Now look, I don't disagree with your points about people's ability to handle, triage and effectively respond to interruptions. It's a completely valid argument to make.

Where I'm having a hard time agreeing with the seeming majority here: is that when I'm interrupted in something I'm doing, by someone who sits two feet away, whipping around and saying "here's how you do that, it goes here, and does this" makes me the problem person (I use problem in the most delicate of ways, I hope the meaning is taken well and in good faith), when it was my work time and efficiency that was interrupted by someone seeking guidance.

If it's in a group channel, makes a bit more sense. When it's a direct message, well then here we are.

But I'll mull this over.

But as a team leader, when my people send me 1-on-1 messages to ask for help, I do what I can to make sure they get that help. For me, it's more effective to be there with them in person within reason (in this case: sitting right next to me is 'within reason') to render that aid, when requested.

Why not walk to a common area, book a conference room for 5 minutes, or just respond in Slack?

It seems like 8 people getting to have quiet conditions ought to be worth more than some minor convenience of not needing to walk away to a different area to answer vocally.

But a desk side "hey how do I x?" or "Hey is this the right way to do this?", it's probably infinitely more productive to work on the issue at our respective desks, get the solution needed, and go back to work.

These responses I'm reading in this thread are becoming more and more astonishing as they genuinely appear-to me-that many developers would be better served working at home where they can enjoy complete and total silence. You are in a shared space, there are going to be people talking and discussing their jobs. It's what they're even there for in the first place.

Of course this within reason, having to share a space with a customer support team where people are constantly on the phones chatting and providing support-sure-I completely get why that would be grating.

We seem to have moved beyond that and are now picking apart the very nature of working with and supporting your colleagues when they come to you for assistance, the idea that something as innocuous as a senior developer helping a junior developer being a problematic and prima facie distraction that must be snuffed out and I find that attitude completely untenable.

Mitigating distractions and minimizing them where possible and reasonable is an admirable goal. But taking a long step back and looking at this thread: It seems many are taking the approach that the workplace ought to function like a library where no sounds are uttered but the clacking of keys and clicking of mice and I'm not sure I agree even minimally.

> “as they genuinely appear-to me-that many developers would be better served working at home where they can enjoy complete and total silence.”

Fully private offices are better, with a high degree of respect to not interrupt your colleagues. Working from home, as you suggest, is certainly much much better than working in an open-plan office though.

> “We seem to have moved beyond that and are now picking apart the very nature of working with and supporting your colleagues when they come to you for assistance, the idea that something as innocuous as a senior developer helping a junior developer being a problematic and prima facie distraction that must be snuffed out and I find that attitude completely untenable“

It’s hardly untenable. It’s a basic part of the job. What you glibly call “a senior developer helping a junior developer” is not that.

When I think of helping junior developers, something I do all the time, I think of using Slack or email to schedule a meeting to answer their questions at some point that’s convenient for us both, in a conference room where we won’t bother other people.

The culture of “just quickly answer my question right now” is horrible, productivity-killing nonsense, but here you’re acting like it’s the only possible way to work.

According to whom? I've been a developer near 14 years now and have worked in siloed offices, cubicles, open office spaces, and my last job was 100% remote for two years. From what authority do you claim to draw the assertion that this is the case?

Anecdote is no replacement for quantitative sample sizes, but this statement seems too absolute to hold any validity without qualifying by whose standards you are suggesting that it has been known for a-as you put it-"long, long time".

What you glibly call “a senior developer helping a junior developer” is not that.

Glib? I'm sorry friend, but no. Absolutely not. Taking two minutes to help someone new on the job find answers periodically throughout the day, and wheeling my chair 180 degrees to render aid as the senior developer is not glib.

What's "glib" is this idea that I am somehow disrupting the workforce, and destroying productivity by preferring to talk to the person who literally sits three feet away from them to help solve a problem than smacking away at my keyboard to answer a question that takes the better part of 180 seconds were I to verbalize "Here's the solution you're looking for and how it fits in to the larger scheme of this feature we're working on". I've been on the other end of that, it felt cold and impersonal as a newbie, and I strive to be the kind of team leader I wanted when I was that junior developer.

The culture of “just quickly answer my question right now” is horrible, productivity-killing nonsense, but here you’re acting like it’s the only possible way to work.

Answering a question quickly is productivity-killing? Then how are you defining productivity, friend? If it's a question that has a short, sufficient and ultimately resolute answer that gets my junior developers the support and response they need to solve the challenges we face as a team, elongating that answer out to a long essay-diatribe is more killing to the productivity. If by that point we need more time, then-as I said in another comment-it absolutely is valid and worthwhile to say "Let's schedule some time to get into a conference room and whiteboard through the problem". Go look above this comment chain, I said as much pretty clearly.

And speaking of clearly? I really appreciate that you took this position and completely ignored the fact that I went through great effort to indicate that I prefer to speak directly to someone "within reason" and went as far as to suggest that when the person is sitting mere inches away from me, that is a scenario that I personally consider "within reason". That alone should have been a pretty clear indicator to you that no, I actually do NOT think that it's the only possible way to work, just a very effective one given the proximity to my cohort. I had hoped that the context clues would reveal themselves clearly, evidently and plainly. I see now that they did not.

I'm going to go ahead and take this time to leave the thread entirely, this debate stopped being fruitful a long time ago and I'm frustrated with myself that I spent as much time replying to it as I have.

Please do, if nothing else, have a wonderful weekend :) I'm sorry we disagree so strongly on this.

Note that this was written in 1987. And cites even earlier works on the topic. By now there’s been an explosion of research on this topic.

> “Glib? I'm sorry friend, but no. Absolutely not.“

Uhh, yes. You are being glib by making a certain phrase (“senior developer helping a junior developer”) have a twisted meaning (that it can only mean a real-time, interruptive audio interaction, rather than scheduled time to help). That’s glib because the short phrase “senior developer helping a junior developer” unpackages into a bunch of complicated factors that need to be considered, and a very important one is to not presume that an interruptive question is worth disrupting someone else’s work over in the moment. You glibly try to side-step this by acting like disrupting someone to ask for help is the primary option and that it’s de facto a good thing to encourage this type of disruptiveness by giving instant gratification with an immediate answer, but it’s not! Glib absolutely is the right way to describe how you are trying to sidestep the real, material meaning of what it is to help out a junior developer (which generally has nothing to do with answering their real-time audio questions in the moment they ask).

> “Answering a question quickly is productivity-killing? Then how are you defining productivity, friend?”

Yes, stopping what I am already working on in order to answer your question will kill my productivity by a lot in order to help your productivity only a little.

This is pretty simple stuff. Why are you unsure about it?

> “went as far as to suggest that when the person is sitting mere inches away from me, that is a scenario that I personally consider "within reason".”

But this is a harmful attitude on your part. It makes no difference if the person is sitting inches away from you. Why would you think physical proximity has any effect in this? What matters is whether the other person is deeply concentrating on something that they judge to be highly important to maintain focus on. Your point of view seems to be about your convenience and not the damage it would do the people who are distupted around you.

Your vitriolic reaction is very frustrating to process because you still do not seem to engage with the basic aspect of this whole topic, which is that if a question pops into your mind that affects you, that does not mean it is worth wasting someone else’s time over if they are busy. That is one of the fundamental problems of open plan offices that encourage ad hoc verbal communication, which is incompatible with modes of working that require extended concentration time for most hours of most days (e.g. almost all of software engineering).

[0]: < https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Proje... >

And yet AGAIN my initial post is misconstrued completely and entirely because people I guess just don't know how to read today.

I am not the person interrupting my coworkers. I am the one being interrupted and asked to help a junior dev. Read my darn post. Read it. READ IT. I am not interrupting my coworkers. I am a senior dev being asked for help. I am the one being interrupted. I am being asked to assist someone. Stop accusing me of breaking my coworkers flow. That is not what I said. That is not what I offered. That was not my post. That was not the position I argued. Those were not my words.

It's actually getting VERY frustrating having responses levied at me as if I am the person disrupting my coworkers, and not the person who is having his own workflow and concentration broken, and repeatedly having responses thrown at me as if I am the root cause of my coworkers not being productive.

/throws up hands

The portion you quoted does not use the word “you” to specifically refer to you personally, but to the general phenomenon of either being interrupted when someone asks a question or being disrupted when people loudly discuss an answer to the question right where everyone is trying to work, instead of moving to a separate common area like the cafeteria or a conference room, or scheduling a meeting to go over it later when it won’t disrupt people.

I think that valuing your uninterrupted time over the team and the product shipping is the truly selfish mindset.

edit> markdown

There is a game-theoretic angle to it. The problem is that interrupting someone costs the team, but creates no cost for the interrupter. Individual interrupters have no incentive to try and balance the global cost to the team of their interruption versus their potential idleness.

If you stop valuing your own uninterrupted “flow” opportunities, the product suffers, because the work cannot be completed that way.

In this sense you’ve got it backwards. You claim that looking out for your own experience of uninterrupted work is somehow suboptimal or selfish or bad, but it’s not. It’s actually the most customer-focused or product-focused, unselfish way to think.

Believing that you are entitled to turn around in your chair and interrupt the workflow of a teammate at your own whimsical discretion, now that is very selfish and does not place the customer, product or team ahead of yourself.

If you’re interrupting people all day, you’re selfishly prioritizing only what’s convenient for you, and discounting all the damage and delay to shipping the product that your interruptions are creating.

I struggled mightily to find a tactful way of putting this to words, but this states it nicely.

My focus in responding to a teammate asking for help isn't on my time, or at least, it's less about my time and more about the objective behind what motivated a teammate to ask for help in the first place: shipping the feature/product.

If it helps clarify ambiguity or confusion for me to wheel over to this person and verbalize the solution they're looking for and work out the blocker with them by sitting right next to them for 5 minutes when they ask for my help, and we get the best possible outcome as a team, that's what I'm going to do.

Excellently said, snowman.

Being the guy who helps everyone else get stuff done often goes unrecognized in any meaningful way.

Valid, but irrelevant, I feel. I am a senior on my team, a junior asks for help. It might not be necessarily moral or even ethical to give them the time of day the second they ask for it, but it is a professional courtesy that I don't go looking to receive superlatives and accolades for.

If a contributor to the team has a question that affects their ability to contribute, that person should get the help they need. I happen to be sitting close enough to them that we can discuss the solution quietly enough so as not to be a distraction, and I do so.

What came from this were all sorts of wild extrapolations and suppositions that doing this created an otherworldly distraction to the rest of the workforce; and it is that mindset that I'm challenging. Not that people don't deserve a distraction free workspace, but to what ends we're willing to go to avoid that distraction while also operating in a manner that helps coworkers succeed, and enables colleagues to be accessible to one another.

Maybe it's a product of my compartmentalized mindset, I'm able to work through someone a few feet away talking about work things when asked about work things. It's when people have loud, echoing conversations about things not really relevant to the tasks at hand that I will HAPPILY concede to anyone who argues that those discussions should be taken elsewhere-like a break room or cafeteria if your office is equipped with one.

But two developers sitting next to each other, talking their way through a data validation issue, unless they're discussing it so loudly that it is legitimately obnoxious for two people whose faces are inches away from each other?

I'm not so sure this is such a work-shattering distraction as the implication seems to be from a majority of folks here-to the point where I'm inclined to call shenanigans and histrionics on the folks who can't function sans complete, utter total silence. The open office can die, in my opinion, but so does the idea that any instance of two people talking about work is just as, or close to being as unacceptable to the point of-as someone suggested-booking a conference room to have a 2 minute discussion when asked "How do I do x?".

I can deal with a nearby conversation and ignore it, although frankly it can be very distracting when it's about technical topics near my own work. Two or three at once is rarer but very irritating when it gets started up. Headphones are great for that, but when I'm suffering from tinnitus they no longer work. What's wrong with walking to a common space away from the work area when you want to have a 2 minute discussion with a coworker? If it's not worth the walk, maybe it isn't worth the discussion.

There's nothing strange about people having trouble in an open office space, all I would ask for is some empathy. I have internalized some of the lessons of my own problems by trying to resist the temptation to ping or otherwise disturb coworkers by non-email means unless it's absolutely necessary. A good deal of the kinds of questions I'm asked or I hear asked (maybe as many as half of them? and I would include my own questions here) could be solved by thinking or researching just a little more in solitude before reaching out.

I've also created improvised physical barriers around my desk to block visual distractions. As a result my current workspace is OK for getting things done, but it doesn't change the fact (for me) that open offices are bad by default and need personal and spatial modification to become acceptable, as compared to the mythical office with a door which would be good for getting things done by default. It's not about being incapable of function without "utter total silence", it's about being made slightly miserable every day on average.