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Comment by scarygliders | Hacker News Reader

> I don't believe we're as special as we think we are

I don't like the premise.

In my opinion and from personal experience, it's more to do with keeping an abstract of the problem you're trying to solve in your head, which is what the cartoon is portraying, than any thought of somehow being special in some way.

I mainly work from home, and I'm married, which means quite often I could be working on a piece of code - abstract in my mind - when the goodly wife enters my room and starts asking or talking about domestic subjects or issues. And then just like the cartoon, the abstraction I had so carefully taken the time to build up in my mind goes POFF!

That POFF! is most frustrating. It's not that I think I'm special, or that the POFF! is different for other types of workers/professions, but it does take time to settle down and begin to build the abstraction back up in one's mind again.

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I'm in the same boat as you. I work from home and so does my wife. I'll just be passing by to go to the bathroom or something and she'll want to have a 20 minute conversation about something. I don't want to be rude, but I'm thinking "I gotta get back at it.."

My memory has never been great, which isn't ideal for being a programmer. Lately, I've had a text editor opened up separate from my code editor where I kind of document my train of thought - especially on fuzzy, complex stuff.

For example, we run everything out of Azure, but I've noticed that for our various environments, but same applications, things are setup in an ad-hoc manner and a little bit different, but still work.

So basically I'm just documenting my train of thought as I setup a new application environment - nothing formal.

That might seem obvious to other development shops, but we're just a couple guys flying by the seat of our pants and things get messy quickly, and memories fade.

> Lately, I've had a text editor opened up separate from my code editor where I kind of document my train of thought - especially on fuzzy, complex stuff.

I do something similar. I have a dedicated to-do app, but I like having a more freeform text log as well. On a Mac, https://github.com/glushchenko/fsnotes works well.

Thanks for the link. This app will solve some needs I have.

Trello is a great tool for this. There are plenty of similar tools as well, including open source alternatives. Your separate open file for mental stack dumping is a great option as well, and something I often use. My favorite, though, is a stack of black index cards on my desk. I like the immediacy, the ease of sorting, and the ability to quickly spread things out or stack them up. Best of all, there's satisfaction in tearing up that card and throwing it away when done. I use Trello quite a bit, but nothing beats the index cards for me. It's something I use both at work and at home.

> So basically I'm just documenting my train of thought as I setup a new application environment - nothing formal.

You can take it one step further and automate that with something like Terraform. Or more primitively bash scripts but that leads to snowflake environments over time as you said.

Yes I regularly keep notes in plain text editor while I am working, to tell myself what I'm going to do next, or to talk out a difficult problem

Yeah, keeping a text editor with a task-specific file open while I work has been something of a revalation for me. I get distracted or thrown off easily, so it really helps reduce the amount of time it takes to get back to the mental spot that I was at. That, and if I need to leave right after I figure something important out, I’ll put a train of thought note wherever I am in the code without comment delimeters so that I can’t compile until I read it when I return.

I think the author's premise is that interruption aversion is symptomatic of how many programmers work and that there are habits one can develop to minimize the impact of external distractions. The presentation from Tom Stuart goes into much more detail.

My personal experiences have led to a waning sympathy for coworkers complaining about too many meetings or interruptions. It's a reactive complaint. The most productive engineers on my teams also tend to be the most disciplined in managing their tasks, guarding their calendars, and employing every Do Not Disturb option available.

To be honest, I think for a lot of developers the premise is already pretty flattering. I'd love to see a presentation titled: "You Were Not That Productive To Begin With, or Why That Fortnite Stream on Your Second Monitor Might Not Be Helping Things."

Haha. Good point. I hate interruptions for an opposite reason from others - they give me no time to prepare a proper response to the interrupter.

My CEO used to bust into my office and want to talk high level tech strategy, meanwhile I’ve been staring at the same for loop for an hour. I finally had to tell him that I cannot switch gears that quickly, and if he wanted a coherent conversation he needed to schedule a meeting :)

The classic conundrum of: "Do you want my _first_ answer or my _best_ answer?"

> The presentation from Tom Stuart goes into much more detail.

What presentation are you talking about? I'd be interested in reading it.

"The Most Common Problem In Software Development And How To Fix It"

https://youtu.be/i08A2uTDoa8

Workers aren't well empowered in many of those situations, at least in my experience.

Those productive engineers? They figured enough of office politics skills to do the equivalent of taking a manager to a dark alley, then leaving the mutilated remains hanging from the "gate" to their time.

Unfortunately, those skills are not skills we teach anyone, at least not in computing. Meanwhile, project management seems to be a common subject in engineering classes in other areas...

I completely agree it is a dysfunctional work environment where the engineer's only recourse to having a sane schedule is taking their "manager to a dark alley."

That said, framing the problem as: "those skills are not skills we teach anyone" is the problem.

Once you can recognize a skill gap, you can fix it. You can be the teacher.

Well, I recognize my own lack of skills there. What's worse is that I also have a generally uphill battle with interpersonal skills, so I'm really not the person to teach them to anyone.

However, so long as we don't have professional courses taking this into account I don't think we can talk about teaching "software engineers".

> > I don't believe we're as special as we think we are

> I don't like the premise.

I don't like the implied conclusion. Why shouldn't you be allowed to feel special or enjoy it or request that unpleasant things don't happen unless absolutely necessary?

What merit is there in saying "well you can actually cope with interruptions even though you hate them, and because you can you now have to, pleb".

(And in the post and the replies to it, where's any concept that different people are different and think about things differently?)

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