Say No
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If someone comes to your desk directly, you are supposed to stop what you are doing and give your attention to that person, even if you are working on something really urgent.
Refusing meeting requests is also not well seen unless you have another appointment, meetnaping happens all the time.
A lot has to do also with open space offices, where everybody is just sitting there and makes it even more awkward, and you are right there available to be interrupted.
Interruptions from persons on your own team are to be taken with even more priority, the modern open office is just a high-interruption environment and there is nothing to be done about it.
In the end it might be really a good thing, because if a person is blocked it walks to the desk of someone else and sometimes can be unblocked and the company as a whole goes forward.
Doing what his boss did of cutting another person off with a 'not now' is not something that his boss can get away with a lot of times, even if he is under pressure: its demoralizing, it just ends up creating a weird atmosphere.
One solution might be: one or two days of remote work a week for everybody.
Some people get personally offended if you don't stop what you are doing to talk to them. I have a feeling that this is harder for people that work for IT departments, because people in other departments don't understand the cost associated to an interruption like that.
This cartoon says it all: http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-...
A lot depends upon what you are paid to deliver. If you're a software engineer, you are paid to deliver working software. You can deliver that software more efficiently if you do not let yourself be interrupted; hence, most good bosses will be okay with a "Shhh, not right now, send me an e-mail" if it's clear you're in the zone on a hard problem. And if you have a bad boss that cares more about attention than results, you should look for a new job anyway.
Same goes for traders, fund managers, and quants in finance - you are paid to make money, and it doesn't matter how rude you are as long as you deliver that.
It most certainly won't work for an administrative assistant, where you are paid to save time for your executive. It won't work for an advertising or marketing exec or salesperson, where you are paid for collaborative, face-to-face interactions. It probably won't even work for a lawyer or investment banking associate, where you are paid to be a partner's bitch.
No, you're paid to deliver solutions. Often the best way to get the solution you need is to make sure the N engineers around you are being productive.
There've been times where the most productive use of my time was to answer questions all day long and not write a single line of code. There've also been times where my job was to shield the engineers on my team and intercept anyone who tried to talk to them. But a lot of the time - I am writing the code. If I don't write the code, it won't get written. The guy being paid to deliver solutions is an executive several levels above me on the org chart who's been with the company since he was the one heads-down writing code, and then it's my manager's job to shield me from everyone who wants to talk to me.
Forgive me for being cynical about the whole premise.
Saying no like this can also be used by people that fake being busy. The same way they always walk with a notepad and pens, and other such tricks.
So Dustin said "Not now!", and the author extrapolated this to a parable about how people at Facebook are so dedicated and productive that they are willing to be borderline rude to serve the company.
Dustin said "Not now", and that's it. It does not mean much.
Eventually my manager at the time did the best thing he could for me. He asked me into his office for a "talk". Then he told me that he didn't want to lose me because I burned out. He said, "Look, you have to learn to say no to people. If you aren't comfortable doing that then tell them to run it by me; and then I'll say no."
Where I work, the entire culture changed from "let's work together to make everything better" to "you drop everything RIGHT NOW if the boss decides that they have a personal project" when a new one took over.
...and so I will be starting my new job in a couple of weeks.
The overarching point is that you need to focus on what's truly important.
This does not mean you need to be rude or outright say "no" in a blunt or un-tactful way. You can come up with any way you like to manage those interruptions and distractions. The point is that people who truly get things completed usually keep their focus and know how to say no to things that aren't truly important.
It's extremely useful to me at this point in my career, and I can think of others who have the same issue, being constantly busy with less important "now" items and being unable to focus on what I believe is really important. Part of it is the company, the people, and that I'm able to do many things; but most of the problem is in how I manage those inputs, and what I train people to do. It's my responsibility to manage my own time to reach the greatest impact, and in doing that, the company will improve; even for the people who think they needed my time urgently.
I'm a huge systems thinker and I generally try not to blame individuals for problems, but this is something I recognize as being almost totally on me.
I believe this is what the article is all about.
(Floor plan: http://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2012/08/dezeen_Frank-Gehry-...)
Apple is at the other extreme - they keep their groups isolated, often behind locked doors. Microsoft used to run recruiting ads for programmers pointing out that their programmers get offices with doors. Google tends to have medium-sized bullpens surrounded by many small glass conference rooms.
I am thinking of it like some sort of weird combination of the desk arrangements of their old Palo Alto office on the scale of their new Menlo Park campus, only all indoors without the myriad of hallways and walls.
Fortunately, we eventually made it clear that you can move up in title, but remain focused on engineering instead of management. This helped tremendously to set it up so we have a set of people who have time set aside specifically for talking about problems, and you can chat with them in order to solve problems while leaving the folks solving code problems alone so they can maintain their productivity.
[1] http://blynclight.proboards.com [2] http://blink1.thingm.com/buy/ [3] https://blinkinlabs.myshopify.com/products/blinkytape-basic
Among other products like this there's definitely a way!
Not great if you don't like wearing headphones though.
Better, I find, is just talking at someone with a cultural expectation of high latency in their response, which is true of a lot of IRC channels. In many previous HN threads people have mentioned the chat room format being crucial for their work discussion; you can direct a question at someone, while allowing it to be publicly visible too so that someone else can step in.
As a manager of a large organization, I have more respect for people on my team who say no and assert stronger ownership over their time, ideally by being transparent about their priorities. At the end of the day, we just look at impact and managing ones own time is a good sign that someone is focused on impact. Still, I'm sure that isn't the case with every manager in every company (or even every manager in my company)
The open space aspect of the FB offices is usually navigated by people putting headphones on to indicate they are heads down. I do it often even though I'm rarely listening to anything. I agree it isn't for everyone though.
I'm sure he didn't mean any harm and was under pressure. People make mistakes. And compensation is called compensation for a reason - (stock) compensation for being yelled at, I'm sure makes it feel better - especially when it's early facebook stock.
I quit. Did something else.
8 years ago I joined that very same company again. I'm still a 'corporate drone', a random developer, but I learned to decline and to say no. Both to your managers and to your coworkers. That single word saved my sanity and allows me to stay with that company to this very day.
I don't agree that it's a matter of culture (at least not in the culture I am roughly familiar with) if you can pull this of. It certainly might be a matter of culture how you need to phrase it.
Fortunately my employer is rather blunt and open internally, so 'No, I really have no patience for that right now' is - while not the friendliest possible answer - acceptable and possible.
Now I need to learn how to walk the fine line between 'saying no' and 'being old and grumpy' :)
That's the difficult part in my experience. I say no a lot. Some people have the impression that I'm lazy or privileged because they feel they can't say no. They certainly can, but they don't want to feel like they're upsetting anyone.
But sometimes when I say no, I say it in the wrong way, or don't provide enough context for why "no" is right. This doesn't help me at other times, even when I've (mostly) effectively communicated that no is the right decision for the person that's asking me to do something.
Not that they don't want to talk to you at all, they just want you to wait till they finish what they're doing first. This is apparently considered "socially awkward" in California.
Not only that, this person then went off and introspected on the broader meaning of this "watershed moment," and concluded that "socially awkward" things like occasionally saying no to someone are sometimes actually OK and good...
After fighting this culture for years, I couldn't handle the constant interruptions anymore and quit. I have a home office now and I control all the variables in it. I couldn't be happier.
In essence, whatever is at #6 or #10 at your priority list is not something that's somewhat important and should be tackled from time to time - it's the very thing that's stealing your time and attention away from your #1 and #2 things, a dangerous distraction that you should consciously limit and either avoid or schedule to a specific time.
You don't have to worry about priority #1001 taking your time - you don't want to do it and so you won't; but things that are seemingly good often lead to "yak-shaving" at the cost of what's truly important for you.
But the pressure had to be immense to react like that - and one suspects that it's only because of good well balanced people around that they could take the social shutdown and come back to work still focused instead of suddenly fostering a poisonous atmosphere - something that can easily happen if the no was taken as "no I don't value you" instead of "no we have to find new ways of working"
Would be interesting to hear others views of this formative time.
If you are interrupted in while working on a very complicated subject, going back to the same focus level takes up to 30 minutes for me. The time I could spent on fixing stuff.
I am happy that most of my employers / managers understood and appreciated this.
You can explain them with this comic as well: http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-...
At the same time it's important to understand that for every no there should also be a yes, and it's just as easy to gently put people down rather than say something that could be construed as rude.
In fact if you had got stuck but didn't ask for help and for some reason the work got delayed this will get escalated and you will be blamed for not asking for help. I just think thats the way it should be.
If I were to wear my slightly evil hat though, I would say it's useful to occasionally decline meetings. It doesn't hurt to remind people your time is of value.
In both the old office and my home office I made / make a real effort to set the box to an appropriate value, i.e. don't have the red cross showing all the time or it loses it's meaning. These days it's only my wife who is looking to interrupt me, fortunately, but this system works well. And, hell, one of the benefits of working from home is having your wife 'insist' on taking you away from a 'red cross' task once in a while, heh-heh.
On the other hand, something that could take a minute for me to answer could take someone an hour to figure out, thus thwarting productivity on the other end.
For many people, especially when they're working on difficult or complex tasks, an interruption will cause them to feel a bit angry or frustrated. This is completely 100% normal.
They don't mean to hurt your feelings. They just need some space to focus. Give them a bit of space, and think nothing else of it.
> Look back on your past week and assemble an honest accounting of your attention. Does the time you spent in each area mirror the importance of that area? This exercise is the true test of your ability to prioritize. It will tell you whether you are able to maintain focus on the important or whether you get distracted by the urgent.
And when you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
http://www.eitanbirshan.com/blog/time-management-covey%E2%80...
As the person delivering information, you by definition have more context than the person or people you're delivering it to. Asking the world to figure-it-out and expecting them to do so correctly is a path that I think is likely to net-cost you.
If you want a more polite version, "I'm sorry not right now."
That's rude, and doesn't actually mean that the refusing party was being productive/busy at the time.
It just means "not now". There could be 100 reasons why.
That's awesome.
This captures the essence of the post, and is almost universally applicable.
Then the "why is everyone being so negative and critical?" comment rises to the top.
For example, saying no to PHP -- whatever it's merits -- means being able to say yes to Java, Python, C, Go, Clojure, whatever. Saying no to Windows means being able to say yes, more, to Linux. Saying no to meetings means saying yes to writing a new feature or fixing a bug. Saying no to interruptions means saying yes to focus. And so on.
You have only so much time in the day, week, year, rest of your life. It's not that there's no value, benefit or use to the thing you're saying no to, it's that the alternative will often give you more of those things, or otherwise help make your life better in some strategic long-term way, or in some non-tangible way like making you happier.
Dustin probably started saying "No" not so much because his time was being monopolized by technical issues, but because other engineers (including the author) were trying to curry favor with him as they saw the status of the social network start to rise.