>> Once a person stops coding for a significant portion of time, critical connections to the concerns of developers atrophy. > Citation needed. It sounds as fa

>> Once a person stops coding for a significant portion of time, critical connections to the concerns of developers atrophy. > Citation needed. It sounds as fake as supposed facts like we only use 10 percent of our brains, or other hogwash. I don't have a citation, but this seems obvious to me. It also bears out in my own experiences. Delivering great software requires deep thought and long, uninterrupted periods of concentration [1], and managing requires rapid context switching. When I was lead developer at a web consultancy in Austin, I mostly attended meetings and context-switched between one of dozens of projects. I never had uninterrupted blocks of time to analyze problems deeply. When I left, it took me a good six weeks of coding before I felt I could really push on hard problems again. I had trained my brain to context switch every 5 minutes, and so it expected to keep doing so. I still knew all the syntax, and remembered how everything played together, but breaking business stories down into their component parts was difficult. I couldn't hold the program in my head. [This bears out in the physical world, too: we would not expect a 100-yard sprinter to necessarily be able to run marathons.] [1] Holding a Program in One's Head | http://paulgraham.com/head.html http://paulgraham.com/head.html