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Programmer interrupted: The cost of interruption and context switching (2022)

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Re: Programmer interrupted: The cost of interruption and context switching (2022)

#251

Post by mtrower »

dghughes wrote: post #207

I'm not a programmer but always tried to be one. Now in middle age I know I could have been one there's nothing amazing about it you just practice with guidance. Like playing a musical instrument very few people can play instantly unless they practice. Sure there are Mozarts but 99.999% of musicians are not. I went to school a few years ago and we had programming. I was able to do it but my younger classmates were be…

While I don’t know how I feel about the word “savant”, I do seem to match your idea of the few, and in that regard I have two things to say here…

* Interruptions affect me just as the article describes. I have my suspicions about those who claim to be unaffected.

* Talent may indeed play a role, but what you probably aren’t seeing behind the apparent talent is the self-driven obsession. Behind those 5 minutes is a mountain of self-obtained experience. As I understand it, even Mozart was no different…

Expanding on that slightly, when considering if I was special compared to the average individual: I self-taught myself from the age of 8, so yeah, probably something different about me that enabled that. On the other hand, I self-taught myself from the age of 8, spending nearly every free moment with computers. How messed up would it be if I didn’t end up with a massive lead over those just starting out?

Of course it was effortless in 5 minutes: I’d already put in more effort by that point than many would in a lifetime…

I guess the moral is, try to consider what it might be that you aren’t seeing.

Re: Programmer interrupted: The cost of interruption and context switching (2022)

#253

Post by robbintt »

asdff wrote: post #9

If I know I am going to have my day broken into sub 1hr chunks thanks to meetings and such, I pretty much write off the day entirely. It takes time to get into the flow state, some studies cite over 20 minutes, and once you are in it you want to stay in it for like four hours. No emails to follow up with, no slack, no zooms, no one tapping your shoulder, no conversations about the weekend distracting you on the perip…

I collected all my meetings into "meeting thursday". A dump day - typically from 9-2, sometimes 9-5. Sometimes I cancel or reschedule everything if another "dump cluster" forms.

Re: Programmer interrupted: The cost of interruption and context switching (2022)

#254

Post by giantrobot »

steve1977 wrote: post #152
giantrobot wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

> 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.

Re: Programmer interrupted: The cost of interruption and context switching (2022)

#256

Post by darthrupert »

asdff wrote: post #9

If I know I am going to have my day broken into sub 1hr chunks thanks to meetings and such, I pretty much write off the day entirely. It takes time to get into the flow state, some studies cite over 20 minutes, and once you are in it you want to stay in it for like four hours. No emails to follow up with, no slack, no zooms, no one tapping your shoulder, no conversations about the weekend distracting you on the perip…

For me it's much worse. If most of my days are reacting to outside signals, it takes me at least a week to get back to the mode where I rely on my own motivation.

I've been in jobs where that happens only for a few weeks in a year, after major vacations.

Re: Programmer interrupted: The cost of interruption and context switching (2022)

#257

Post by wpietri »

asdff wrote: post #242
silisili wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar raising. At one point I was ASE certified, at another I was a landscaper. The first thing I noticed about white collar work was how gossipy and lazy everyone was. We didn't have time for that in blue collar work. I had no idea how these people were useful to work or society. It seems so bizarre to me, even today, that most white collar jobs make more money. It's like they took the people who couldn't work phy…

IMO you work harder in blue collar but its less stress because people don't expect you to hustle to meet a deadline.. I was also a landscaper for a while. Labor is labor in that sort of job, it marches at an expected rate and is dependent on how many hands are working. You often cannot just work for longer, either, if you are bound by the constraints of daylight, or having to clear out of the area by a certain time d…

For sure. White collar work is treated as unreal, mentally malleable, in a way people have mostly learned to not do with physical work.

Re: Programmer interrupted: The cost of interruption and context switching (2022)

#258

Post by eitland »

mrguyorama wrote: post #232
eitland wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to be most common. My comment is only pointing out that for me it is the opposite: I work better without breakfast.

That's very unusual. Your brain needs ready supplies of glucose to function. Not eating breakfast is forcing your body to turn energy stores into glucose in a way that it tries to avoid and probably doesn't give your brain ample supply, or just not function well. Do you actually work better, or have you decided that you work better?

Many well functioning people, including IIRC navy attack divers, live on a glucose free diet for a long time, so I am not alone.

As for if I work better or just have decided I work better, I only have 4 or 5 years of experience with this but despite the fact that I love breakfast and lunch I still skip them because the brain fog I seem to get between 1200 and 1400 on days when I eat breakfast just isn't worth it.

Re: Programmer interrupted: The cost of interruption and context switching (2022)

#259

Post by yoz-y »

adultSwim wrote: post #255

I think we complain about this too much. Meetings and communication are work too.

Seems like most projects end up so bloated that you need 20 minutes to get back to understanding what you were working on. I tend to avoid "clever" code as much as I can, so it is quite obvious what stuff does. Can get right back into it in matters of minutes.

Re: Programmer interrupted: The cost of interruption and context switching (2022)

#260

Post by zevir »

Important topic! Totally agree that context switching has a heavier cost than most people realize. That's also why so many product/dev teams are optimizing for tools that improve dev productivity and collaboration. Here are a few other links that you might find interesting: https://livecycle.io/blogs/humanitec-dx-study/ https://livecycle.io/blogs/context-switch/
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