That's great, but I don't want to work with you, because something you're working on or something you're responsible for is blocking me and I have no way of making progress.

Local vs. global optimization …

You sure your priorities are of so much more significance than what the person is working on that they justify destroying the concentration of intellectual property creation and forcing a preemption of this other person’s task or reorder of their stack?

If you’re blocked for lack of a task switch, what are you blocking in turn by causing a new interrupt and switch?

Instead of crashing the thread they’re on, why not go to the scheduler and reorder the queue or better re-weight the threading so priorities are worked more optimally?

If in attempting that, you find you run into contention, it could be the most effective overall output is if your task is the one in an occasional wait state.

I hope this will answer all comments below as well.

Being a productive member of a team is about finding balance between what you're personally trying to get done and helping your teammates accomplish their tasks. Like everything else, it's a trade-off.

Your formulation of local vs global optimization of priorities is exactly the correct way to view this problem. My priorities and my colleague's priorities are approximately the same priorities, assuming we're on the same team or on adjacent teams. We are both shipping the same product and serving the same users at the end of the day.

That's why, like everything else in life, the truth lies somewhere in the middle - interrupting someone 10 times a day for trivial stuff you can look up yourself by reading code or documentation is a waste of the other person's time. But wasting four hours running around looking for an answer to a question that your teammate can answer in two minutes is also a waste of time. The end user is not well served by either behavior.

My rule of thumb is 30 minutes. If I can't find an answer in 30 minutes, and I think a teammate knows the answer and can answer immediately, I will ping them or come to their desk.

Obviously you have to read the room. If the teammate you want to bug looks deeply concentrated in what they're doing, they're in the middle of typing, or you ask and they say "sorry I'm in the middle of something, come back in an hour", I'll leave them alone and probably take a break or something. But if they're just back from a coffee break or a meeting, or finished up a discussion with someone else at their desk, there's just no reason to keep banging your head against your desk.

And of course I hold myself to the same standard. Being dismissive to someone who needs your attention is immature. I always assume good intent, and if someone bothers me too often, I just tell them; for some people I will ask they show me what they've already tried. I find this almost always works.

Really the only one who should be deciding if an interruption from one person to another is worthwhile should be the manager. They know whose time is more valuable to the company at that time. Plus managertime is easily interuptible.

Unless it's effecting your performance review or whatever, who cares, honestly? The obsession with efficiency and Taylorism is what's wrong with the current state of affairs in business.

Not saying people shouldn't want to be productive just that understanding delays and simply pyschologically dealing with them would go a long way in modern culture. Not everything needs to happen 5 minutes ago, is late, or is so critical it can't wait a few hours.

>Unless it's effecting your performance review or whatever, who cares, honestly? The obsession with efficiency and Taylorism is what's wrong with the current state of affairs in business.

being blocked on a task due to missing knowledge isn't really "efficient". Especially when someone can point you to the right place in the span of a single slack message line instead of spending hours wandering through legacy code and still missing the full scope of the change I want to make.

Sure, if it's a one-off bug fix task someone internal discovered, it can wait a day. But these kinds of issues when highlihgted are never because "it happened once" One is coincidence, twice is happenstance. thrice is probably a habit and you learn that certain people aren't a reliable resource in terms of, well, co-working.

It's not just about efficiency, it's about not hitting the brakes. When you've got momentum and you're in the flow, killing it is deeply unsatisfying, and I for one have a hard time getting it back. Obviously that doesn't justify bugging someone 10 times a day, but there's a balance to be found.

Many of us get profit sharing. In such environments, we should be caring about global efficiency of the labor force.

So distracting people who work on something that blocks you is "making progress"? That's rich.

apparently doesn’t want to work with anyone that won’t jump up and cater to every urgent need. A real charmer!

> I have no way of making progress

This is how you make "progress", by disturbing people who are working?

It's probably for the best that we work different places :-)

Well, I don't want to work with you. Let's segregate by company policy and let the market sort out the winners.

>That's great, but I don't want to work with you, because something you're working on or something you're responsible for is blocking me and I have no way of making progress.

I suggest you try to figure it out for yourself first. I can't count the number if times I sent a message, "hey, bla bla," then 5 minutes later I return "never mind." If you can't figure it out, have some respect for the other person's work and time and send an email or message. They will most likely get back to you by the end of the day if not sooner.

If the situation is that urgent, the whole team better be involved because y'all didn't plan that out correctly.

>you're working on or something you're responsible for is blocking me and I have no way of making progress

Me more important then you right?

If you're in a position of some power that's maybe what you'd prefer. I'm on the bottom rung and being able to walk up to someone's desk so they can't ignore me would be extremely helpful. Been WFH for a while and it is not uncommon for people to ignore requests, never reply to messages etc.

Yes that is a problem with my current team, but I can't really do anything about it. Working from an office would mostly sidestep it.

I feel like most people are in agreement - commuting really sucks but working in an office is generally better. I suspect if teleporters existed barely anyone would WFH.

> I'm on the bottom rung and being able to walk up to someone's desk so they can't ignore me would be extremely helpful. Been WFH for a while and it is not uncommon for people to ignore requests, never reply to messages etc.

TBF, that's not a problem with remote work. If the only way people will respond to a valid inquiry is through in person harassment there are much bigger issues at your employer.

Your last sentence sparked some reflection for me. I would absolutely teleport somewhere for a team meeting rather than play Zoom Brady Bunch.

I would 100% do all my coding from home though, unless work returned to the “good old days” of offices with full walls and doors that closed.

> I would absolutely teleport somewhere for a team meeting rather than play Zoom Brady Bunch.

Imagine Scotty beaming the team down for a meeting and all of them are in their pajamas, unshaved and groggy, some still holding their cereal bowls.

>I feel like most people are in agreement - commuting really sucks but working in an office is generally better. I suspect if teleporters existed barely anyone would WFH.

depends on office space and potential home accommodations. Like, if you have a dedicated 8m^2 office room in your house, it still may not be worth teleporting into an open space office. But if everyone can get a small private room to some more open floor structure for collaboration, it sounds like the perfect solution.

I get the need to have uninterrupted time, but if others are depending on you to get their job done, it's kinda dickish to complain about people being "allowed to disturb you".

When people don't havr access to you they quickly realize that never actually depended on you to get the job done.

I’m not sure most juniors starting their first job during the pandemic would feel that way. Imagine being in that situation and all your colleagues are never logged in to Slack, don’t reply to your emails until the end of the day, expect to never be disturbed, don’t attend any meetings..

I’m a junior who started my first job during the pandemic (well, I had one month in the office before the pandemic). That wasn’t be experience at all. Slack and email were much easier to use for getting used to the job than being in person was. Of course, yes, some people need to be online to answer questions, but that doesn’t mean that everyone has to be available all the time. Being online also encourages good documentation, which is a better habit to be in anyway.

Username... Doesn't check out.