Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1_800_UNICORN | Hacker News Reader

I just want to remind folks that there are, in fact, organizations for whom the open plan actually works. I've spent the last few years practicing XP, on a collaborative team that includes PM, UX, QA, and devs, and we work in an open plan with no complaints. We find that it REALLY helps us minimize meetings and email/Slack since we can quickly turn to the person we need, ask our question, get an answer, and get back to work. As a developer it's hugely refreshing to be able to easily ask for advice or input from the rest of the dev team in a rapid way.

The reason I mention this anecdote is not to dispute any of the studies... I understand the difference between anecdotal evidence and quantitative evidence. Just a counter-point to the inevitable echo chamber of complaints about open floor plans being inhumane, a money-grab, etc etc.

View on HN

Sort of related to your username, those are unicorns. Most companies are dysfunctional or barely functional. Why those same companies have 99% of the time open spaces is not a mystery.

It's cheap.

It's not because XP, pair programming, quick feedback or any other ponies/unicorns, it's because you can cram more people in a smaller place.

Oh, and also control. Managers at least have the illusion of direct control or even better, they have a Stasi-like informant network in case someone "misbehaves".

> We find that it REALLY helps us minimize meetings and email/Slack since we can quickly turn to the person we need

So, it's an all-day, unpredictable meeting?

The only way for open offices to work is when nobody is doing open work. The major fail of open offices are the constant distractions existing around you. If they don't exist, then of course can it work.

Anyway, what you discribe still has a price for your team. You not only break the persons concentration who is asked, instead of giving them the choice to answer when they have free time to concentrate on something new, you also break rise the chance of breaking the concentration of everyone else who is not involved.

We find that it REALLY helps us minimize meetings and email/Slack since we can quickly turn to the person we need, ask our question, get an answer, and get back to work.

Someone downvoted me in another thread about open-offices because I do this. A coworker who sits three feet away often pings me multiple times a day with questions that are much easier answered by turning around, wheeling over pointing to a few things on their screen, explaining how they related and wheeling back over.

They said "I was part of the problem".

Because it's quicker to turn around and have a human conversation with someone sitting a yard away than type, take screenshots, and beam them over the network?

Yes, you're part of the problem. (It's okay, I do this too, but I'm trying to stop!)

We have private offices, but an "open door" policy. I recently noticed that I was pinging my boss several times a day on stuff that could've been handled by email. It dawned on my that my doing this, multiplied by the several other people who do this, was bad for productivity. So I started consciously sending things by email.

Humans are not interrupt-driven real-time systems. We're circa 1965 batch-processing machines. Email is great because it allows you to queue up a set of tasks and work in batches with natural breaks. Interruptions are bad because they break batch processing. Interruptions are also selfish. They prioritize the interuptee's desire to get immediate answers with the interrupted's need to work in batches.

Some people don't mind it--or they think they don't mind it. I used to be one of those people until I started using Pomodoro. Now you interrupt me in the middle of a session, and I'm like >:-@

I guess I'm just going to resign myself to this then, and own it.

Now look, I don't disagree with your points about people's ability to handle, triage and effectively respond to interruptions. It's a completely valid argument to make.

Where I'm having a hard time agreeing with the seeming majority here: is that when I'm interrupted in something I'm doing, by someone who sits two feet away, whipping around and saying "here's how you do that, it goes here, and does this" makes me the problem person (I use problem in the most delicate of ways, I hope the meaning is taken well and in good faith), when it was my work time and efficiency that was interrupted by someone seeking guidance.

If it's in a group channel, makes a bit more sense. When it's a direct message, well then here we are.

But I'll mull this over.

My mistake, I thought you were the interrupter. In that case, it's very nice of you to sacrifice your time to enable anti-social behavior on the part of your coworkers!

It seems a LOT of people are replying to my post somehow thinking I am the person interrupting-maybe that's on me to phrase the problem more clearly next time.

But as a team leader, when my people send me 1-on-1 messages to ask for help, I do what I can to make sure they get that help. For me, it's more effective to be there with them in person within reason (in this case: sitting right next to me is 'within reason') to render that aid, when requested.

If 10 people are nearby, your loud answer might be disruptive those other 8 people.

Why not walk to a common area, book a conference room for 5 minutes, or just respond in Slack?

It seems like 8 people getting to have quiet conditions ought to be worth more than some minor convenience of not needing to walk away to a different area to answer vocally.

I'm unsure really how to respond here. If we're talking about something that has a long, complicated answer that requires lots of back and forth, yes, sure that's probably a completely valid approach.

But a desk side "hey how do I x?" or "Hey is this the right way to do this?", it's probably infinitely more productive to work on the issue at our respective desks, get the solution needed, and go back to work.

These responses I'm reading in this thread are becoming more and more astonishing as they genuinely appear-to me-that many developers would be better served working at home where they can enjoy complete and total silence. You are in a shared space, there are going to be people talking and discussing their jobs. It's what they're even there for in the first place.

Of course this within reason, having to share a space with a customer support team where people are constantly on the phones chatting and providing support-sure-I completely get why that would be grating.

We seem to have moved beyond that and are now picking apart the very nature of working with and supporting your colleagues when they come to you for assistance, the idea that something as innocuous as a senior developer helping a junior developer being a problematic and prima facie distraction that must be snuffed out and I find that attitude completely untenable.

Mitigating distractions and minimizing them where possible and reasonable is an admirable goal. But taking a long step back and looking at this thread: It seems many are taking the approach that the workplace ought to function like a library where no sounds are uttered but the clacking of keys and clicking of mice and I'm not sure I agree even minimally.

I am not sure why it is astonishing to you. It’s been known for a long, long time that developers minimally need near total silence to do their jobs properly, and need privacy and space to think or diagram privately on a whiteboard, etc.

> “as they genuinely appear-to me-that many developers would be better served working at home where they can enjoy complete and total silence.”

Fully private offices are better, with a high degree of respect to not interrupt your colleagues. Working from home, as you suggest, is certainly much much better than working in an open-plan office though.

> “We seem to have moved beyond that and are now picking apart the very nature of working with and supporting your colleagues when they come to you for assistance, the idea that something as innocuous as a senior developer helping a junior developer being a problematic and prima facie distraction that must be snuffed out and I find that attitude completely untenable“

It’s hardly untenable. It’s a basic part of the job. What you glibly call “a senior developer helping a junior developer” is not that.

When I think of helping junior developers, something I do all the time, I think of using Slack or email to schedule a meeting to answer their questions at some point that’s convenient for us both, in a conference room where we won’t bother other people.

The culture of “just quickly answer my question right now” is horrible, productivity-killing nonsense, but here you’re acting like it’s the only possible way to work.

It’s been known for a long, long time that developers minimally need near total silence to do their jobs properly

According to whom? I've been a developer near 14 years now and have worked in siloed offices, cubicles, open office spaces, and my last job was 100% remote for two years. From what authority do you claim to draw the assertion that this is the case?

Anecdote is no replacement for quantitative sample sizes, but this statement seems too absolute to hold any validity without qualifying by whose standards you are suggesting that it has been known for a-as you put it-"long, long time".

What you glibly call “a senior developer helping a junior developer” is not that.

Glib? I'm sorry friend, but no. Absolutely not. Taking two minutes to help someone new on the job find answers periodically throughout the day, and wheeling my chair 180 degrees to render aid as the senior developer is not glib.

What's "glib" is this idea that I am somehow disrupting the workforce, and destroying productivity by preferring to talk to the person who literally sits three feet away from them to help solve a problem than smacking away at my keyboard to answer a question that takes the better part of 180 seconds were I to verbalize "Here's the solution you're looking for and how it fits in to the larger scheme of this feature we're working on". I've been on the other end of that, it felt cold and impersonal as a newbie, and I strive to be the kind of team leader I wanted when I was that junior developer.

The culture of “just quickly answer my question right now” is horrible, productivity-killing nonsense, but here you’re acting like it’s the only possible way to work.

Answering a question quickly is productivity-killing? Then how are you defining productivity, friend? If it's a question that has a short, sufficient and ultimately resolute answer that gets my junior developers the support and response they need to solve the challenges we face as a team, elongating that answer out to a long essay-diatribe is more killing to the productivity. If by that point we need more time, then-as I said in another comment-it absolutely is valid and worthwhile to say "Let's schedule some time to get into a conference room and whiteboard through the problem". Go look above this comment chain, I said as much pretty clearly.

And speaking of clearly? I really appreciate that you took this position and completely ignored the fact that I went through great effort to indicate that I prefer to speak directly to someone "within reason" and went as far as to suggest that when the person is sitting mere inches away from me, that is a scenario that I personally consider "within reason". That alone should have been a pretty clear indicator to you that no, I actually do NOT think that it's the only possible way to work, just a very effective one given the proximity to my cohort. I had hoped that the context clues would reveal themselves clearly, evidently and plainly. I see now that they did not.

I'm going to go ahead and take this time to leave the thread entirely, this debate stopped being fruitful a long time ago and I'm frustrated with myself that I spent as much time replying to it as I have.

Please do, if nothing else, have a wonderful weekend :) I'm sorry we disagree so strongly on this.

Have you ever read Peopleware[0], particularly the chapter called “Bring Back the Door” and the various studies it cites about distractions in software engineering and effect on defect rates?

Note that this was written in 1987. And cites even earlier works on the topic. By now there’s been an explosion of research on this topic.

> “Glib? I'm sorry friend, but no. Absolutely not.“

Uhh, yes. You are being glib by making a certain phrase (“senior developer helping a junior developer”) have a twisted meaning (that it can only mean a real-time, interruptive audio interaction, rather than scheduled time to help). That’s glib because the short phrase “senior developer helping a junior developer” unpackages into a bunch of complicated factors that need to be considered, and a very important one is to not presume that an interruptive question is worth disrupting someone else’s work over in the moment. You glibly try to side-step this by acting like disrupting someone to ask for help is the primary option and that it’s de facto a good thing to encourage this type of disruptiveness by giving instant gratification with an immediate answer, but it’s not! Glib absolutely is the right way to describe how you are trying to sidestep the real, material meaning of what it is to help out a junior developer (which generally has nothing to do with answering their real-time audio questions in the moment they ask).

> “Answering a question quickly is productivity-killing? Then how are you defining productivity, friend?”

Yes, stopping what I am already working on in order to answer your question will kill my productivity by a lot in order to help your productivity only a little.

This is pretty simple stuff. Why are you unsure about it?

> “went as far as to suggest that when the person is sitting mere inches away from me, that is a scenario that I personally consider "within reason".”

But this is a harmful attitude on your part. It makes no difference if the person is sitting inches away from you. Why would you think physical proximity has any effect in this? What matters is whether the other person is deeply concentrating on something that they judge to be highly important to maintain focus on. Your point of view seems to be about your convenience and not the damage it would do the people who are distupted around you.

Your vitriolic reaction is very frustrating to process because you still do not seem to engage with the basic aspect of this whole topic, which is that if a question pops into your mind that affects you, that does not mean it is worth wasting someone else’s time over if they are busy. That is one of the fundamental problems of open plan offices that encourage ad hoc verbal communication, which is incompatible with modes of working that require extended concentration time for most hours of most days (e.g. almost all of software engineering).

[0]: < https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Proje... >

>Yes, stopping what I am already working on in order to answer your question will kill my productivity by a lot in order to help your productivity only a little.

And yet AGAIN my initial post is misconstrued completely and entirely because people I guess just don't know how to read today.

I am not the person interrupting my coworkers. I am the one being interrupted and asked to help a junior dev. Read my darn post. Read it. READ IT. I am not interrupting my coworkers. I am a senior dev being asked for help. I am the one being interrupted. I am being asked to assist someone. Stop accusing me of breaking my coworkers flow. That is not what I said. That is not what I offered. That was not my post. That was not the position I argued. Those were not my words.

It's actually getting VERY frustrating having responses levied at me as if I am the person disrupting my coworkers, and not the person who is having his own workflow and concentration broken, and repeatedly having responses thrown at me as if I am the root cause of my coworkers not being productive.

/throws up hands

You talked about your propensity to answer people right there in the midst of the open space, thus contributing to the noise. I’m discussing how a side-effect of that would be to distract many other people, and then also discussing the general problem of these interruptive questions (even though I understand your line of comments was about how you will answer questions, and it was misinterpreted in other threads).

The portion you quoted does not use the word “you” to specifically refer to you personally, but to the general phenomenon of either being interrupted when someone asks a question or being disrupted when people loudly discuss an answer to the question right where everyone is trying to work, instead of moving to a separate common area like the cafeteria or a conference room, or scheduling a meeting to go over it later when it won’t disrupt people.

But the optimization function is wrong here. It's not about how much uninterrupted work I get done. It's whether or not the product ships, and that's a function of how much work the team gets done. So if a teammate is stuck, interrupting me with a question can get them unstuck faster than if they struggled with it for 20-30 mins or more.

I think that valuing your uninterrupted time over the team and the product shipping is the truly selfish mindset.

edit> markdown

Right. But when someone is stuck and they interrupt someone else, now you have two people who are out of the zone and not working. You have to balance the lost productivity of the interruption against the lost productivity of the person being stuck. (There might be a quite a thumb on the scale of that, because questions often go "upward" to more productive contributors.) Moreover, it's not like the interrupter needs to sit and twiddle her thumbs while waiting for a response. She can switch to doing something else while waiting for a response.

There is a game-theoretic angle to it. The problem is that interrupting someone costs the team, but creates no cost for the interrupter. Individual interrupters have no incentive to try and balance the global cost to the team of their interruption versus their potential idleness.

For most engineers, putting product quality and delivery as the top priority is equivalent to valuing your own uninterrupted time highest.

If you stop valuing your own uninterrupted “flow” opportunities, the product suffers, because the work cannot be completed that way.

In this sense you’ve got it backwards. You claim that looking out for your own experience of uninterrupted work is somehow suboptimal or selfish or bad, but it’s not. It’s actually the most customer-focused or product-focused, unselfish way to think.

Believing that you are entitled to turn around in your chair and interrupt the workflow of a teammate at your own whimsical discretion, now that is very selfish and does not place the customer, product or team ahead of yourself.

If you’re interrupting people all day, you’re selfishly prioritizing only what’s convenient for you, and discounting all the damage and delay to shipping the product that your interruptions are creating.

I think that valuing your uninterrupted time over the team and the product shipping is the truly selfish mindset.

I struggled mightily to find a tactful way of putting this to words, but this states it nicely.

My focus in responding to a teammate asking for help isn't on my time, or at least, it's less about my time and more about the objective behind what motivated a teammate to ask for help in the first place: shipping the feature/product.

If it helps clarify ambiguity or confusion for me to wheel over to this person and verbalize the solution they're looking for and work out the blocker with them by sitting right next to them for 5 minutes when they ask for my help, and we get the best possible outcome as a team, that's what I'm going to do.

Excellently said, snowman.

If you're a manager and you're getting compensated for keeping the wheels greased for your team, that's great. But if you're a regular IC being selfish about conserving your limited attention and energy isn't immoral at all. Being the guy who helps everyone else get stuff done often goes unrecognized in any meaningful way. Worse, being that guy all the time (rather than some budgeted proportion of your time) can prevent you from getting the stuff you will be recognized for shipping from shipping, and can cost you the focus needed to benefit in other ways (learning/practicing your deeper technical skills).

I'd like to reply to this in a similar manner as I did to another: it feels like there are extra variables being thrown into this that were never brought up from the start of this large discussion thread.

Being the guy who helps everyone else get stuff done often goes unrecognized in any meaningful way.

Valid, but irrelevant, I feel. I am a senior on my team, a junior asks for help. It might not be necessarily moral or even ethical to give them the time of day the second they ask for it, but it is a professional courtesy that I don't go looking to receive superlatives and accolades for.

If a contributor to the team has a question that affects their ability to contribute, that person should get the help they need. I happen to be sitting close enough to them that we can discuss the solution quietly enough so as not to be a distraction, and I do so.

What came from this were all sorts of wild extrapolations and suppositions that doing this created an otherworldly distraction to the rest of the workforce; and it is that mindset that I'm challenging. Not that people don't deserve a distraction free workspace, but to what ends we're willing to go to avoid that distraction while also operating in a manner that helps coworkers succeed, and enables colleagues to be accessible to one another.

Maybe it's a product of my compartmentalized mindset, I'm able to work through someone a few feet away talking about work things when asked about work things. It's when people have loud, echoing conversations about things not really relevant to the tasks at hand that I will HAPPILY concede to anyone who argues that those discussions should be taken elsewhere-like a break room or cafeteria if your office is equipped with one.

But two developers sitting next to each other, talking their way through a data validation issue, unless they're discussing it so loudly that it is legitimately obnoxious for two people whose faces are inches away from each other?

I'm not so sure this is such a work-shattering distraction as the implication seems to be from a majority of folks here-to the point where I'm inclined to call shenanigans and histrionics on the folks who can't function sans complete, utter total silence. The open office can die, in my opinion, but so does the idea that any instance of two people talking about work is just as, or close to being as unacceptable to the point of-as someone suggested-booking a conference room to have a 2 minute discussion when asked "How do I do x?".

I didn't use any hyperbole in my response, but you're projecting a lot onto mine. Let me give you a realistic personal example, something that might happen to me at least once or twice a week. I'm 20 minutes into establishing my bearings in a set of files I think I'll have to modify or at least understand for the next change I need to make. Someone comes over and asks me a technical question - maybe via a chat ping or a tap on the shoulder, or even just by walking behind me. Now I can choose to tell them it isn't a good time, but they've probably already started to describe their problem and that alone has stolen enough of the focus I was building up that I'm better off trying to help them first. (If I'm an hour in rather than 20 minutes in I'm more likely to tell them to ask me later). After giving them 5 - 10 minutes of my time, the original focus is lost. It may take me another 20 minutes just to get back to the cusp of beginning to write code again. There are only a few good sized blocks of time to work in the normal day, so that's more expensive than it seems.

I can deal with a nearby conversation and ignore it, although frankly it can be very distracting when it's about technical topics near my own work. Two or three at once is rarer but very irritating when it gets started up. Headphones are great for that, but when I'm suffering from tinnitus they no longer work. What's wrong with walking to a common space away from the work area when you want to have a 2 minute discussion with a coworker? If it's not worth the walk, maybe it isn't worth the discussion.

There's nothing strange about people having trouble in an open office space, all I would ask for is some empathy. I have internalized some of the lessons of my own problems by trying to resist the temptation to ping or otherwise disturb coworkers by non-email means unless it's absolutely necessary. A good deal of the kinds of questions I'm asked or I hear asked (maybe as many as half of them? and I would include my own questions here) could be solved by thinking or researching just a little more in solitude before reaching out.

I've also created improvised physical barriers around my desk to block visual distractions. As a result my current workspace is OK for getting things done, but it doesn't change the fact (for me) that open offices are bad by default and need personal and spatial modification to become acceptable, as compared to the mythical office with a door which would be good for getting things done by default. It's not about being incapable of function without "utter total silence", it's about being made slightly miserable every day on average.

It's funny - I'd have said that this is a fairly good outcome, including the "pings you on Slack" part. It separates "this question is best answered in person" from "this question is best raised in person", which does a lot of good.

It means that if you need 30 seconds to save, commit, and pull the relevant branch (or 50 minutes for an urgent bugfix), the other person doesn't have to hover awkwardly or walk away. And it means that if you don't know the answer and have to check something, you can do that before talking to them. And then, yes, you can talk in person. Because that still really is the best answer a lot of the time.

I think I understand their complaint, because depending on how an open plan office is laid out this might be efficient for 2 people and distracting for 10 around them, but I don't think that's inevitable. Even with open plan, it's possible to have relatively low interference and seat people who talk often close together. (Companies seating by rank or function instead of need for contact are, obviously, doing it wrong.)

For all the complaints about Slack as a distraction, my experience has been that it's a huge boon relative to what it replaces. It's pretty well understood that in-person and phone contact mean "answer now" and email means "answer in some hours" or even "tomorrow morning". Channel messages as "someone answer in 10-60 minutes" and DMs as "answer in a few minutes barring a crisis" are a huge improvement in terms of focus.

Cause slack does not interrupt while I am focused while your question does interrupt while I am focused. It takes effort and time to get back to focused state. Frequent random interrupts kill productivity.

So, while it is making you faster, it is killing focus and productivity of the person you are asking to. Which is fine as long as the other person does not have deadline or other need to produce more.

I almost always have noise cancelling headphones and my colleagues ping me on Slack, "got a minute?" and when I'm ready (often instantly, sometimes not) I roll over to their desk. Decent compromise.

it is killing focus and productivity of the person you are asking to.

At the expense of mine by asking me a question, and asking me for help.

Seems rather one-sided, no? A colleague has asked for my help. Their concentration is already broken because there is a problem they need help solving, and probably their work progress is halted because they're unsure what to do about a given problem, and think I am someone who can help them.

I genuinely do not understand the objection to whipping around and offering to help that person solve a problem that prevents them from accomplishing a task, project, assignment or obligation.

I ask for help understanding the conceit here, that the person who turns around and helps their colleague is at fault of 'breaking someone's concentration' when they were asked to provide help to a coworker.

> I ask for help understanding the conceit here, that the person who turns around and helps their colleague is at fault of 'breaking someone's concentration' when they were asked to provide help to a coworker.

How on earth did you came to that interpretation?

The person who asks question is interrupting the other one. Asking via slack is less intrusive as it gives the colleague the chance to finish whatever the colleague is doing before answering.

How on earth did you came to that interpretation?

Because SO many of the replies to my original inquiry seem-by verbiage-to have taken what I said as an indicator that I was the one causing the interruption, not the one responding to it.

Or, maybe I misunderstood their replies wholesale, and are in fact suggesting that responding to someone who asks for help electronically with ad hoc assistance contributes to the spiraling decline of office productivity by turning to the person sitting 36" away and offering the requested assistance.

Ah, I did actually misunderstood your original comment. I apologise.

They’re answering questions, not asking them.

> They said "I was part of the problem".

You are.

> Because it's quicker to turn around and have a human conversation with someone sitting a yard away than type, take screenshots, and beam them over the network?

No. Because, if everybody does that the office gets loud and distracting and also nothing gets documented and people have to waste time asking and answering the same questions again and again.

I'm hesitant to look at this a problem of "either answer the question verbally" OR "document the solution for later reference" because people and teams have the capability to discuss problems face-to-face, distill that answer and create documentation based on that collaboration at a later time or date-like during a sprint review.

In fact, I think many in this profession do exactly that: issue is brought up, solutions are discussed either via chat or ad hoc, a solution is found, and documentation is created around those discussions.

Nor do I think this is an issue of asking the same questions repeatedly when it could have been answered once.

What is presented here is a simple enough scenario where someone asks for help, and I do what is in my means to render aid. Adding additional variables or considerations to the equation that weren't proffered as elements of the initial problem isn't an entirely helpful tactic to the discussion.

I'm not big on pretending there aren't real differences with respect to the kinds of work done in this industry. Some engineering is harder than others and open offices simply don't fit all cases. Or even most, per the article.

How do you actually get any work done?

Answering a question in person likely breaks your concentration for a few minutes.

Having to wait for 5-10 minutes for an answer in Slack breaks the concentration of the person asking the question, _and_ your concentration because you still need to get distracted and answer the question.

Async communication is great in many cases, likely most cases. Sync communication does have important uses, though.

Answering a question in person likely breaks your concentration for a few minutes.

I'm going to argue that their concentration is already broken because there's a problem, needing remediation and help from a colleague on to the point of bothering to ask in the first place. And if you're sitting three feet away from me, I'm sorry but I'd much rather just flip around, ask if you have a minute, answer the question, and drive closer to the desired team outcome.

Change my mind.

The other person then has to either interrupt everything to help you (so now you’re both distracted for a while) or say no (while maintaining a mental task queue to remember to get back to you later, which is mentally taxing). Overall, it feels a bit selfish to interrupt someone to get your trouble solved when there are more subtle ways of doing it.

Overall, it feels a bit selfish to interrupt someone to get your trouble solved when there are more subtle ways of doing it.

I'm a bit confused by this. It is selfish, in the workplace to ask a colleague for help who sits an arm's length away?

Be it via Slack or shoulder tap, you're breaking their concentration regardless. Whatever task they were doing, is now being stopped because of the ask for help.

Maybe I'm looking at this from too high of a vantage point. Help me out here.

Slack, email, or IM don't break my concentration because I ignore them when I don't have time to answer questions. It's not as easy to ignore someone physically tapping on your shoulder.

There's a very simple way to not interrupt someone working: try to catch their eye. If you can't, they're probably busy. Write down your question and move onto another aspect of what you're working on. You might even realize the answer to your own question while working. Maybe you will collect multiple questions, and you can ask them all at once rather than interrupting someone multiple times.

I've certainly had days where I got nothing done because people asked me a question every 10-20 minutes.

It feels weird jumping to someone's defense here, but it's been equally weird watching so many people completely mischaracterize what the grandparent (great-grandparent, I think?) comment said:

S/he is not the one asking for help. He is the one being asked for help. Their attention and focus is the one being interrupted (or at least that's what their first comment said, that they receive numerous requests from help from someone who sits directly behind them via chat). And on that note, I actually find myself taking his or her side on this. They are being asked for help by someone who sits close enough away that they can quickly provide an answer verbally and return to their chores/duties.

That seems more efficient than hammering at the keyboard given the recipient can very likely hear the sound of one's voice with the response to the inquiry for assistance.

Why are so many comments to this problem being presented as if this person is the one who needs their behavior rectified, when they are not the source of the interruption, but the recipient of?

I know what the original comment asked, which is why I did not answer that original comment. But this most recent comment did not ask that:

> I'm a bit confused by this. It is selfish, in the workplace to ask a colleague for help who sits an arm's length away?

> Be it via Slack or shoulder tap, you're breaking their concentration regardless. Whatever task they were doing, is now being stopped because of the ask for help.

I was responding to this. They are now asking from the point of view of the person doing the interrupting. The statement about Slack vs shoulder tap is not true for me, and I would guess it is not true for a lot of people. Someone asking a question via Slack does not break my concentration.

I’ll quote (and ignore the strawman):

>It is selfish, in the workplace to ask a colleague for help who sits an arm's length away-Slack or shoulder tap, you're breaking their concentration regardless

Not really, because you can disable notifications and check when you have free time. A physical interruption is abrupt and for sure will distract.

I haven't removed a single point of order from my post, beyond to edit a grammatical error; and to what strawman are you pointing? I quoted a direct line from your post and explained why I disagreed with it.

If this is how you're about to start discussing this, then I'll just bow out right now.

The strawman is:

>It is selfish, in the workplace to ask a colleague for help who sits an arm's length away?

Because I haven’t said that, at all. I’ll bow out myself.

This entire comment thread began because the person you're replying presented a situation where they are the person sitting arms length away from the messenger. At least, that was my impression, having sat back and watched this thread balloon so quickly, seems like a lot of people missed that and thought dvtrn was the one asking for help, when he's the one being asked and interrupted.

dvtrn have I misunderstood your posts? Sorry to put words in your mouth if I have.

No you are correct.

Why do you think Slack is just as interruptive as a shoulder tap? When I have to focus on my work and I’m in a state where I cannot answer someone else’s question for a while, I minimize Slack and email, usually for several hours.

You can still send me a message on Slack, and I’ll respond in a few hours when I can.

But if you speak verbally directly to me at my desk or tap me on the shoulder, then I have to break my concentration, engage in social norms about hearing out your question. Even if I instantly tell you I can’t help right now, I’ll lose 5-15 minutes getting back to concentration every time you do this.

You have a very unusual and incorrect understanding about how much more severely distracting itbis to receive a verbal / shoulder tap interruption for a question than something asynchronous like Slack or email.

This is exactly what I'm saying. In the case of a quick question, in-person communication is more efficient for both sides. Doing the same thing async has a noticeably higher overhead.

There is almost no scenario where interrupting a developer in person is better than sending them an IM that they can respond to later.

The only reason would be actual urgency (not the pretend emergencies that businesses claim, either).

As an individual, what you say your ratio is of "Sure I can help now" to "I'll help you later" when a colleague asks for help?

Merely curious.

I think the point is that you should assume most engineers need large uninterrupted blocks most of the time most days. It’s not about a ratio of one to the other, it’s about needing 5-hour segments of time in which nobody asks you anything at all and you don’t have to say “sure I can help now” or “I’ll help you later” because you don’t need to say anything when you’re not interrupted.

Saying “I’ll help you later” usually comes with 5-15 minutes of lost productivity while you try to get your concentration back for what you were just doing.

Also, it’s often better to bundle questions together, usually at the end of the day, and document them like with an internal Q&A board, to reduce future needs to interrupt over that same question.

But, to put some number on this, I’d say later in the afternoon, if I’m not busy for a deadline, I’ll jump up and help on all questions.

Between 7 am and lunch, I will not help you unless it’s an absolute emergency. I simply can’t afford to if I am going to do my job. Between lunch and 4pm, say, it’s a crapshoot based on what I’m doing, but generally I would say I respond with “I’ll help you later” to 90% of interrupting questions.

Interestingly, on my year end reviews one of the most consistent pieces of positive feedback I’ve gotten across several different employers, is that I am extremely helpful and generous with explaining things, and that my explanations are usually exceptionally clear and offer insight that quickly clears up confusion and leaves impressive documentation behind for people to reference later.

It’s about communicating smart, not communicating constantly. I defer about 90% of the questions I’m asked, yet people look to me as “the guy who always answers everybody’s questions.”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com