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Comment by MatthewPhillips | Hacker News Reader

> In my experience, having someone there in person is a lot more productive, I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting around for emails to be responded to.

More productive for who? You? Better hope that person wasn't in the middle of something important when you broke his/her train of thought that will take a good half hour for them to recover.

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No train of thought takes half an hour to recover, that is massively scaled up to make my point sound ridiculous. That aside, if I feel it is important enough that it required an immediate response prompting me to go all the way to their desk, then it's most likely more productive for the entire company.

I should probably post-face this with the fact that I am one of only 2 devs at my company, the rest are content production / design / marketing.

Actually studies suggest that for "knowledge workers" like programmers 25 minutes is the average amount of time it takes to recover from an interruption to a task. So half an hour lost to an interruption isn't that bad an estimate. Anecdotally I've certainly had times deep into debugging complex problems where an interruption has needed a lot longer than 30 minutes to recover from.

This. I find I can generally get back into feature writing within 5-10 minutes. Debugging can take much longer. This is the number one reason for staying late, because I know that if I leave this issue now, it will take me half of tomorrow just to get back to this particular spot.

> That aside, if I feel it is important enough that it required an immediate response prompting me to go all the way to their desk, then it's most likely more productive for the entire company.

You must have some incredible judgment then. Do you trust all of your coworkers with having that same level of judgment?

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