DaedTech - Programmers, Teach Non-Geeks The True Cost of Interruptions

Interruptions are one of the biggest sources of inefficiency for programmers. Now, to be fair, they’re probably a big source of inefficiency for everyone, but relatively speaking, they’re worse for programmers. To understand what I mean, let’s take someone whose job is in sales. A lot of the day is probably spent on the phone or in transit to and from meetings. In a given meeting or while reviewing notes prior to a meeting, an interruption to a sales person means time spent dealing with the interruption, a shake of the head, and a “where was I… oh, right.” For a manager, the day is often just a series of never-ending interruptions. In a management capacity, I find it common to sit down at lunch, still not having done the first thing I planned to do that day. Paul Graham has an excellent article about the different natures of the day for managers and for people he calls “makers,” a group that clearly includes programmers.

For a programmer, an interruption is oh-so different. There you sit, 12 calls into the call stack. On one monitor is a carefully picked set of inputs to a complex form that was responsible for generating the issue and on the other monitor is the comforting dark theme of your IDE, with the current line in the debugger glowing an angry yellow. You’ve been building to this moment for 50 minutes — you finally typed in the right inputs, understood the sequence in which the events had been fired, and got past the exact right number of foreach and while loops that took a few minutes each to process, and set your breakpoint before the exception was triggered, whipping you into some handler on the complete other end of the code base. Right now, at this exact moment, you understand why there are 22 items in the Orders collection, you know what the exact value of _underbilledCustomerCount is and you’ve hastily scribbled down the string “8xZ204330Kd” because that was the auto-generated confirmation code resulting from some combination of random numbers and GUIDs that you don’t understand and don’t want to understand because you just need to know what it is. This is the moment where you’re completely amped up because you’re about to unlock the mysteries of what on earth could be triggering a null reference exception in this third party library call that you’re pretty sure —

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But here’s the real insult-to-injury moment. When you try to explain to the PM how insanely destructive to your productivity that interaction was, he snorts at you and tells you not to be so melodramatic. He wanders off, wondering why programmers are such overdramatic prima donnas...

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Well, worry not, because I think I have a way that you can actually demonstrate to them just how devastating interruptions are to your productivity compared to, say, theirs. In other words, here’s how to make someone understand that, for you, an interruption isn’t just a delay after which you can get right back to work but a complete total of your efforts up to that point. Here’s how.

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Give him yet another minute. Then tell him that he’s only got 20 seconds left. Or is it 30? Maybe 25. Whatever the case may be, he’s getting into crunch time. Oh well, you guess he failed. Thank him in advance for lunch, but offer to let him keep his lunch money if he promises to stop constantly doing what you just did to him while you’re trying to code, which is a lot like keeping track of numbers all day in your head.

I'm going to have to use this on my wife... OH, did I say that out loud? I meant my boss... oh, there I go again... anyway... What's funny is that I'm sure every dev will get this and every non-dev won't.

"Dev's are from Mars and Non-Dev's are from some other fricken parallel dimension that I wish would fall into the massive black hole in the center of our galaxy when the interrupt me in the middle of coding session and break me out of the zone..."

Shame that's a little long for a title. :)