Dear Boss: For a programmer, 10 minutes = 3 hours

Re:Dear Boss: For a programmer, 10 minutes = 3 hours by pavel_lishin on Friday February 03, 2012 @03:11PM (#3548721)

A lot of times, there isn't anything you can work on that doesn't require a lot of concentration. I got an interrupt earlier today that put me on hold for an hour, while an email chain tried to sort out what was necessary.

How can I focus on implementing a hard feature when at any point, someone might pull me away from it and knock down my house of cards?

Hell, even if I'm writing code and suddenly I have to actually start working on a different project, I have to commit what I was doing, and try to squash everything later, or start stashing code around, and set up the other project's environment, etc. That's five minutes eaten up already.

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Re:Dear Boss: For a programmer, 10 minutes = 3 hours by randomdata on Friday February 03, 2012 @04:23PM (#3549073)

I find learning something new doesn't require a lot of context switching, and while does not show immediate productivity, the long term gains to the organization are present and quite valuable. It beats just randomly surfing the internet anyway; bean counters may not agree.

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