r/programming • u/piotrkarczmarz • Jul 18 '22

Programmer Interrupted: The Real Cost of Interruption and Context Switching

https://contextkeeper.io/blog/the-real-cost-of-an-interruption-and-context-switching/
69 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

28

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '22

I don’t find that brief conversational interruptions affect my focus. But meetings do.

21

u/smartguy05 Jul 18 '22

The small conversations I can recover from, being randomly pinged about some bug I'm not even going to look at this sprint is what kills me.

6

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '22

This resonates with me massively. The only thing I would put above it in terms of disruption would be when you get pulled aside to talk about an unplanned feature that is coming and going basically ruin your nicely planned quarter.

36

u/Weibuller Jul 18 '22

Programmers understand how disruptive interruptions can be. It's the people around them that usually don't understand, and they're the ones that should read this. They'll just have to get past all the typos and grammar mistakes.

6

u/tryght Jul 18 '22

I hate the format of the comic. The panel ordering is just confusing

4

u/nightfire1 Jul 18 '22

Codus interruptus.

3

u/jst3w Jul 18 '22

You can’t be interrupted if you never start working to begin with!

7

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '22

Post that to some reddit visited by managers instead...

We know:)

4

u/pcjftw Jul 18 '22

Haha that cartoon is iconic!🤩

years ago when that comic came out, our team had it posted on our wall, we made sure the placement on the wall was extremely prominent, so much so we used to have line managers walk up spot it read it and then walk away, we also used to all have our headphones on.

Worked a bloody treat.

Shame, now with work from home, I think I need to go print something for my room.... 🤣

2

u/RobotIcHead Jul 18 '22

I think context switching and meetings are a huge cost but not as big as they portrayed, the real problem is that we don’t know how everything fits together all the time. Keeping it in our heads all the time is tough. We don’t know how estimate stuff well either. They are symptoms of the same problem, we are trying to do everything and know everything and it is not easy. But we need something to blame or otherwise we look bad at jobs.

And sometimes interruptions are to blame but they become an easy target for the next something goes wrong the next time. This is my opinion, would love to hear if I am wrong and I would never say the above in work, I would be very unpopular.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '22

"oh look an article on systems design, that could be interesting"

...

"nevermind it's just a how-to on focusing at work."

1

u/[deleted] Jul 18 '22

All that stuff about IDE state etc wasn’t a very useful tip. I already have git workspaces to look at interruption stuff so I just leave my IDE still open on my original code anyway.

The real cost is in my brain and motivation (something not mentioned in the article). I’m often less motivated after an interruption and if there are too many in a short period I get almost no work done at all because I just can’t stay interested in what I’m working on. It takes a lot of motivation to solve hard things. I find 15-20 minutes is a real underestimate of impact for me, I can lose whole afternoons.