> Cal Newport said it best in his book Deep Work: the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive. The people who cultivate that skill, stay up late at night while everyone is asleep so they don’t get distracted. T…
If you work on a team, being reachable is part of your work. There are (few) opportunities for solo thinking, and Cal is lucky to find one. I hope you find one for yourself. But as a team, the answer "I can't reach the expert because they secluded themselves" is not acceptable. Because as a senior figure on a team, you job is to become a force multiplier for others, not a solo force. Not to do work that magnanimously…
It's not that I disagree with the premise. Rather, I believe as a society, we've largely taught ourselves helplessness and failed to document properly how things are supposed to work (both when requesting features and checking how existing things work, both functionally and in code). Add short tenures onto this, and it makes for a system which needs a lot more synchronized "are you available" time than need be.
Additionally, maybe I'm biased, but many juniors don't need as much mentorship as the average senior dev here likes to claim once they're settled in. Again, it might be backfiring in terms of learned helplessness, where they won't try and solve their own problems first. Furthermore, it stimulates not documenting processes in a way that newcomers can learn, where seniors become glorified encyclopedias. Most juniors I come across stumble here: not when the problem can be found online, but when the problem is a piece of domain knowledge / in-house framework documented extremely poorly, and requires an extensive amount of time to communicate.
Combating this may cut down required mentoring significantly. Now imagine you might be able to cut down regular mentoring to a 1-2h window. On a regular 8 hour day, that leaves a whole 6-7h to plan at your own convenience. This could have different setups as well (two days with high accessibility, three days of access only in critical cases). Most of all, as long as we don't make the deep dive and continue our existing ideas, we're only setting ourselves up for a selffulfilling prophecy. It's only after we try, we can accurately make such bold claims.