You seem stuck in the past and project your problems onto others. For many, IM and chat rooms do not cause productivity problems. Different companies use Slack and other tools in their own way, have their own policies as to what is expected and what not.
The client has enough options available you can set as you like as to not disturb you.
Email has its own problems. Sometimes you need answers to important questions promptly. @<user> works better then, at the same time, it is less intrusive than a phone call.
Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. It is not your leisure time.
Some people here talk about work like they think it is their own personal project time.
> Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. It is not your leisure time.
I do not agree with that statement. In lots of roles, it does not matter whether you answer now or in one hour, but being constantly disrupted unexpectedly can have a dramatic impact on concentration and productivity. I cannot do any substantial programming or data analysis if I expect to be disrupted. The problem is not someone calling because the house is on fire and I am the only one who can fix it; the problem is someone screaming for my attention to e.g. know if I will participate in an event in 2 months time. Avoiding unnecessary disruptions is not letting people have leisure time, it is allowing them to do their work properly.
This, please. Why on earth EVERYONE is expected to be "on the ready" all the time? I understand it may be the case for some people but...not being on the ready means you're on your leisure time?
Somewhere along the road we failed to grasp the idea that some jobs require extreme doses of concentration, and being highly available is a counter to those jobs. Don't pretend that customer support and chess players have the same needs to excel at their jobs.
I have a theory that certain job titles are amenable to people with poor boundaries. The first Pointy Haired Boss I encountered was a customer. Dumber than a post, his primary skill seemed to be in getting things he didn’t deserve.
Salespeople often worry far more about Face than Physics. If they told a customer something was easy, then you have to cobble something together quickly no matter what. Which means massive tech debt, huge time sinks, and later questions about why you guys are so slow now? That only stops when the engineers find solidarity, and agree to always say no.
> I cannot do any substantial programming or data analysis if I expect to be disrupted.
Yet when you're in an office, you can always be interrupted by anyone coming up to you (and that's usually true even if you have your private office). That doesn't mean we don't reduce the actual number of interruptions. The same applies when working remotely.
It's a matter of cost-to-interrupt. IM substantially lowers that, the same as home visit is more expensive than snail-mail spam is more expensive than e-mail spam.
>> Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you,
I don't want anyone who's job requires deep, introspective thought on big problems to be constanly distracted by a flashing toast that's probably a non-time sensitive, low-effort inquiry or worse.
This applies to my newest junior developer trying to learn a big, hairy code base, our senior product manager working through plans for the rest of the year, the CFO figuring out how we can afford to keep everyone employed or the vast majority of positions outside of those explicitly focused on inbound communication. If you work on the help desk, inbound marketing, tech support or sales, sure a big part of your responsibility is responsive communication. For most other roles responsive does not mean immediate or even really, really soon.
I can definitely appreciate how distracting it is to get nagged on slack. unless it's a manager, I will usually take at least 20-30 minutes to respond. this tends to cut down on a lot of the lazy questions. people figure out that if it only takes twenty minutes to solve their problem, they may as well just do it instead of waiting the same amount of time for a response.
most questions I get are genuine coordination problems that need to be resolved. "hey, I see you have x file checked out. I also need to make some changes. should I wait for you to submit or will it merge cleanly?" answering this kind of stuff promptly saves everyone a lot of headache in the long run.
there are also questions about code that you are much more familiar with than the other person. it might cost you an hour to get back into "deep work" mode, but you save that person a day or more of floundering around and possibly messing things up (that you will have to fix later).
I'm not making any assumptions about you personally, but I find that many people who complain a lot about distractions really just don't like working with other people. this is fine, but it means you should probably be in a role where other people depend less on your knowledge and/or using your interfaces.
This reads like undermining coworkers while cuddling up to management. Why do you peers not deserve immediate replies but manager does? Why should someone spend 20 minutes researching something if you can point them in the right direction faster?
I estimate twenty minutes as the average cost of answering a question. I'm only obligated to help co-workers if it costs me less time than it saves them. if a manager in your tree asks you a dumb question, they are squandering their own resources. I'm not obligated to stop them.
to be clear, I only use the twenty minute rule deliberately on people who consistently ask low effort questions. usually I just finish whatever subtask I'm working on, then think of a response. fortunately I don't have many people like this where I work, but they do exist.
> I'm only obligated to help co-workers if it costs me less time than it saves them. if a manager in your tree asks you a dumb question, they are squandering their own resources. I'm not obligated to stop them.
Wow such a team player! You must be a joy to work with. Helping your team is an “obligation” but only if a certain math equation is a positive number..
When my manager asks a question, I don’t treat it with hostility. It isn’t a “dumb” question, because for some reason that’s what he needed to know. I could bet that you have asked a few dumb questions in your day.
And with other teammates, why the contempt? You are a team. It isn’t all about “your productivity,” it’s about the team accomplishing the goal. You probably aren’t a Nobel winning physicist sitting around dreaming up theories that change the earth, but it certainly seems like it.
Be helpful and compassionate with your team. If you really can’t be bothered, activate Do Not Disturb. If you actually think your boss is asking dumb questions, perhaps you should ask them why. Or perhaps you should ask to be the boss. Or perhaps you should just be helpful and friendly and not such an entitled grump. Or perhaps get better at your job so interruptions aren’t so horrible for you. Perhaps your hatred of interruption is due to insecurity or anxiety about your abilities. If that’s the case, work on boosting your capabilities.
But don’t treat your teammates like some kind of fungus that need avoidance.
> Wow such a team player! You must be a joy to work with.
Sarcasm, insult.
> Helping your team is an “obligation” but only if a certain math equation is a positive number..
Deliberate negative misrepresentation of a reasonable position (some things are more important than others).
> When my manager asks a question, I don’t treat it with hostility.
Boasting, posturing of superiority.
> It isn’t a “dumb” question, because for some reason that’s what he needed to know.
Claim that you know their life better than they do, and you are a better judge of what they are being asked than they are.
> I could bet that you have asked a few dumb questions in your day.
Irrelevant putdown/insult, which wouldn't change the current situation whether it was true or false.
> You are a team. It isn’t all about “your productivity,”
Dismissive putdown, with quotes implying their productivity isn't important, i.e. that they overvalue their own work and that you can value it better than they can.
> it’s about the team accomplishing the goal
Dismissive of the fact that for a team to accomplish a goal, people in the team must be able to do their work towards said goal.
> You probably aren’t a Nobel winning physicist sitting around dreaming up theories that change the earth, but it certainly seems like it
Irrelevant insult and putdown, implying their work is unimportant. Tag-on bit at the end insults their own judgement of the worth of their work and implicitly claims you are a better judge of its importance than they are.
> perhaps you should just be helpful and friendly and not such an entitled grump
Another insult, accusation of overblown status.
> Or perhaps get better at your job
Another insult.
> Perhaps your hatred of interruption is due to insecurity or anxiety about your abilities.
Another insult.
> Be helpful and compassionate
The jaw-dropping, tone-deaf, blind-to-what-you-are-saying sentence which causes me to post this comment.
the original post contained a small disclaimer that annoying, low effort questions do exist (with a strategy for dealing with them), followed by several examples of questions that are important to answer promptly. I even said most of the questions my coworkers ask are in this category, and I mentioned it again in the followup response. the main thrust of the post is to get people to consider how allowing themselves to be distracted by high-quality questions is worth the hit to their individual productivity. I really don't see how you can read all this negativity into my posts without totally ignoring the overall context.
I will double down on my point that you don't have to prioritize questions that cost more time than they save. if I spend more time helping you than it would have taken you to figure it out yourself, this hurts the overall productivity of the team.
> I don't want anyone who's job requires deep, introspective thought on big problems to be constanly distracted by a flashing toast that's probably a non-time sensitive, low-effort inquiry or worse.
Who says he needs to? Your company should have communication policies. They should decide which channels/rooms your junior should join. He's a junior, it is likely no one will urgently need an answer from him for some time, so his settings can reflect that. He does not even need a visible/audible notification for that @-message, he can answer when he feels like it.
Also, your last paragraph make it sound like the people in those roles cannot handle their job responsibilities AND a couple of disturbances.
Yes, I have also heard that repeated ad nauseam. I think it is highly debatable and individual.
I also think a lot of people overestimate how "deep" their own work is compared to others. E.g. a lot of programming is just tedious busywork and scaffolding, yet every programmer here seems to think a slight interruption is a destructive event. Maybe the problem is with you, not others. Maybe you are not a good match for working on a team.
At many companies, plenty of programmers and engineers do complex, meaningful work in a crowded, very busy setting, with lots of talking over each other's heads.
Have you seen how SpaceX or Tesla engineers work?
What some people call deep work others do with their hands tied and constant "interruption".
The vast majority of SpaceX and Tesla work is pure logistics/operations (and everyone I know at either company hates it). You think all those people are doing physics or engineering?
> Email has its own problems. Sometimes you need answers to important questions promptly. @<user> works better then, at the same time, it is less intrusive than a phone call.
I think this is a useful way of looking at it - the medium governs the expectation of response. An email basically never expects a response, an "@" in slack expects a response at some point, and a phone call is "I AM MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANYTHING YOU MIGHT BE DOING RIGHT NOW TALK TO ME". Slack etc. are obviously useful in filling the middle ground between the two extremes.
> Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too.
I sort of disagree with this. Being expected to drop everything that you're doing and deal with whoever wants to engage with you at any point is a really bad pattern. If someone's got to the point where they're blocked on a single person responding to something, then that's a really bad smell for some process and organisational failings.
People should be able to own and manage their time. That doesn't mean they get to close themselves off from the world and ignore everyone, but it also doesn't make them an on-demand slave to their colleagues.
This might be a SV thing, because I can assure you that many, many e-mails require a response elsewhere including government. Failure to respond to some emails will result in a loss of funding or your job.
Yeah, that doesn't work either. As a system admin, I have found folks expect e-mails to show up immediately and judge their response as such. There are certain departments of the US government who expect an e-mail response immediately when they send out one of their queries. You need to jump.
Setting up rules on the mail (e.g. bounce the icon on MacOS) is a very smart and healthy thing to do. If you control your own mail server, then paying attention to the logs and having some alerts that deal with it might be very wise.
>> Setting up rules on the mail (e.g. bounce the icon on MacOS)
I don't agree with this. You are exploiting a biological imperative intended to prevent us from being attacked by surprise so that I read your email? There goes the 30 minutes I just spent getting into the zone invetigating an evil little bug.
If someone has these ridciulous expectations about email I prefer (the still very annoying) follow-up email or physical visit. At least that requires some effort.
If someone has these ridciulous expectations about email I prefer (the still very annoying) follow-up email or physical visit. At least that requires some effort.
Yeah, you'll find people who oversee money have many ridiculous expectations and when your grant and the people you are helping depend on you meetings those expectations, then you damn well do everything you can to do so.
No government or grant official is going to do "physical visits". The whole point is you do not want them expending effort on you because that will end badly for you. You need to be oil on glass as far as they are concerned.
To draw an analogy to snail mail, sending an email is basically the equivalent to chucking something in the cheapest post option there is. It may be delivered in the future, it's often delivered particularly quickly but not always, and the sender doesn't really have any indication that it's actually been received by a human.
This is why there's more expensive options you can buy - guaranteed delivery, signed for etc. that provide more robust guarantees. There's no equivalent for email, so trying to layer similar expectations on top of things that aren't designed to meet them is going to sometimes go badly.
> As a system admin, I have found folks expect e-mails to show up immediately and judge their response as such. There are certain departments of the US government who expect an e-mail response immediately when they send out one of their queries.
What do these people do when their expectations are challenged? What if an intermediate SMTP server decides to hold onto the message for 2 weeks for no real reason (yes, this happens).
In the UK, if the government needs you to do something, you get a letter. Usually multiple, sometimes sent with proof of delivery required, depending on how important it is you receive it.
What do these people do when their expectations are challenged? What if an intermediate SMTP server decides to hold onto the message for 2 weeks for no real reason (yes, this happens).
You have to deal with it. Had a problem with one agency (that should actually know better) getting e-mail and I worked the damn problem (on their end, but its my fault regardless) until is was solved. You learn to call people.
In the US, you get an e-mail from a grant officer. You deal and remember that this is about the people you are helping and working for a great future.
Getting mad about technical realities in a political situation is just screaming at clouds, might make you feel better but it doesn't change a thing. Hopefully the underlings that take over will be a bit more technology savy, but I doubt it.
That first sentence feels a bit like an ad hominem attack to me. There's no call for that here.
Slack, Teams, Mattermost, or any other real time chat application cannot replace email because they are different types of tools. They solve different problem sets, even if they overlap a bit.
I fall into the camp of people who believes that multitasking is bullshit and true productivity is only possible given long stretches of uninterrupted focus time. If someone needs something from me, they should talk to my scrum master or manager - that person will be best positioned to know the ideal time to interrupt me and get new work into my flow.
Work time doesn't mean anyone is allowed to interrupt anyone else whenever they want. Work is like a fluid, and its flow must be managed, or the plumbing is going to get stopped up or even burst.
> That first sentence feels a bit like an ad hominem attack to me. There's no call for that here.
I meant stuck in the past as in unwilling to move beyond email for primary communication, and that second part of the sentence as in not being able to see that his problems with IM might not be others'.
The fact that "others" might not have OP's problem (or perhaps they're just in denial), does not mean that OP doesn't have the problem, nor that the problem is unimportant.
> Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. It is not your leisure time.
You're lucky that you've only worked at companies with healthy cultures around interruptions and respecting people's time. This is not true for many of us.
Scheduling a meeting requires some minimal preparation and coordination with other people's schedules. Sending an e-mail is implicitly asynchronous, with an expectation that the receive will make a a best-effort attempt to answer it as quickly as possible, once they finish their current task.
Slack private messages, name tags, and @channel/@here notifications have all of the immediacy of a phone call, but with minimal effort required by the person triggering the interruption. The power balance is asymmetrically tipped toward the interrupters.
> Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. It is not your leisure time.
This is excruciatingly entitled logic from the requester. Do you honestly think your coworkers are all taking leisure time if they don't respond instantly to your requests? Does everyone on your slack exist to answer at your beck and call?
For most people. Covid-19 won’t be a problem. Just because something isn’t a problem for the majority doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem. Even a huge one.
And I can speak from vast experience: it feels great to help people, and can win you friends and in some cases referrals, but at the end of the year, it’s a crap shoot whether your boss will commend you or vilify you. Most are going to notice the things you didn’t get done, not the things you facilitated. When facilitators get laid off, office morale tanks, but they are still laid off.
The number of times I get interrupted for a question while I’m right in the cusp of unraveling some hidden truth about our code or a bug is nuts. It’s easy to get nerd sniped, especially if the other person is talking about breaking something they don’t understand.
(Personally, I think your most knowledgeable people should only be booked for like 25 hours a week and the rest of their time earmarked for consultation, but nobody above me in the org chart ever agrees)
> I think your most knowledgeable people should only be booked for like 25 hours a week and the rest of their time earmarked for consultation
My last job had a lot of problems, but this was one of the things they did well. They realized that the most senior people were more valuable helping others (even others in other departments) than slinging code all day.
> Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. It is not your leisure time.
Oh man, the amount of presumptuousness packed into this comment is obnoxious.
It really just reads like someone whose roles have been more focused on a series of time-critical tasks rather than deep work which requires uninterrupted focus. A bit of a lack of experience, or imagination.
As someone in ops I do both types of work, and having spent the last six years in an open office environment I know all about how distracting interruptions can be. At the same time, you are at work and cannot expect to behave like a recluse.
I think you are misinterpreting. Besides, it goes way. Where I work, and I will take a guess and say it is like that most places, sometimes people need an answer promptly (might not be life or death, but sometimes, in my line of work, it can be), from me, from others. If that is the case, I think an @-interruption is appropriate.
Oh I see. I love the double standard of HN. When the discussion is about remote where you can have complete focus alone everyone is suddenly up in arms about constant collaboration and communication along with endless churn of in person meetings and water cooler conversations for socialization; yet when we discuss a tool which you literally put on dnd then it suddenly prevents you from working.. not the endless office chatter. Clearly people just wanna appear to work by going to the office.
Oh and to everyone who is suggesting we should use email, you clearly haven’t experienced work email spam, just ask the attorney next door and you’ll grasp it . It ain’t better than slack. At least you get to dnd with slack.
I strongly disagree with this. It is impossible to work on a task and engage in concentration to solve an issue with constant interruptions. If you're only doing negligible pithy "problems" then it's fine but for difficult problems you absolutely need to be able to concentrate. Here's some other real-life examples where concentration is important:
a. A library. There's a reason it's quiet and not in the middle of a market.
b. A car. There's a reason using a mobile phone whilst driving is illegal.
c. Exams. There's a reason they don't do exams in the middle of a PE lesson.
d. Cubicles or offices. There's a reason they were invented for developers to work in. Open-plan offices are the worst. IM seems to be bypassing this "cubicle" design and still expecting the same type of output, which is impossible.
Of course, if you're right that we're "stuck in the past" I expect to see all of these scenarios transform into loud, noisy affairs with constant interruptions. Obviously you feel they will?
Some people feel that asking and answering questions is the same as "work" and I worked in a place where there were many teams engaged in generating this "work", but for the developers in the company nothing was worse than constant interruptions. Some people just didn't get it. One guy even bought ear defenders and we'd go "do not disturb" on Skype because else nothing would get done and there would be complaints from these "noisy" types that work wasn't being finished in a timely manner...... ironically they were completely oblivious to the fact that they were the ones slowing down work by asking "is it done?" "how are you doing?" "can I confirm what you're doing?" every 5 minutes. To concentrate, you need no interruptions.
On my Slack channels, I get some questions about work (that then typically involve them ringing me anyway even if I answer in text, very irritating) or people posting dumb articles or memes rofl lol garbage.
The client has enough options available you can set as you like as to not disturb you.
Email has its own problems. Sometimes you need answers to important questions promptly. @<user> works better then, at the same time, it is less intrusive than a phone call.
Also, it is work time, you have to expect to be on the ready, and answer people that needs something from you, so they can get their work done, too. It is not your leisure time.
Some people here talk about work like they think it is their own personal project time.