But your need for an instant answer often derails my work flow. I can get a lot more done now that I am not being interrupted as frequently and can address questions once I have wrapped up what I am doing or at least have time to write down where specifically I stopped.
This! The office paradigm values everyone else's time over my time. It paints interruption as a virtue. My last employer (before COVID) cancelled all WFH with the statement "We all know a 15 minute face-to-face conversation is better than a 3 day email chain". What about the other 99% of my time? Any time saved by that 15 minutes interaction is dwarfed by the amount lost in other daily nonsense.
I've got so used to them to get me to my zone I still use at home...
Does a quick interruption that unblocks me and allows me to continue working outweigh allowing you to finish your thing first? Because maybe you're unblocked but I'm blocked by you now, and the thing that's actually blocking me. So only 1 person is able to work.
Understandably this can lead to a lot of context switching, but so can someone swiveling in a chair to ask a question or go down a rabbit hole. You can optimize the process a bit by shifting perspective and having a path to follow if you get blocked, rather than lamenting on how you're blocked(not you in particular, but people in general).
*I feel like it is somewhat rare that a person only ever has 1 specific thing to work on.
No, absolutely not. As my coworker you have no right to my time, at all. Certainly not on-demand.
You are in no position to prioritize my time, especially in the context of you finishing your task.
> Because maybe you're unblocked but I'm blocked by you now, and the thing that's actually blocking me.
No, you are blocked by whatever you are blocked by. Solving your problems is your problem. Not mine.
> So only 1 person is able to work.
If you can't do your job without also consuming my time in parallel what exactly are you contributing? If you are blocked and need input then go work on something else until you can get the input. This is elementary time management and respect for your coworkers.
Just because I ask you in person for help from time to time does not equate to me not contributing anything.
Just because someone asks you for help in person does not mean you can't say 'no, can you try me at this time or send me an email detailing the issue'.
Solving problems can be a siloed experience, but depending on the organization or team, most problems in today's businesses are team efforts, and require team collaboration. Having blinders with comments like 'solving your problems is your problem' is a great way to overlook when a problem someone is having is actually YOUR problem because you overlooked a bit of code or configuration or documentation.
That's not what I said. My comment was about working in parallel and demanding immediate coworker input to advance.
> Just because someone asks you for help in person does not mean you can't say 'no, can you try me at this time or send me an email detailing the issue'.
The situation is not asking for help in person, it is interrupting to ask for help.
> Solving problems can be a siloed experience, but depending on the organization or team, most problems in today's businesses are team efforts, and require team collaboration. Having blinders with comments like 'solving your problems is your problem' is a great way to overlook when a problem someone is having is actually YOUR problem because you overlooked a bit of code or configuration or documentation.
I never said anything about working in silos. We still have a daily standup, we still do sprint planning, we still to regular operations reviews. I take ownership for my own actions and deliverables and help coworkers. This is simply a matter of how to request that assistance and the expectations around when that is provided.
Asking for help in person is literally interrupting someone, no matter what they are doing because their attention has to be re-directed from whatever they were doing to you. So there is no meaningful difference between asking for help and interrupting to ask for help. But through social cues I can tell what level of concentration you might be on, and with some precision judge when a good time might be to check in. Hell, I will definitely be wrong some of the time, but that's just life.
The situation is obviously different for someone that is always co-dependent on others for getting work done.
Yes, all of those things are true and I do all of those things. I am speaking specifically about interrupting a coworker who is doing productive work.
> "siloed," "completely independent," and "unanswerable to anyone."
I didn't say anything about this. Respecting your coworkers time does not require any of it.
What part of this statement says 'team player' to you?
The whole part about working as a team-player is that solving their problems is your problem, because it is the teams problem.
What you are describing is being assigned a list of stuff and working on it independently, then not helping anyone else unless it's convenient for you. This is colloquially called 'not being a team player'.
The part where each member of the team is trusted with their own time management. I will also not interrupt you when you are working, because I respect you and your time.
> The whole part about working as a team-player is that solving their problems is your problem, because it is the teams problem.
Yeah, no. The team has problems so we divide the work. Each of us takes ownership for some small part of it. Asking for input from teammates is fine, that is the responsibility of that owner. But that doesn't mean they can interrupt someone to get it. To be an effective teammate you need to earn the respect of your peers and interrupting will undermine that trust long term. Obviously I want my coworkers to solve their problems because we all work toward a common goal and of course I provide input to help them do that.
You must be very good at your specific tasks because it sounds like you are not very good at your job (which includes "teamwork," "mentoring," and "problem solving"), at least if you behave the way you're saying you behave.
I have never ever gone into a team environment and felt the need to earn respect from my teammates or have them earn mine. This is a glass half full or empty thing. You can go into a team and require others prove themselves and vice-versa or you can give people the benefit of the doubt and let them lose the trust if something happens. Both lead to vastly different experiences.
What you say sounds pretty selfish though. If someone came to me and asked for help with something I'd be happy to drop tools and come and help as I'm not just a 'colleague', I'm a team member.
If you need clarification then send an email, add a comment in your issue tracker or set up a meeting. There's no reason to interrupt someone doing productive work to get clarification on a story. You should be able to manage parallel stories and make progress as you get clarification.
Asking "hey you got a minute?" is a waste of everyone's time because either the answer is "yes" and you could have asked your question already or the answer is "no" and you just disrupted someone who was doing productive work and still doesn't know if your actual question is worth answering right now. Just ask your question and I will answer it when I have time. This is why it is better to ask in email, IM or a meeting, depending on the nature of the question.
Like I said, everything you're writing speaks to you.
In the office respect for the headphone signal is not universal. Also, sometimes I don't want to wear headphones just to signal I am in flow. Nor do I want to have to use them drown out all the other distractions. People are still walking around and doing things, all are potential distractions.
No, solving the company's problems is both our problems. You have a tremendously adversarial attitude toward your coworkers. Why don't you trust them to know the cost of interrupting you and decide whether or not it's a net gain?
Yes, this requires effective collaboration.
> You have a tremendously adversarial attitude toward your coworkers.
I do not have an adversarial attitude toward my coworkers. In fact I am very well liked by the people I work with. Probably because I treat them with respect.
> Why don't you trust them to know the cost of interrupting you and decide whether or not it's a net gain?
How can they possibly know this? That would require everyone on the team having complete knowledge of what everyone else is doing at all times. Further, if you believe you know more than your coworker about their situation then it speaks to a distrust of their abilities.
In the first case, it does seem a lot more reasonable to interrupt and trade-off the productivity of the blocker in favor of the blockee. At worst, that's an even trade and at best it incentivizes not being a blocker.
In the second case, I'd rather not create a distributed denial of concentration scenario for SWEs who are rarely stuck to optimize for those who are more frequently stuck.
There's another angle here which is that ad-hoc in-person conversations tend to be low value because there's no record. The process of simply writing down a question before asking it goes a long way toward finding a solution.
It's one of the things I really appreciate about working from home. There are no unwelcome interruptions because everyone controls their own time and interactions I do have are higher value because they have been more thoroughly considered.
I can skim the first few words of a Slack message without losing context and if those first few words demand an immediate response, I can "save" what I am doing to my notes.
I had a co-worker who did this in a past job, even though he sat behind me. It was quite helpful.
Absolutely.
Another thing is that it's often harder to write your question/problem in text as a message, when in verbal communication it's a lot easier (personally, YMMV). But having to organise calls to get that verbal communication is a pain.
A lot of folks are used to being lazy intra communications in an org, and imho, that shouldn't be an excuse to dissuade remote work when the benefits are incredibly clear. If you suck at comms or management in a more flexible work arrangement environment (which is okay! to get better at something you must first suck at it), it's time to get better.
Maybe a drop-in thing could work, like Clubhouse. But then that's kinda invading your privacy if you have to stay on that.
yes, we're finding that a lot of folks have deficient written communication skills.
another problem is that a lot of developers can type fast enough to program, but not actually type fast enough to productively use email/slack. that one surprised me!
i had a coworker right before covid started, who, you'd send him something in slack, and then watch the "JimBob is typing..." indicator flash on and off for 5 minutes. then he'd just show up at your door and say "no. five." or whatever the very brief answer was.
Also, there may be things that were said, but I may not remember, so I'll have to ask again for the information. With text, you can always go back to those messages and re-read them.
If it's a call it's a bit out of the blue. Maybe they don't have their headset around/plugged in, maybe they're doing something like eating or doing laundry. You just don't know because all you see is an activity status icon.
Maybe it's just me/my personality.
- I either wouldn't see it because I'm involved in something out and messages are not priority interrupts. (i.e. I don't have notifications turned on.)
- Or, if I see it but now isn't a good time, I'll reply something like sure but right now is a bit crazy. Call my cell at xPM. (Or I'll drop something on your calendar.)
It is nothing like the imposition of requiring them to commute to an office to be interrupted at will.
That's the beauty of async communication. It doesn't matter if they're busy, they'll get back to you when they can, and you're free to do the same. No one gets ripped out of their workflow.
Why is it more rude to call someone on teams where they can just decline the call than to swivel in your chair and start talking to them?
If anything, I think etiquette has improved in our situation. No more in person interruptions or people just hovering at the edge of your vision to get attention. No more loudly conversing colleagues in the open plan office.
Instead we have lines dropped in chat or more carefully crafted emails for longer questions.
In the office, you can generally observe the state of your co-worker. Are they on a phone call? Are they already talking to someone in person?
A phone/Slack/Teams call can be quite disruptive if someone is already in a meeting.
We haven't fully adapted work culture to remote work.
When I’m in a call I don’t get notifications of chats or phone calls.
If I need to focus I set my status to do not disturb and I don’t get notifications and calls go to voicemail.
So I do not share your observations.
A person can be scheduled in for an hour's long meeting but it actually only takes 10 minutes, but you check the person's status after the 10 minutes and it still says 'In a meeting' (usually differentiates with 'In a call' if they're actually in a call, but it's quite unreliable and you don't know if maybe they're having technical problems and are just about to reconnect).
I can’t (as a human) switch context like a CPU. It’s not just about a couple of minutes. It’s about the time that it takes me to get back into the context and in the right place where I was in, prior to the interruption.
I believe this is not a good example for the point you’re trying to make.
If you're working, you're available on chat (discord). If you're not available (like taking lunch or a break) set your status so everyone knows.
If you need to talk to someone, don't hesitate to ask.
If you send more than 2-3 chat messages as part of a discussion, just pull everyone in to a video room immediately and talk it through. (Discord makes this really easy.)
At first I was a little uneasy about being pulled in to video calls all the time, but I came to really appreciate it. I honestly think this worked better than "just turning your swivel chair" because our team was big enough that even in an office not everyone would be a swivel away.
I see no benefits of an office environment for my team (but then the 6 of us were split over multiple locations before covid) - the benefits are in the informal communication with people from other teams.
It feels that way because it is. Demanding synchronous response even if you're a boss is despicable. Glad I don't have to work with you.
Sure there are exceptions when you've got important deadlines or fires to put out, but distractions are never welcome. Sure in office it was acceptable to have 5x less productivity, but you get to coach people which felt nice internally.
What used to be swivel in your chair and ask a colleague or going to whoever you need to speak to is now
* Send a Slack message/email and wait an arbitrary amount of time for a response.
* Organise a Skype/Teams/whatever call in a few hours time and feel guilty about it, as it feels rude to just ring someone as they could be occupied or busy.
I spend a stupid amount of time having blocked stories/tasks because I need to clarify some criteria/parts of it and the people I need to speak to are difficult to reach because they're busy/AFK.