved so someone else might be able to handle it.
  - spike021 3y ago
    That's no different from being in an office though. If someone taps me on the shoulder and says they need a few minutes of my time looking over problematic code or whatever, I can say "sure just give me about 15 minutes to finish off this X/Y/Z" When someone is relegated to doing this over Slack/Teams/whatever, the other person might have their notifications muted and rarely check for new ones. So it could end up being several hours of waiting. Just because someone checks in with you IRL and asks if you have time to help with a question doesn't mean you need to be interrupted from "flow".
infecto 3y ago
[flagged]
robertlagrant 3y ago
> it feels like you don't necessarily realize that some people do need deep work, and prioritize your quick satisfaction to other's focus. This is very one-sided. If you can unblock someone now so they don't spend 3 hours searching through the local intranet for some information, then that makes your team faster. There's a balance to be had, of course, but your team's overall delivery is what's important. > I view it as a type of interruption. It's not your view. Of course it's an interruption. That doesn't make it bad.
- funcDropShadow 3y ago
  Of course there is a balance needed. But spending once 3 hours to search something might increase familiarity with the resources the intranet provides. So the next question could be answered way faster. Or it could be the occasion to improve the local intranet with some missing cross reference or some comment.
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    Or it might be 100% wasted time that could be bypassed with a 5 minute conversation across the room. =)
    - otteromkram 3y ago
      Or, via chat or a phone call. No physical presence required :-D
  - nicoburns 3y ago
    > But spending once 3 hours to search something might increase familiarity with the resources the intranet provides. Assuming your company even has an intranet.
- beeboobaa 3y ago
  > If you can unblock someone now so they don't spend 3 hours Past your training period you are responsible for your own productivity. Don't make it the problem of your peers.
AmericanChopper 3y ago
This is a pretty common anti-pattern with how technical ICs view their work. No matter how technical or silo’d you are, your work is always going to be inherently collaborative, and your ability to collaborate with others is a hard bottleneck on everybody else’s ability to extract any value at all from the work you do. Managing or working with ICs with this perspective is also a lot like having a toddler around.
otteromkram 3y ago
I support this 100%. Programming and most tech work is pretty solitary. If collaboration needs to happen there's nothing wrong with hopping on a call. People that state what OP said should go into sales or customer service. Want to talk all day? There's your new job.
that_guy_iain 3y ago
> Sorry for the negative take here but how it's written it feels like you don't necessarily realize that some people do need deep work, and prioritize your quick satisfaction to other's focus. I'm always confused by people who struggle so much with being able to quickly answer a question and get back to what they were doing. Also, here you're prioritising your work over someone else's. > I simply can't stand incessantly being asked questions, I view it as a type of interruption Well, you are being interrupted. But you're being paid to be interrupted.
- alok99 3y ago
  > I'm always confused by people who struggle so much with being able to quickly answer a question and get back to what they were doing. > Also, here you're prioritising your work over someone else's. That's what the whole article is about. The struggle is that holding a context in your mind is easily broken by small interruptions. It's not by choice. So the question is how do you reconcile people on both sides working together.
- erik_seaberg 3y ago
  If you make me think about some technical problem other than the one I have halfway solved in my head, anything I didn’t write in code is gone and I need to reinvent it almost from scratch. When management evaluates my performance, delivering my projects carries much more weight than helping yours (which they might not even be able to measure).
  - that_guy_iain 3y ago
    >When management evaluates my performance, delivering my projects carries much more weight than helping yours (which they might not even be able to measure). 1. Your project is generally the same as those you work with. 2. Management often care about how you work with others. If you have someone who is helping everyone else, they're a lot more important than the person who just focuses on their task. Not just on team work but overall their knowledge is generally better than others.
dang 3y ago
Please don't cross into personal attack. We have to ban accounts that do it repeatedly, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd be grateful. Also, please don't post in the flamewar style generally. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We want thoughtful, curious conversation in which people are open to learning from one another. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38693114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38693114.

by ath3nd 3y ago

spike021 3y ago

>Basically like having a toddler around. Unnecessarily condescending response to the OP, to be honest.

ath3nd 3y ago
Fair take. I am not trying to be condescending here, but it's hard to view this behavior as anything but overly disruptive. https://www.businessdit.com/distraction-work-statistics/ https://www.businessdit.com/distraction-work-statistics/ Instead of "just a quick question", the OP could prepare a list of their questions, and ask them all at the allocated time. A scheduled deep dive into the questions the OP has might even be more productive than multiple unscheduled disruptions of others' time. And in an open office, even if you ask only a single person something, others might hear it too, despite the question not being intended to them. We are talking about multiple people's brain cycles being dragged out their focus space, we are talking multiple conversations happening next to you, we are talking about click clack of people's keyboards next to you, and people moving going to take a coffee in your peripheral vision. It's a nightmare. https://theconversation.com/returning-to-the-workplace-heres-how-to-stay-focused-in-a-noisy-office-158186 https://theconversation.com/returning-to-the-workplace-heres... https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-truth-about-open-offices https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-truth-about-open-offices
- cauch 3y ago
  So what you are asking is that OP destroy their own "deep work" a lot just that you don't get a mild distraction in yours. > And in an open office, even if you ask only a single person something, others might hear it too, despite the question not being intended to them. I guess I'm special, because when I'm in a "deep work", I just don't hear people around me. I know it's not the case of everyone, some of my colleagues just put noise-suppression headphones, which is yet another easy way to solve your problem without forcing others to cater to your needs. Of course, open space can be bad, and there are numerous examples of crazy open space situations. But what OP was describing is clearly not to the extend of what you are talking then.
  - ath3nd 3y ago
    > So what you are asking is that OP destroy their own "deep work" a lot just that you don't get a mild distraction in yours. Yes! I believe the OP should write down all their questions in a structured format, and then schedule a meetings with 1 person helping them onboard, where they can discuss the questions at length and go on any tangent, rather than interrupt colleagues ad hoc. That's a normal, grown up thing to do, and it will also help them crystallize and distill what knowledge is missing. > I know it's not the case of everyone, some of my colleagues just put noise-suppression headphones, which is yet another easy way to solve your problem without forcing others to cater to your needs I do put noise suppression headphones, but they can't stop the people moving in front of me nor the taps on my shoulder. > without forcing others to cater to your needs Not wanting to be interrupted is not forcing others to take care of your needs.If you are unsure what I mean, let me call you in the middle of the night because I want to have a conversation with somebody and discuss economics. You not wanting to pick up is completely normal, right, or are you forcing ME to cater to your needs of being left the heck at peace? How dare you forcing me to have normal boundaries and call you at reasonable times! No, it's the people who interrupt others and forcing to drop everything else so they answer "just one tiny question" and expecting it to be done on the spot. That's forcing people to take cater to their needs! Hence me liking the OP's behavior to that of a toddler.
    - 3y ago

matsemann 3y ago

I think I would be fine not having you in the office, given your condescending response.. > Basically like having a toddler around. I changed jobs during lockdown. When I've joined other companies earlier, everyone knew to step in to help the new guy. So people would constantly ask me how I was doing, see if I were struggling and ask to help me, or I could just poke someone in the room. But getting onboarded remotely during lockdown (in a non-remote-first company), I didn't know who to ask. No one could see me being stuck. I couldn't just ask out in the open room. Writing a message in a chat channel meant it could take ages before I got any help to get going. Yay to me for at least not "disturbing" people. But the tradeoff here is that the whole team suffers as a team, just so people can have personal productivity. Which I think lessens speed in the long run. We're not code-monkeys picking Jira-tasks and dishing out features. We're working on a project together.

laserlight 3y ago
When I read your account of your onboarding at two different companies, I can only see a company with a good culture and another company with a poor culture. If you had onboarded the first company remotely, I bet you would have got check-in messages. Similarly, if you had onboarded the second company on-site, nobody would have cared about how you were doing.
- matsemann 3y ago
  Yes, but that's the company culture the one I'm replying to is advocating for. A culture where you never should dare asking anyone for help, as you're inconveniencing them. Just sit silent with your problems and schedule a meeting the next day, and they might find it in their heart to help you. Or also get annoyed by "all the meetings destroying their focus time"..
  - ath3nd 3y ago
    I advocate for another culture, as I've seen everybody beihg happy with it. I advocate for a culture where onboardings are mostly self service and most documentation is up to date, frequently available, and easy to access. A culture where people are not afraid to ask questions, but they rarely have to, because most of the stuff is at the docs, and they never wonder who to ask, because they've been told who their onboarding "buddy" is. The person being onboarded is also aware that it's probably a good idea to batch their questions into a list, so they can discuss them with their buddy during their scheduled meetings, but is also not afraid to ad-hoc ask questions, because no documentation is perfect. If these ad-hoc questions are too much and too often, it might be that something in the self service is missing, and that is remedied accordingly. In the culture I advocate, everybody's satisfied, learned well, and mindful of each other's time and flow, and it has nothing to do with being in the office or not. In fact, I have anecdotally noticed that in-person companies are more likely to use existing people's time and attention as crutches for compensating for a the lackings of a comprehensive on-boarding plan, which is what I believe the OP experienced and wrongfully thought to be the solution.

lnxg33k1 3y ago

This shit about being connected is killing me, people goes to work as part of their social life and are ruining everyone else existence, if people doesn’t have connections therapist is where they should go not coworkers

ath3nd 3y ago
To be fair, I was a bit overly harsh with the OP, and it's purely due to reactionary reasons, as I've been far too often on the receiving end of a barrage of questions from multiple sides, while trying to meet deadlines. And I don't blame the newcomers, they are simply finding their way in a bad situation, I blame the company. The funny part here is that the companies expect you to help onboard new employees AND do your other work at the same time, while at the same refusing to give you the time to build on a proper onboarding, with documentation to read, what software to install, etc. In my current company we assign a "buddy" to the new onboarders, we have a handbook + a (supported and tested) onboarding installation toolkit, and pretty good documentation. The buddy does the handholding via scheduled and ad-hoc sessions, the onboarding material does the rest. During the pandemic we got to test this approach out on people who haven't even visited the office, and we improved it iteratively on every new onboardee. It's surprising how just improving such a small thing makes onboarding so much more pleasant for everybody, and how this, when done well, works both for office AND remote new employees.
harwoodjp 3y ago
I agree that this is the case, though the causes are pathological to the system, not the individual. You have to spend all your time at work, so you depend on it for social stimulus.

cauch 3y ago

[flagged]

laserlight 3y ago
> mildly inconvenienced Judging by GP comment, they sound like they are heavily inconvenienced. Am I reading it wrong?
- cauch 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure that if you write down a list of inconveniencing things, this cannot be anywhere but at the bottom. The fact that some person will cry and shout that it is very very inconvenient seems to just confirm this person is acting like a toddler. But in fact you are right, "mildly inconvenient" may not be the best way to put it, it could have been "because otherwise you are as inconvenienced as they are if they follow your wish". After all, that is my point: I don't say it's not inconvenient for you, I'm just asking why should a group prefer the solution where A is inconvenienced and B not inconvenienced over a solution where B is inconvenienced and A not inconvenienced.
  - 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
    I think one is more inconvenienced than the other. If someone doesn't answer your question immediately, search harder. The answer is out there somewhere.
  - ath3nd 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - cauch 3y ago
      Hm, one could as legitimately argue: if the person who has the knowledge FAILED to document it properly and give it to the person who needs it. Then the person who has the knowledge is the one who deserve to have their flow disrupted instead of the person who notice they haven't done their work. Why should the person who demands the knowledge pays for the other person failure? But more importantly, a grown-up would say: the two persons are collaborating, they are not fighting each other. The person who has knowledge is a grown-up, they will want the work to progress correctly and they will want to see their colleague succeed professionally and socially. The person who needs the knowledge is a grown-up, they will not ask over and over again when they see it disturbs the person who has the knowledge (and no one here is against that, obviously). That's a sad way of seeing professional relationship, but also not a very smart way too: in real life, your own position is biased: when Mr X asks Mr Y a question, it is because Mr X truly believe it's a legitimate question. But maybe Mr Y has written the doc somewhere and Mr X missed it (which can and will happen). In which case, Mr Y will think Mr X is "wrong". But how Mr X can be sure he is not "wrong": Mr X does not know what he does not know. Or maybe Mr Y has written the doc, but badly. In which case, Mr Y will incorrectly think Mr X is "wrong". Or maybe ... In short: grown-ups understand that communication is messy and that "counting points" is just ridiculous, inefficient and just something that a person who has poor understanding of the reality will think is fine.

ffgjgf1 3y ago

> you don't necessarily realize that some people do need deep work, and prioritize your quick satisfaction to other's focus Surely there must be ways to balance these things? When you want to ask someone a question it shouldn’t be too hard to infer whether it’s a good time to do that now or you should wait (if it is, well it’s exactly a very hard skill to learn if you put in some effort)

quickthrower2 3y ago
You need it to be a good time for all 6 people
- Broken_Hippo 3y ago
  No, you don't. You need to communicate it effectively to 6 people and be open enough so they aren't waiting for the 15 minutes you claim to have free. IN general, if folks have a question and can easily see that you don't want to be interrupted right then, they'll wait a bit.
fzzzy 3y ago
Yes. It is easy to balance these things. Ask the question in an asynchronous medium.
dotnet00 3y ago
I feel like that's exactly what email or pinging someone in a group chat is for, or at least that's how I prefer it. If I'm deeply focused on something else, I'll just ignore the notification, if I'm available I'll respond. Bonus points for just posting it to a team group chat or CC-ing everyone involved so someone else might be able to handle it.
- spike021 3y ago
  That's no different from being in an office though. If someone taps me on the shoulder and says they need a few minutes of my time looking over problematic code or whatever, I can say "sure just give me about 15 minutes to finish off this X/Y/Z" When someone is relegated to doing this over Slack/Teams/whatever, the other person might have their notifications muted and rarely check for new ones. So it could end up being several hours of waiting. Just because someone checks in with you IRL and asks if you have time to help with a question doesn't mean you need to be interrupted from "flow".

infecto 3y ago

[flagged]

robertlagrant 3y ago

> it feels like you don't necessarily realize that some people do need deep work, and prioritize your quick satisfaction to other's focus. This is very one-sided. If you can unblock someone now so they don't spend 3 hours searching through the local intranet for some information, then that makes your team faster. There's a balance to be had, of course, but your team's overall delivery is what's important. > I view it as a type of interruption. It's not your view. Of course it's an interruption. That doesn't make it bad.

funcDropShadow 3y ago
Of course there is a balance needed. But spending once 3 hours to search something might increase familiarity with the resources the intranet provides. So the next question could be answered way faster. Or it could be the occasion to improve the local intranet with some missing cross reference or some comment.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  Or it might be 100% wasted time that could be bypassed with a 5 minute conversation across the room. =)
  - otteromkram 3y ago
    Or, via chat or a phone call. No physical presence required :-D
- nicoburns 3y ago
  > But spending once 3 hours to search something might increase familiarity with the resources the intranet provides. Assuming your company even has an intranet.
beeboobaa 3y ago
> If you can unblock someone now so they don't spend 3 hours Past your training period you are responsible for your own productivity. Don't make it the problem of your peers.

AmericanChopper 3y ago

This is a pretty common anti-pattern with how technical ICs view their work. No matter how technical or silo’d you are, your work is always going to be inherently collaborative, and your ability to collaborate with others is a hard bottleneck on everybody else’s ability to extract any value at all from the work you do. Managing or working with ICs with this perspective is also a lot like having a toddler around.

otteromkram 3y ago

I support this 100%. Programming and most tech work is pretty solitary. If collaboration needs to happen there's nothing wrong with hopping on a call. People that state what OP said should go into sales or customer service. Want to talk all day? There's your new job.

that_guy_iain 3y ago

> Sorry for the negative take here but how it's written it feels like you don't necessarily realize that some people do need deep work, and prioritize your quick satisfaction to other's focus. I'm always confused by people who struggle so much with being able to quickly answer a question and get back to what they were doing. Also, here you're prioritising your work over someone else's. > I simply can't stand incessantly being asked questions, I view it as a type of interruption Well, you are being interrupted. But you're being paid to be interrupted.

alok99 3y ago
> I'm always confused by people who struggle so much with being able to quickly answer a question and get back to what they were doing. > Also, here you're prioritising your work over someone else's. That's what the whole article is about. The struggle is that holding a context in your mind is easily broken by small interruptions. It's not by choice. So the question is how do you reconcile people on both sides working together.
erik_seaberg 3y ago
If you make me think about some technical problem other than the one I have halfway solved in my head, anything I didn’t write in code is gone and I need to reinvent it almost from scratch. When management evaluates my performance, delivering my projects carries much more weight than helping yours (which they might not even be able to measure).
- that_guy_iain 3y ago
  >When management evaluates my performance, delivering my projects carries much more weight than helping yours (which they might not even be able to measure). 1. Your project is generally the same as those you work with. 2. Management often care about how you work with others. If you have someone who is helping everyone else, they're a lot more important than the person who just focuses on their task. Not just on team work but overall their knowledge is generally better than others.

dang 3y ago

Please don't cross into personal attack. We have to ban accounts that do it repeatedly, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd be grateful. Also, please don't post in the flamewar style generally. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We want thoughtful, curious conversation in which people are open to learning from one another. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38693114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38693114.