The Church of Interruption (2018)

I admired the left alignments of the quotation marks, but was really put off by them breaking after the diagram.

There are easy, non-offensive, non-interrupting methods of communicating while another person is talking. Signal yes/no, dissent, agreement? Thumbs up or down, Nod or shake head. Applause? Deaf people's clap (raise both hands, oscillate quickly around z-axis). Want to say something? Raise one hand. Want the speaker to get on with it? Circular motion with the tip of the index finger around the y-axis. Strongly disagree with speaker and intend to insult? Show middle finger (ok, that one is offensive, intentionally).

There is a rich repertoire of non-verbal communication available to us that most people will understand. And if you use them, the problem instantly vanishes.

That people don't use them is imho not a problem of not knowing or not understanding. It is a problem of lacking civility. Of the desire to assert dominance by interrupting. Of asserting dominance by talking for a long time. And of the myopic concentration on verbal communication.

Now if you are on the phone, there isn't much else you can do, of course...

The wizard has mastered all 4 quadrants and skillfully choses protocols based on the current programming contexts at play.

Also, communication is programming and the wizard is very clear about this.

Speaking from my experience:

The problem isn’t interruption, it’s how someone interrupts. I have been in many meetings over my career where the loudest person speaks very authoritatively about something they don’t understand, resulting in the meeting becoming completely derailed: invariants and laws are needlessly questioned, and important design parameters are overlooked.

An example taken from real world experience: loud interrupter asks for input on how we can ensure messages arrive in-order over a TCP connection. I speak up and, after verifying that I interpreted the question correctly, state that we don’t have to worry about that — in-order delivery is guaranteed by TCP itself. Interrupter cuts me off to say “that’s an interesting theory, but it’s really important that we know messages will be delivered in order. Jason, or Susan, what do you know of, oh, what’s that called… Raft? Paxos? I think there things called state machines?” This general pattern continues: I try to assert that we’re getting caught up trying to solve , I get cut off mid sentence, and interrupter spouts off buzzwords that they don’t understand hoping that something will stick.

At some point I then have to raise my voice: “hey, hey, HEY! You’re not hearing me. This is a non-issue. It is simply a fact that TCP guarantees in order delivery. That’s not a theory of mine, it’s not something I’m feeling. It’s fact. Do you understand that, or do you believe that the TCP specification is broken in some way, and that every book on TCP is somehow wrong? Also, please, please stop cutting me off.”

It’s not people speaking up regularly or occasionally interrupting that’s an issue — the issue is when I have to raise my voice and become confrontational to have an interrupter let me speak and raise concerns of my own, when I have to consistently push back against attempts at silencing me. Or when I raise a point, and interrupter (seemingly to keep an air of authority) cuts me off after I raise a concern for which I would like to offer guidance, turns to someone else, and says “so what do you think of that?”

These individuals usually ascend the org chart rapidly, as they seem incredibly engaged, and their domination of meetings is usually conflated with good leadership skills (after all, it looks like everyone is following their lead). If they’re working with junior level developers, their ignorance goes unnoticed, and by the time these interrupters are several tiers up the org chart, their peers are too far removed from the technical side to realize that the interrupter doesn’t know which end is up — but the interrupter has strong opinions, “so surely they know what they are talking about.”

Fortunately, such people are pretty rare (at least in my experience).