Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, the cost of context switching is well-known, and has been proven, over and over again, for decades.

But managers don't care (and many co-workers also).

A quick shufti at most modern open-plan offices, shows the contempt that managers have for developer context. They know better, and have made the conscious decision to go open, anyway.

I remember visiting the Facebook/Instagram building, in NYC, and was aghast at the huge, noisy, crowded office. I would not be able to get any work done, in that environment.

I'm grateful to be in a position, where I work alone (mostly), as I can keep all those balls in the air, and the difference in productivity is amazing.

View on HN

This killed me my last few years at Apple in the spaceship. Everything in the fucking building is a distraction and most of it is constantly in your line of sight at all times.

Even if I managed to angle my monitor right, put on headphones, and pull my hoodie up to reduce distractions some side conversation or impromptu stand up would inevitably distract me and pull me out of my flow. I tried to come in as late as practical in order to stay late so I could get work done for a few uninterrupted hours. I found myself going in a day on the weekend to actually get the previous week's work finished. Unfortunately management doesn't like people coming in "late" because they can't lord over them from their offices during the day and constantly interrupt them with meetings.

It was downright insulting that a $5b building intended for professionals didn't have real offices with fucking doors. At the upper management level the fact the company worked as well if not better with WFH policies must be incensing. It makes plain the insipid claims about "collaboration" in that stupid building. Collaboration happens when engineers want to share ideas, not because they're imprisoned in a glorified fish tank for eight hours a day.

> This killed me my last few years at Apple in the spaceship. Everything in the fucking building is a distraction and most of it is constantly in your line of sight at all times.

That‘s an interesting bit of information. Maybe this is one of reasons in the decline of quality at Apple - at least in temporal terms it could correlate.

I'd put the source of a quality decline as the cumulative effect of the yearly OS release cadence. The schedule doesn't leave nearly enough time for feature development, testing, and then bug fixes based on the testing. At the end of the summer the OSes get declared "zero bugs" which really just means a bunch of bugs get punted back to the originator asking for reproduction or extra documentation. By this time no one has time for try reproducing the bug unless it's really egregious. So the new OS just has a bunch of new bugs and rarely do any of the bugs from the previous release get fixed unless they're particularly egregious or security issues.

This leaves a lot of little bugs sitting around that might only affect say 1% of the user base but every bug is usually a different 1%. So almost everyone ends up running into annoying bugs for their particular usage/workflow. A secondary effect are big mid-cycle releases like iOS 16.4 which end up bundling features likely meant for the 16.0 release in the fall but slipped. Unfortunately due to the crunch they get the same level of testing/bug fixing as the fall point releases.

The building doesn't lead to poor software quality, that's a failure of scheduling/planning on the part of management. The shitty building just puts the software development on Hard Mode.

> Collaboration happens when engineers want to share ideas, not because they're imprisoned in a glorified fish tank for eight hours a day.

I feel like this is an obvious truth that is somehow overlooked a lot, willfully or otherwise.

> But managers don't care (and many co-workers also).

For the majority, the cost is not that well known and in general they are not the ones paying for it, you are.

In particular for your colleagues it may be beneficial to disturb you because when they disturb you, you may lose concentration but the may in fact avoid losing it by quickly get an answer to their pending problem.

This is one aspect where LLMs may be very useful: asking something to a tool like ChatGPT may not be faster than asking a colleague, but if it avoids ruining the colleague's concentration it will be a net positive for the company. This is even more true if/when those model will incorporate specific internal knowledge (code, documentation) of the company.

> In particular for your colleagues it may be beneficial to disturb you because when they disturb you, you may lose concentration but the may in fact avoid losing it by quickly get an answer to their pending problem.

This is true, but the people getting asked are usually the ones doing (much) more delicate work, so it’s their concentration that should be protected.

Huh, I really thought `shufti` was a typo in this context, and one that sounded funny to my Middle Eastern ears, so I was surprised to discover it's a real word, albeit with Middle Eastern origins [1].

1. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shufti

I was raised amongst a lot of brits (me mum was one), but I’ve left a lot of that behind (I had a British accent, as a child).

>But managers don't care (and many co-workers also).

i bet 99% of time people are interrupting themselves. Like i just did to browse HN.

People definitely need some distractions but for me it's definitely not 99% of the time. Also, I could argue sometimes the solitaire game between coding stints is actually loading up your brain with some software thoughts, and then giving it a little break to process. Sometimes it takes a day for me to come back and feel like my brain has reconciled some details of a hard problem and only then can I make progress.

A momentary distraction like a quick HN check is not the same as the context switching of, for example, going to a budget meeting while in the middle of trying to figure out some technical detail. Very different things.

Agree completely. A self-determined break is an entirely different thing from being interrupted by other people.

The difference is scheduling and autonomy. If you had "HN Time" blocked out in your calendar it'd be just as distracting as a budgeting meeting. HN only is different because you can choose when to be distracted by it, and you're happy to say no to it.

If you could control when the budget meeting happens, or if you could decline it, you'd have far fewer issues with it.

> i bet 99% of time people are interrupting themselves. Like i just did to browse HN.

I don't know about you but I am here on a pomodoro break between two tasks.

There are people who dont care about you, nor your work - who will interrupt you because they only think about themselves.

Then there is a group of dicks who do it on purpose.

For me I have to for health reasons.

If you don't get up and walk around, at least 15 minutes of light to moderate exercise per hour seated, you will suffer bad health effects. Stuff that can end your life early and in painful ways.

I find walking around every hour or two for a while to collect my thoughts about what I'm working on is still something I can make productive. I bring a notebook with me to do some notes if there's more than I can fit in my head, which is pretty usual. It's a good way to get some planning in.

I interrupt myself all the time, when I'm bored and easily able to distract myself.

I interrupt myself when I'm in the flow absolutely never!

I'm really grateful to have a non-obtrusive work environment as well.

I check in with the team once a week and make sure the task tracking system is updated. Everyone is happy and stuff gets done.

We're going to have to do some more hands-on work down the line where we're going to need physical presence working with hardware which is going to be an interesting shift, but I still think that we're going to mostly adhere to the usual workflow.

It's not that they do not care it that they do not understand this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com