The real problem is complexity, which has gone exponential.
When I joined the work force in 2000, my life was comparably so stunningly simple. Just a few guys in the same room. Barely any process or documentation. Email was still new so the concept of an outside world barely existed. Chat did not exist, but wouldn't make sense anyway. We talked a bit here and there but 80% was actually doing the work, not talking about it. Management had no idea what we were doing and metric porn did not yet exist.
A lot has changed. More complicated tech stacks means more deeper specializations, requiring more handovers. A lot is outsourced now so you may need vendors to move things. You may have off-shored things. Nobody has clarity on what you need to do, hence you need to hop the organization to find out the details. You need to pass legal and the privacy office. You need to report status constantly to an army of bean counters. Testing has become amazingly complicated and so is system administration.
It requires super human effort to move things by an inch. So no, "collaboration is not a force multiplier". Collaboration isn't a product or outcome. Ideally you'd have an absolute minimum of it. The ideal workflow is that you create a clear and detailed work package, hand it over to the worker, whom you then leave alone to actually do it.
Your companies' purpose is to ship software or whatever else it does, it isn't to ship emails, chat, status updates, approvals and documents.
It is absolutely baffling to me how highly paid office workers' productivity is pissed away like this without intervention. Don't send them to a yoga class to cope, fix the fucking problem. You're setting your money on fire.
> When I joined the work force in 2000, my life was comparably so stunningly simple.
Interesting, because the simple life you describe was long in the rearview mirror to me by 2000. It does describe what things were like for me in the '80s, though.
I wonder if the difference isn't time period as much as career experience.
> I wonder if the difference isn't time period as much as career experience.
Yep. I had this leave-me-alone experience in the late 2010's. Again in ~2015. Yet again in 2020.
Actually I get this experience any time I join a new organization and am not The Guy for anything yet. I have no idea what's going on, so why would you bother _me_? You wouldn't. You'd let me get on with work.
But as time passes, I know more and more about how things work, who knows what, where things are, what the code is doing, past and future decisions, ... suddenly I'm your best bet to get quick answers to tough questions. Of course you're gonna bother me!
If you're smart then right as that stage of the process begins you leave the job to keep your salary ahead of inflation and start all over again. Rinse repeat. Plenty of leave-me-alone time to do the actual work while the SMEs get ass blasted by meetings constantly.
> your best bet to get quick answers to tough questions
Just my opinion, but anyone who routinely relies on "quick answers" needs to be kicked in the shin and then fired without severance. They are the swampiest part of the swamp.
Strong disagree. Modern systems are vast and complex, if you aren’t leveraging the nearest expert, you’re doing it wrong – that’s what they’re for! Knowing things you don’t know and shouting warnings of gotchas and long-term visions.
But if you keep asking the same question, then you should be kicked in the shins. And the expert should be kicked for not writing it down or fixing the system after the same questions comes up for the 3rd time.
I often wonder if we really need(ed) to change everything to it's current state. What if we still had fax machines and photocopiers and non-networked IBM PCs in the office? I mean we could run a business like that in the 80s, why not now?
It seems like we're in a race and constantly accelerate but does it make sense?
Don't get me wrong, I understand that it makes economic sense to be faster and cheaper than the competition. I also don't mind many of the nice goodies we have nowadays and the progress in medicine etc..
However, I feel like working was more humanely paced back then. It's also possible that I'm just getting old and / or tired (I also suffer from depression and whatnot) which makes me think so fondly of the past.
E.g. the company I'm working at now, they had folder filled with documentation and there were people actually thinking about how the things should work and how some meaningful innovation could be done. Nowadays documentation spread in different versions in numerous teams channels, sharepoint pages, jira, confluence, network shares, git repositories etc. it's really hard to find anything. Lot's of features are being added to the products but without knowing how they're actually being used by the customers, many of them being completely impractical or irrelevant in real life...
I have experienced exactly the opposite, I feel my work has become a lot easier today than two decades ago.
Back in the day remote access to customer infrastructure was non existent, so you had to travel a lot and spend countless hours on the phone.
Working with teams overseas was also challenging, there was no Teams, Zoom or Discord, the best you could hope for was Messenger (then Skype) or trying to get everyone on a call.
But most of the stuff was done over email, which is a terrible tool for synchronous communications.
Documentation has become easier to maintain as well.
I agree that many companies are overwhelmed with technology and many of the processes have become redundant, but that's mostly due to poor design and implementation.
A good document management system, good standards and training really improves documentation.
We stopped using network shares for documentation about three years ago.
All of our development,dms,collaboration and communication tools are on Azure.
Not all are perfect and we miss some functionality by being locked out with MS but they all integrate pretty well for the most part.
We recently got rid of the last few line phones in our offices and we are all now 100% on Teams for external communications as well.
As for the human part, that's something really subjective.
I keep my social life almost completely disconnected from work, and although I enjoy the monthly happy hour with colleagues and small talk in the office sometimes, I don't have any personal desire of having human interactions at work.
> But most of the stuff was done over email, which is a terrible tool for synchronous communications.
I've heard this a lot but don't get this complaint. Email wasn't designed to be, meant to be, or supposed to be used as a tool for synchronous communication. So of course it's terrible at it.
The point of email as a tool is to satisfy other goals. It's an excellent replacement for FAX, snail mail letters, etc...
Conference calls, video calls, face-to-face meetings are the tools meant for synchronous communication.
'Chat' tools are completely unnecessary. It's there to satisfy the perceived demands of the workforce but might actually be net negative as several commenters pointed out here.
I hear you. I recently had a colleague retire after a lifetime in the company and he described in detail how over the course of his career, work had gotten increasingly impersonal, fleeting, unrewarding. It was painful to hear.
> Your companies' purpose is to ship software or whatever else it does,
It's not to ship software or whatever else, it's to make money. Because without money, you don't have your pay or job and the major reason why you do your job is gone.
Your perspective optimizes for your job and what you enjoy the most, but in most businesses, it's not just the factory and engineers that makes the business, and if you worked diligently on the wrong thing, thats an even worse waste. There are billions of lines of code out there that nobody gives a shit about because their associated business failed. The market doesn't reward the nicest team to work on, they reward winners. The nice team is just a tool to be more likely to win.
There's an undeniable existential crisis brewing within the tech industry. It's concerning to see how the pursuit of monetary gain seems to have eclipsed other, arguably more essential, objectives. Life's raison d'etre, after all, is not about amassing a surplus of glucose or oxygen.
It's staggering how numerous high-profile tech firms are sitting on gargantuan cash reserves, with seemingly no coherent strategy on how to allocate these resources. In the meantime, employees bear the brunt through layoffs, while innovative competition gets steamrolled under the guise of threats.
I'm of the belief that our technological endeavors should fundamentally aim to enhance the human experience in a long-lasting, sustainable manner. A deliberate and well-orchestrated transition to more efficient and equitable ways of operation should be the industry's primary focus, not just an afterthought.
A labor union? 1/3 Americans were covered by one within living memory.
Let people have a voice in their workplace. It's so funny to me how Americans wax poetic about republics and democracy until it comes time to talk about their workplaces. Or about how taxes are theft but the surplus value of their labor that is increasingly held captive by faceless NGOs is not discussed.
People should work to live and not the other way around.
Well, it's to make money by shipping software (or whatever the company does).
If the goal of a company was just to make money, full stop, then all companies would just do the same handful of most-profitable activities. But what we actually see is companies doing an enormous range of different things, with an equally huge range of levels of profitability.
I think it's overly reductive to say that the only purpose a company has is to make money.
> I think it's overly reductive to say that the only purpose a company has is to make money.
Yes, but also no. It's a simplification that is amazingly accurate, it does help to think of different companies as thinking about money on shorter or longer timespans.
As someone working in big tech, I have to say that for certain features I would much rather ship the right 10,000 lines in 6 months than 100,000 lines of the kind of wrong thing. The cost of being even a little wrong at the scale my company operates at is eye-watering.
We had two teams do a bit of what you describe over the course of six months, shipped a lot without building much alignment. We are going to live with the cost of those decisions for a minimum of 5 years.
The lower bound of the cost of working around their mistakes right now is equivalent to... 80 engineer years maybe? Because now we have customers who rely on some insane functionality they built that we are contractually obligated to support (and spiritually want to maintain good faith) and it will infect a bunch of other systems that will now have to integrate with their choices and take on that tech debt.
Absolutely. But I think it's still worth talking about productivity in the sense of how much are you investing for the additional value you're generating.
In the context of this discussion and your comment, wouldn't it be better if those teams were aligned and productive? Is that just not possible in large orgs/software or is it just poor management?
I think it's just unusual to have enough information to be able to plan up front. There are two aspects:
1. Do we have all the information to make the right product decisions now?
2. Do we have all the information to scope all the technical work?
Both are unusual and the second requires the first. It's not that it never happens (A nearby team in my org did it over the last six months) but this has become harder to achieve as the complexity of software has increased.
We need to be more specific than "make money". The purpose is to maximize the discounted cash flow. I.e. to max out the present value of the company's profits over the life of the company, or in other words, max out the value of the company.
That means that you might engage in R&D for projects that have a chance to become really big in the future. It can also mean pursuing an ever larger range of smaller profitability projects (still adds to your profit).
This may not be what the CEO is optimizing for. Even assuming a CEO is an all knowing oracle in terms of predicting future profits and even assuming they are aware of all the details of what a large company is working on (hint: they're not either). The rest of the organization has a life of its own as well with individuals optimizing for different things that are rarely in perfect alignment with the company's goals.
On top of all that, shipping software may not be the business driver. Promising things, demos, good salesmanship, may all contribute to a business more than "shipping software". Look at Tesla's "FSD". I.e. it's not even clear that shipping sooner with amazing value/quality to the end user drives the business side that strongly. Often software is not sold directly to the end user. Even when it is the end user may have other things driving their money spending decisions. I would say it likely can be a driver but you also need the kind of organization that is able to leverage that in the market.
Good points. Making money is indeed a better definition of desired outcomes.
But my point stands: if you want to make money, why do you waste 75% of your potential not actually doing work?
My first email account was in 1989. That's also when I started doing online chat.
> Chat did not exist, but wouldn't make sense anyway.
Perhaps not to you, but for others it had been around time for some time, along with its problems. Microsoft, for example, distributed WinChat starting with Windows for Workgroups in 1992.
Here's a description of events which took place at Microsoft no later than early 1993, as described in the 1996 book 'Showstopper! : the breakneckrace to create Windows NT and the next generation at Microsoft', https://archive.org/details/showstopperbreak0000zach_p7g1/pa... :
] WinChat was a variant on electronic mail; it allowed two or more people to type messages back and forth as if they spoke on the telephone. These “interactive” conversations were quite popular and illustrated the benefits of a computer network. It was important to test WinChat because NT was supposed to incorporate all Windows networking features. In his memo, Manheim was informing the team that they could use WinChat if they wanted. While his group was testing WinChat, others using it might also turn up problems.
] Manheim’s announcement bothered Cutler. He felt WinChat would distract people from bug fixing. He didn’t want it used. “This isn’t a fun app. It is a waste of time,” he wrote to Manheim. “VMS had this program 10 years ago. It was a waste of time then and it is a waste of time now. Anyone I see wasting their time with [WinChat] is apt to get some verbal abuse.”
] ... Using Winchat “is not a waste of time,” Manheim wrote, his anger rising. “It’s part of the product that will be used by the customers and if it’s trash we'll get shit for it.
] ... I have direct experience with this kind of application at Digital. It is easy to get everyone to sit around and type at each other rather than fixing the bugs they should be fixing. If I had my way we would not ship this app. But then we wouldn’t be compatible with Win 3.1 and we have to do that.
The book also mentions email,
] It was a neat ploy, since colleagues mainly conversed via electronic mail, or e-mail. No matter Whitmer’s whereabouts, his e-mail address remained “Chuckwh.” At Microsoft, e-mail was the most trusted and intimate means of exchanging messages.
We have peak micro-managements doctrines, then "just look at the big picture" reaction, then it stagnates in the middle, to go back to one extreme or the other. I think the Agile trend will go away, and there's some companies out of it already, I just don't expect this current trend to last for a half-century either.
Agile was developed to fix that, basically do the minimum viable number of meetings required to keep management in the loop while empowering engineers to make decisions about their own work. Didn't really work out that way though.
I've worked on two teams that did Agile this way. Both were the most productive and impactful teams I've ever worked on.
Unfortunately, part of those team's success was their ability to work mostly unblocked by the rest of the org. Once process had to accommodate other people's timelines and turn-around expectations, that all went out the window.
Most organizations seem to much prefer optimizing for short-turn around time over sustained throughput.
Not sure what your work place back then was but we clearly had tons of emails sent in 2000 already. As to chat ICQ came out in 1996, as did AOL IM in 1997, Yahoo and MSN as well. They were very popular by 2000.
One of my funniest moments as an intern was helping one of my mentors accidentally delete her entire inbox. I can't even remember what we were trying to do with her inbox, but deleting the entire contents was not it. There was a moment of panic, then calm. She just told me: if it's important, they'll email me again. And we moved on and never spoke of it again.
I often feel like IT has been taken over by corporate parasites, for the lack of a better word. Staff that is feeding and living off IT, but is not actually doing IT.
I would say collaboration should be maximized inside the team, where latency is lowest and coherence is highest, and minimized outside it. This is the product-oriented organization philosophy, which aims to maximize communication efficiency. At the other end are functional organizations, which aim to maximize competency (specialization), and flexibility.
This is a big part of why I don't use social media beyond HN and Reddit (if those count). Being inundated with a constant stream of notifications is not only distracting, it makes me feel less in control of my mind, and therefore, my life.
My regular email, slack notifications from work, and text messages from friends are pretty much all my introverted mind can handle, and even then I still feel out of focus much of the time. Meditating helps considerably, but it feels like I'm swimming upstream.
While I'm not immune to wanting to pull the content slot machine, at least with HN and Reddit I get at least some choice about how I interact with those environments.
What you named can effectively kill 8h, every effin' day.
Personally, what I don't get is folks wearing smart watches, getting instant notifications when somebody pings them. Its apparently not enough that phone blinks and plays sounds and your desk vibrates, now your wrist has to. How desperately addicted to constant stream of stimuli they are, my boss including (and he still thinks his apple watch are great, but when I sit next to him I see how it fucks him pretty badly, plus its so annoying I want to throw him out through closed window myself and I am not alone).
People still somehow do their job, despite of these semi-useless gizmos, not thanks to them. Yes you can tune it down but for every person doing so there are 10, or more like 100 who don't do it at all. And not only for the case of my boss, it makes them objectively worse workers, employees, friends, parents and overall human beings.
I ran a small side business for a while - at the time I had a fitness tracker style watch that would vibrate every time I got an email or notification. At first it was thrilling but after a while as the workload got too much I realised every time it vibrated my heart rate would increase and my anxiety would spike. It felt like I was on 24/7 on-call.
Now I don't receive any notifications. I check my messages too often still, but at least it's on my terms.
I still wear a fitness tracker but now it's just a watch.
> Personally, what I don't get is folks wearing smart watches, getting instant notifications when somebody pings them.
My watch is my primary defense against interruptions. With the watch, I can leave the ringer and vibrator off on my phone entirely. When an alert happens, my watch vibrates once and that's it. It's an intrusion that's easy to ignore when I don't want to be interrupted.
I'm in the same boat. I select which apps send notifications to my watch and that prevents me from using my phone unnecessarily. Looking at my wrist is a lot easier than taking the phone out of my pocket and unlocking it. And I'm much less likely to get distracted by something unrelated.
My watch tells me when I have a meeting in 10min, if I get a call and if a family member messages. That's it. If I need to take medication I'll set an alarm as well but that's still infrequent. Only things I know I have to take action on right away.
HN is a killer for my productivity, even though I only try to visit it a couple of times a day. Once in the morning to read the whole front page, and then later in the day to get updates.
I need to somehow massively increase my filtering of which articles I open. I often end up reading 50% of the stories on the front page, plus the comments.
My worst productivity killer is getting into an argument early in the morning with someone on HN or a similar site. Even if I stop visiting the site, my mind keeps thinking about the argument for a couple of hours instead of whatever it is supposed to do.
The two things that help are a) if it isn't too deep, like 4 nested comment threads deep on a three day old thread, then someone may chime in while I'm away and make a similar enough point that when I come back later, I don't anything to say/add, and b) even if no one does say anything, readers aren't dumb. if I say water is wet, but someone responds, calling me an an idiot and that water isn't wet. even if no one chimes in to further respond yes it is and here's why, readers can determine for themselves and decide water is or isn't wet.
Asking myself that question when I reply to someone who replied to me helps cut that off.
I also picture that meme-ably smug fellow sitting behind a card table with some provoking statement, and the sentence “Prove me wrong.” No, I don’t owe you my time and energy to try changing a mind not interested in changing, but in attracting attention.
Reminds me of the good old XKCD, "someone is wrong on the internet!" [0]. I also enjoy commenting here and in other places, but lately I've been tapering back, and it's nice waking up without notifications from anyone telling you you're wrong. :)
It's the intermittent reinforcement caused by a useful thread once in a while that contributes to the addiction. You could choose to just check the topics you find useful, using https://histre.com/hn/
This is exactly what keeps me on this site, and Twitter as well. Sometimes there are long spells of nothing interesting and I start to wonder why I'm even checking, but then something pops up and browsing HN becomes positive in my head again for awhile.
I know what you mean. I always go to the comments first as the article might be summarized better there. It's only if I don't get what I need from the comments that I am forced to actually visit the article and read it.
I find it useful to filter to only stories over X points. 500 seems like a good bar for really great stuff. 300 for more casual reading, anything lower starts having a bunch more noise.
I created https://staticnews.pages.dev for myself to solve this exact problem. It only shows the top 30 stories from the previous day with a pruned comment tree. I liked the idea of a sibling comment here about filtering to stories by score, so I might tweak it to do something like that.
I've hit the point where nearly all content on Reddit and HN feels repetitive, outside a few novel articles.
The same trends and style of articles tend to pop up over and over and over. Eventually, most of them just don't resonate. They may be _amazing_ articles, but they'll just be forgotten in my sea of other work if they they're not directly relevant to what I'm working on right now.
It doesn’t help that all of the documentation you need is in the same system as all of the distractions, especially since much of modern documentation is folklore projected out through blogs and sites like SO or Reddit.
Back in the day documentation was the book on your desk and that pretty much was the end of it. At worst you may have had a stack of monthly magazines that could only hold your interest for so long.
If anything during idle time you might have been reading the dustier and darker corners of your system documentation and find a surprise you could use.
I've taken it upon myself to aggresively curtail all the notifications that my phone is allowed to show me.
Texts, calls, or anything that I might need to see immediately is all that I allow. Emails, ads, and other crap gets canned the first time I see it. If it's not urgent, then I don't need to know about it.
I've even started removing notification noises from my groupchats with my friends, so the notification will let me know there's a conversation happening but I won't be pestered into participating.
> so the notification will let me know there's a conversation happening but I won't be pestered into participating
I really wish more (any?) chat programs let you know some kind of conversation was happening, but wasn't pinging you every single message. Something like every X hour(s) there's a notification that says "X messages have been received," or when a chat has been idle for an extended period of time, then after X time the first new message comes in I receive a notification for only that first message.
As is, 90% of my chat apps have notifications completely disabled, and I have to manually go in to see if anything has happened.
It's also worth mentioning how intrusive notifications have gotten.
I remember back in the Good Old Days of Android there was a notification ticker that unintrusively told me that I had gotten a notification and sampled some (or all) of the text.
Now, you can be watching a video and have 1/6th of your screen suddenly change (and repeatedly if, as mentioned, it's an active group chat)
Discord kind of does this, at least on mobile. It'll ping you the first few messages to a channel/convo, and if you ignore those it stops sending them until you open them.
I've aggressively silenced technology over the last few years and wrote about it. I just turn off anything that calls for my attention without justification.
It's hard to notice the improvement, a bit like a headache that slowly subsides. But it works. I don't get sidetracked as much. Technology feels less... noisy.
> This is a big part of why I don't use social media beyond HN and Reddit (if those count). Being inundated with a constant stream of notifications is not only distracting, it makes me feel less in control of my mind, and therefore, my life.
I’ve been using social media apps for years with notifications disabled. I switched phones recently and notifications got re-enabled. The deluge of useless notifications was terrifying.
I routinely go through my day’s notifications and disallow notifications from apps that I don’t want to see. It doesn’t take long to clean them up and it makes a huge difference.
Unfortunately, my worst offenders are Slack and work-related pings by a mile. It only takes a few busybodies to rain notifications down on the team all day long.
> Meditating helps considerably, but it feels like I'm swimming upstream.
If it's not too much trouble, hoping you might provide your meditation routine with me/us. It's a practice I'd like to begin, but hard to know where to start, or if I'm doing it right.
Its not complicated, basically after I shower in the morning I just kneel on a yoga mat, sometimes after doing a few basic poses, then close my eyes and focus on visualizing my upcoming day. Or you can choose to focus on just breathing. If a thought appears in your head, don't force it away, just let it drift, like breathing. The key is to not try to meditate, just let what happens happen.
With experience, you'll figure out what works. All you have to do is get started, and you're guaranteed to get better after awhile and be able to start experimenting with your method. You can even do it right now! Don't have time? I read an old maxim once from a buddhist monk: "If you don't have time to meditate for 15 minutes, do it for 30".
To be the annoying naysayer, but more as a thought experiment: many jobs benefit from increased focus. And like.. yeah, unnecessary notifications are unnecessary! Tautological.
But in context: a coworker needs a piece of information. You are there. You have the information. Asking you saves them 30 minutes. Should they interrupt you?
What if it's 5 minutes? What if it's 15? What is the level of urgency on their end? Is there pedagogical value in them figuring this out without you?
Ultimately interruptions have varying degrees of necessity, and we should be evaluating a team's interruptions as a whole. "Turn off all notifications" might indeed be the proper baseline, but at the end of the day the real thing is team interaction. Is the problem interruptions? Or is it role distribution? Is it knowledge sharing?
It's very easy in a context free situation to apply blanket statements but there's so much nuance to these interactions that I have a hard time establishing any sort of blanket rule. But at the end of the day, people's norms are different, so something needs to be said. "Don't talk to your coworkers" just rubs me the wrong way. It is definitely what is said to many teams who interact with programmers, though.
It's all about expectations. I'm a startup CTO. So, I'm constantly being pulled into meetings asked about this or that on Slack and there's always stuff piling up in my inbox. None of it requires a real time response from me. Most of those meetings are not that urgent/important. A lot of things on Slack resolve itself without me responding instantly. Me interrupting whatever it is I'm trying to do is super disruptive. A few tactical strikes on my calendar can remove any chance whatsoever to get anything significant done on a day. So me dropping everything I'm doing to respond to some random inbound thing is actually very expensive and disruptive.
The way I deal with it is not responding immediately other than by accident. People stop expecting it when you stop doing that. They adapt. And they appreciate when you eventually do respond. Basically asynchronous communication makes responding more efficient. Instead of constantly attention hopping you simply periodically respond to stuff in order of priority. When urgent stuff really needs attention, people will find you.
I turn off notifications/alerts for most things and I simply check when I have some time. Tools and apps begging for attention rank very low on my priority queue of things that need attention. Most email I still receive is actually notifications and not requests for lengthy replies. I rarely use email for discussions of any kind any more. Wrong medium for it. If my phone rings, it's generally a spam call. Most important calls are scheduled. And I prefer taking them on my laptop via a video call. If I don't recognize the number, I don't answer at all.
All this eliminates interruptions of rare moments I have when I can actually focus on something. Focus time is actually blocked in my calendar and I don't allow stuff to creep into that other than by exception. And I strongly encourage people to not even attempt to book meetings with me outside a few dedicated slots I have for that. There's always more stuff to do than I can do. So, it's important to cherry pick and do it well.
When I started my career, I only had a phone and slow email. Then, email got faster. Eventually, I got chat. Things got so much faster with chat. Then, I got alerts for chats. Again: Faster because you never miss an alert. Then, chatbots appears to show alerts and help with simple things. Again: You go faster and get more information instantly. The places that delivered the most monetary value all had very high information velocity.
Agree anything “black and white” is probably wrong. Just like devs like to not see the value in the existence of tech debt or management or coding interviews some seem unable to weigh the pros and cons of notifications and being randomized. Everything is complicated.
I'm jealous of technology workers from about 10 years ago, before work IM tools like Slack, HipChat, and Teams became the standard. Being able to work uninterruptedly except for emails (for which a delayed response was acceptable) sounds like an absolute dream. I dread the constant feeling of low-level anxiety induced by these tools (Gotta keep that status icon green! Gotta respond to messages right away!)
Before IM, if the boss needed to know something OMFG URGENT RIGHT NOW, they'd pick up the phone and call you--also breaking your concentration. The problem is not the technology, it's people's willingness to destroy productivity just to get some nugget of information synchronously instead of asynchronously.
I have empathy though, because I've had to break people's concentrations to urgently ping for information, too. It's always because my boss needed me to urgently get the information, and he's doing it because his boss needs to urgently get the informational and so on. Some senior VP somewhere makes an offhand remark about the status of Project X, and suddenly, 20 different managers are pinging their underlings for urgent information, breaking everyone's concentration.
Ugh. Your last paragraph rings incredibly true for me. The only (partial) antidote that I've found is having a reasonable cadence for updating major project status in a well-known place. If you publish reasonably current information on an on-going basis (which seems like a reasonable demand), you have a chance to avoid many of the curiosity escalations.
I remember being at a small company in the late 90s. We hired a new engineer and he used AIM. The boss was furious that the new guy was spending his time on the clock chatting with friends (and possibly leaking company secrets to people at other companies!). They forbid him to use it, so he would log into it every morning and set his status to some childish message about how his employer wouldn’t allow him to use it during business hours.
I remember thinking it was odd that the engineer would think it was OK to be chatting with friends while he was supposed to be working, but I also thought it was odd that the boss was so pissed off about it. It’s not like we didn’t (physically, IRL) chat among ourselves about non-work stuff, too. As long as we were getting our work done, who cares? Now everyone has chat and social media on every device, include their own that they bring with them anywhere, including work.
I also remember that when I was a kid, I was never supposed to interrupt my father at work by calling him, unless it was an absolute real emergency, like the house burning down. Times have changed!
I turn my IM app off when I need to focus. When we were all in one office, I would keep it off for days at a time.
The worst was when a manager insisted I have it on. He was literally 3 cubes away from me (and always present). Why does he need to IM with me?! He was in his 50's, and had spent most of his career without such tools.
Another solution I now use since we're no longer in the office: If you ping me, I'll initiate a voice call. Async with constant notifications is a productivity killer. With a call, there is a fixed end point to the interruption.
You and me are like the complete opposite. You'd rather your boss waltz on over to your cube and interrupt you instead of a message notification you can put off a while?
Seems like it's about symmetric costs and overall efficiency. To get up and walk over costs the Boss time and physical effort, so it won't take happen frequently, and it will likely happen on a predictable schedule (e.g. as boss goes to lunch). Context cues are available, and clarification is instant, which minimizes time-wasting rabbit holes.
In contrast, for the Boss to rattle some misguided text into Slack takes much less effort on the Boss's part and doesn't break the Boss's concentration, but the misunderstanding will be harder to clear up. If there is a back and forth it will take longer and be more distracting and stressful to the engineer, and if there isn't a back and forth the engineer is more likely wondering wtf the Boss is on about.
1. When they waltz over to my cube, they are also interrupting themselves, so they are an order less likely to do it (i.e. do it only when important).
2. IM notifications every few minutes is far more disruptive than a quick 1-5 minute conversation. When he leaves the cube, I can focus. With IM, if I respond, I don't know when, or even if, he will respond. That consumes some of the focus. And an IM session can last 30+ minutes because of the async nature.
3. It's my manager. If he IMs me and I don't respond, and it's important enough, he'll come to my cube anyway (and be annoyed/upset). I can't always know what is important to him or not. So async doesn't really work that well.
4. I don't need the mental burden of tracking which IM sessions have pending responses. Email is much easier to manage. So my policy tends to be: "If I don't respond soon after seeing it, assume it is forgotten and ping me again."
Plenty of distractions with email as well. Also, folks used MSN/Yahoo chat regularly before HipChat/Yammer/Slack came to picture.
But I agree, overall it was a lot less distractions to get things done. On the other hand, the web had a lot less resources to get things done (this was before Stackoverflow), so if you stumbled into technical issues it took longer to resolve them.
Yes, but in my experience at least, while these were used they were not used company wide. They weren't even department wide or team wide in some cases. So the communication over something like AIM was way more intentional, way more likely to be relevant to the teams work, and there was not the expectation of getting quick responses or keeping your status as green/available. So even still the situation was way more tenable for keeping focus time.
Do you have to keep it green and respond right away? I put a meeting in my calendar as “focus time” and then turn off slack. People are usually quite understanding. It also helps to be regular so people know that you are never available around that time.
You might get away with not responding immediately but losing that green status means HR will be asking you to leave or sending you a box for your equipment by the end of the day. Managers (project, product, people) are notorious for demanding always green status icons.
Fake meetings are fine until it is discovered you did a fake meeting. Then you get told not to do that again. They want the appearance of productivity -- they don't want productivity.
> losing that green status means HR will be asking you to leave or sending you a box for your equipment by the end of the day
I genuinely never had that fear in any of the places I worked at (or heard of one!). If that is a cause for termination or being written up, I'd probably look for some place else.
> Fake meetings are fine until it is discovered you did a fake meeting
My meetings are titled "focus time". It’s purely there to communicate to other team members why I may be unavailable during those time. If people need me during that time, they just ask me beforehand and I’m happy to oblige.
I'm torn on this. Yeah, it'd be great to have a hard line between dev and ops with both groups also having managers to shield them from the business team that protects the mental states of flow of each. But realistically, IME, devs who respond to the ops issues on the features they build directly from the biz people are way more valuable to the bottom line of the company in terms of getting high value work done. Yeah, it's not optimal, but throughput per dev on the aggregate and a deep understanding of the tech vis a vis the actual business needs its serving is really important.
If you are lucky. There's the cookie popup, the newsletter popup, the popup that wants to talk about new features....and on and on. All while macOS gives you three popups for the same calendar event, a software update that it thinks you should know about right fucking now and a slew of popups from some application you started which now wants to disrupt your flow with.....more alerts.
PS: if someone knows who wrote the calendar daemon in macOS, please say hello from me and ensure they know how pathetic I think it is that they managed to spend 70-80% CPU to update calendars. Really? Do them a favor and get them application forms in the "rapid food preparation" industry.
The Calendar app on my iPhone used 50mb of data in the last month. I have maybe 10 events in it. I can’t even begin to understand how it managed to pull 50mb. WhatsApp, which I use nonstop daily, pulled 3mb.
Sure, on an unlimited cap 50mb is no problem. But when roaming it could cost a fortune. Seems like minimising resource usage is often an afterthought, even for Apple.
IIRC the Calendar standards (iCal, etc) are pull-based, so your Calendar app has to poll/request the whole calendar constantly to check for new events in case you make one on another device (e.g. your computer). There are also enough edge cases that also nobody wants to change/improve on the standards.
WhatsApp can send you a push when you get a message, so its usage is ~nothing if you're not sending and receiving messages.
Not sure about iPhone, but most browsers on Android (e.g. Chrome, Edge) let you disable JavaScript in "site settings" by default. You then opt-in for a given site by clicking the little padlock on the address bar and enabling JavaScript for the site in question. Also works for things like audio, location, etc.
Genuinely not sure what methods they went through, but you can install it (and other firefox+chrome extensions) on the Orion browser. But they also have a built-in ad & tracking blocker that works well
I turned off all alerts except for messages from my family. I check everything else often enough and people really can’t tell the difference in my responsiveness. My overall happiness is higher now that things aren’t popping up or vibrating all the time.
- I block all unscheduled phone calls, whitelisting only parents/SO
- I block all notifications and check apps pull-only
- During work hours I check Slack about once every 30 minutes. (If there's some urgent deadline coming up I might check it a few more times in the evening but that's not the norm)
i consider a website that presents structured text in a consumer-friendly way, using minimal resources, a very successful application of computers, the internet and a browser.
Really, we should be asked if we want notifications in the first place. I find chat apps like Teams, Discord, alert way too much. The signal to noise is tiny. Maybe this is my fault (I never really "got" Discord, Slack, Teams etc. like I got email, IM, SharePoint and phone calls), but I get added to group chats/Teams without me knowing and just start getting visual, audio and haptic (on my phone) alerts with very little context. It's a bad UX. At least my phone makes it relatively easy to mute things, or everything.
I wish there was a mute all notifications button on my keyboard like I have a mute mic and mute audio button. Aside from letting me focus, it would be really useful when presenting. Going through a few clicks through the notification center in Windows is a start, but it is too hidden to be obvious to anyone not specifically looking for it and is a bit cumbersome if you flip things on and off frequently.
I don't have a Windows solution to the "mute everything for presentations" problem, but for anyone on macOS: option-click on the clock / notification section in the menu bar and you'll put yourself into Do Not Disturb mode. Option-click the clock again to disable.
The discoverability of that shortcut isn't great but it has become one of my favorite macOS features.
Amusingly, the first thing it does is put a big countdown clock on your screen, counting down the time till your "focus" ends. Otherwise it works pretty well.
I just turn off my WiFi completely when I want to do work and need less distractions. One problem I have, though, is that toddlers have no "off" or "mute" button, so during non-school days it's kinda difficult to get more than one medium-sized (an hour or less time) thing done.
> one medium-sized (an hour or less time) thing done
Totally off-topic, but this fascinated me because it highlighted how differently people regard task size. If I have a task that can be done in about an hour or less, I call that "very small". A small task can be done in a day, a medium in a single-digit number of days.
To me, small tasks things that can be done almost immediately, medium are things I can do a half-dozen of per day, and large tasks take a whole day themselves. I don't think in more than 1-day increments, lately.
I‘ve turned off push notifications for most productivity apps on my phone, and haven’t ever missed them. Slack and email have no business appearing on my home screen.
Right, the issue is that "modern" work still requires attention, but is often accompanied by an expectation for responsiveness and a wide array of demands on the worker's attention.
Nobody is saying "why aren't our production line employees very active on the #dogsofourworkplace slack channel?"
My thoughts, exactly. Unfortunately, I think it's not simply that constant alerts steal attention, but also that dependence on computers is also training us to not pay attention. The computer will tell us the problem and how to solve it, no thought required, a lot of the time. Therefore, we need to be even more alert than we used to (have to be), in order to spot the rare occasion that the computer is wrong, and apply thought and common sense. Additionally (for me at least), controlling the quality of the computer tends to be less fulfilling and less exciting work than actually solving problems myself, meaning I don't care as much about it and am not as attentive to it.
Trying to build an Antikythera mechanism but I keep being handed wax tablets notifying me about 4 people liking the murals my friend made about his visit to Corinth last month, and now my politically weird uncle has apparently added me to a group celebrating the thirty tyrants of athens.
My father in law (deceased) used to spend 8-10 hours a day doing woodworking art for his business, then several hours delivering things to customers each day as well. I asked him how it tool 8-10 hours to do 3-6 pieces when I had been watching and he finished each one in about 30 minutes (other than paint drying and stuff). He said that people were always talking to him, because his store and work area were basically right in the middle of town and he worked out front rather than inside because he had no workshop in the store. I hung out with him for a day and saw no less than a dozen different people stop by and have 10-15 minute conversations with him, and he couldn't do much work during that time.
That's a pretty useless story for HN, but seemed relevant to the topic at hand, and I like remembering my father in law and telling stories about him (I miss him considerably).
I wish my FIL was around to teach me, I hate tech work! It does seem common, and I think there's something about working with natural materials and holding something organic that appeals to me. Software isn't "real" as much as woodworking is. Sometimes it's hard to just build stuff that is deleted in several months, versus making a quality chair which will probably get use for hundreds of years. I have some wood furnishings in my current rental home that were built by the owner who built this whole house with is wife in the 50's and they are the most solid things we use on a daily basis.
Very little code will still be used a decade later. I have sincere doubts that much that I've produced will endure even half that long. Software is ephemeral. But as you pointed out, quality furniture can last for many decades or even centuries and still be as useful as the day it was built.
Modern work comes with modern distractions. All these emails and phone notifications ruin modern people from getting into flow states which require a lot of attention.
I believe that people enter the flow state much less today than before smartphones came along.
I am totally on the other side of this - I would much rather get my work interrupted to unblock a colleague than to pretend that anything I do is so meaningful that it's more important than working with other people. In any company larger than a few people, your own individual work doesn't matter so much - your time is better spent helping other people get their shit done, especially if you know enough to have people be asking you
Of course this doesn't get you promoted at FAANG or whatever but I don't really care much about that. It also doesn't account for annoying parasitic people who don't know how to communicate remotely or don't check documentation / internal KB before asking, but hopefully you hire better people than that :)
I broadly agree with you (but then I work on cloud infrastructure which in most places I've worked so far has meant being a supporting/enabling function) but I do wonder:
> In any company larger than a few people, your own individual work doesn't matter so much - your time is better spent helping other people get their shit done, especially if you know enough to have people be asking you
This fairly obviously can't be true for everyone in an organisation so I wonder which factors affect it in practice - whether it's a function of personality or role, for example.
i worked with this guy who had alerts popping up on his screen for everything that was anywhere in his calendar (somebody else having a meeting in room X? he got an alert when it started), every email that arrived for him, and probably some other stuff, too. while you were talking to him, his head would twitch over to the monitor every time one came in, yet he never knew what email he'd received.
i don't think i've ever met anyone who had a higher defect rate in their code.
Colleague sends an email. Ignore it cause I'm focused.
Same colleague sends a chat request. Ignore it cause I'm focused.
Same colleague sends a text message. Ignore it cause I'm focused.
Same colleague actually calls. Ignore it cause I'm focused.
Same colleague walks over to tell you about the email and the chat and the text and the call. But when he gets to your desk, he realizes that he figured out the solution, so breaks your focus to apologize for breaking your focus.
What works for me for a long time is total separation of work vs private online life. On my work laptop, no social media, private email etc is set up, whereas on my private laptop there is no access to any work related stuff. Also, no work email/chat on my phone.
So no private notifications during working hours and if I really have to focus, I just turn off email/chat temporarily.
On the other hand, after I finish work, zero work related notifications can reach me.
The comments and discourse here is always so black and white.
If you're lucky enough to have creative work where you can deliver the most value by doing focused work all day, then by all means ignore your slack and email. BTW I'm very jealous of your job!
Why can't we just be adult professionals who can decide for themselves when to spend time without distractions and when not to? Surely we need both right?
The problem isn't when you have a software dev, say, doing focused work, and their manager, say, being interrupt-driven. That's fine (though the majority of us here on HN are "focused work" types, so their viewpoint tends to predominate).
The problem comes when the manager (or IT or someone else) decides that everyone else has to be available for instant response to the alerts. That violates your "adult professionals" rule, too.
Except I used to be able to walk over to your desk if I needed to talk asap or ring your work internal radio. Now I send an email a slack a call and get a response two days later
I fully support the sentiment here, and took a lot of the content from Deep Work to heart when I first read it and was trying to figure out how to be a more productive professional SWE, but a lot of this information is common knowledge within SWE culture for those who care about it, and I still haven't found an organization or team that actually puts these into practice.
I fear we've already lost this battle and the non-knowledge-worker to knowledge-worker ratio has gotten too high for tech companies/workers to get the cat back in the bag. If anybody has successfully changed a dev team's processes to make changes in the right direction, I'd love to hear how that happened for you. Many people I work with complain about too many meetings and interruptions and yet the expectations which contribute to these problems continue. My org recently adopted having a "no meeting day" every week and without this I don't think I'd ever get anything done.
Solution: disable notifications. It turns out life is pretty great when you don’t know what’s happening in the news cycle. “But how will I hold relevant conversations with my friends and family?” If all you discuss with your community is current events, congratulations, you’re the perfect unit of manufactured consent.
But I do want them if someone's asking for help I might be able to give, or frankly even if it's just something chatty/'bants' (that could change if there was more of it of course) - 'status updates' (shared as messages) though really wind me up. OK, have a nice lunch. OK, won't message you for a bit then - but I wasn't going to and this isn't a phone call or meeting so I wouldn't expect an immediate response anyway.
If you're worried someone's going to try to reach you while you're out for half an hour and be upset that you don't reply sooner, just use the (Slack) built-in feature for that?
I agree about news though - call me 'uninformed' if you want, but I think anyone who tries it quickly learns how little of it matters. (And I was a paying Times (London) subscriber before that, not like I was reading gossip mags, tabloids, and Sky News shock-horror clickbait.) Major stuff makes it to HN anyway.
This is why I've completely disabled all notifications in Windows. Those "toasts" are a distraction I can't ignore since they forcibly impose themselves over whatever I'm focusing on.
Better that they never happen. Nothing in the operating system is so important that it needs a toast.
I have "Do Not Disturb" enabled 100% of the time, except when I'm waiting for a delivery. Incoming calls from unknown numbers are also automatically silenced.
Related question: are there some employees that are so motivated to solve the problem in front of them (or simply more disciplined) less likely to get distracted? If so, what has been the relative productivity hit to "diligent" vs. "slacking" employees?
The solution appears to be rather simple here. Just establish "office hours" and put them in the calendar or something. These are times when you will be available to answer any questions. Otherwise, unless a true emergency comes up, it's focus time.
What are some alternatives to the constantly noisy slack for startups? I like the idea of low effort messages, but other than being extremely self disciplined there doesn't seem to be a great way to consume them in a reasonable, low interrupt way.
Avoidant personality disorder is your friend. Mute the noise in your life or it may mute you. Break the chemical cycle of a classically conditioned digital mouse trap and create something truly useful but most importantly fun.
The only major difference between work now and work 15 years ago is there's more remote work, and nobody has been taught how to work remote. There are multiple books, blogs and guides on it, but nobody reads anything anymore, so here's the tl;dr:
- Schedule all your work. Schedule when you'll check e-mails, slack, teams. Schedule when you'll have office hours. Schedule when you'll do research. Schedule when you'll pair with someone. Schedule lunch. Your calendar should be booked pretty much every hour of the day, except for meeting day, when you keep a 3-hour window open for meetings.
- Silence all notifications except meeting reminders. Provide an escalation path for use in emergencies. Make e-mail rules, slack rules, etc that will bypass a snoozed notification and go right to you. Put your phone number in your Slack, Teams, Outlook, etc profile.
- When you do have meetings, be strategic. Schedule meetings only when you have already done the work to prepare for them, have an agenda, have done research, and need consensus or troubleshooting. Choose shorter meeting windows, like 15 minutes, 25 minutes, 45 minutes. Have someone keep a timer to remind people before the meeting comes to a close and end it on time. Don't schedule a meeting to find out if you need a meeting. Don't end the meeting without action items and meeting notes. Don't schedule a meeting when an e-mail back-and-forth will do.
- Prioritize working asynchronously. Push back on meetings and calls, and instead ask for details in e-mail, Slack, Jira, Confluence, GitHub Issues/PRs, etc.
- Actually learn how to use your ticketing and wiki system. Don't make it someone else's job to organize your own work. Use the systems to make your work more efficient. Put notes in as you do work, and direct people to go look for your current progress there rather than bug you. Be habitual about keeping status, progress, etc consistently up-to-date. If someone asks for status, point them at a URL to your status updates. If this seems arduous, there are almost always existing tools designed to make it easier.
- Document and publicize your workflow. What your schedule is, how you organize it, how to contact you and under what circumstances. Make sure anyone in your company can find out whether they need to contact you and when and how.
- Try hard not to multitask. If you aren't getting several tickets done per week, your work hasn't been broken up sufficiently, or you're jumping around too much.
- Keep track of your time and work so that you can account for it. Measure toil vs feature work. If the toil goes over 50%, tell your boss, and keep a record of it. After a month of that you should be able to estimate your lost time, extrapolate it out to a year, and show them how much time/money they're losing. If your boss doesn't care, have a skip-level.
If you think any of that is crazy, just remember some of us have been doing Open Source development for 20+ years without meetings. If IRC, pull requests, and mailing lists are good enough to create the foundations of most of the world's software, it's probably good enough for your job.
When I joined the work force in 2000, my life was comparably so stunningly simple. Just a few guys in the same room. Barely any process or documentation. Email was still new so the concept of an outside world barely existed. Chat did not exist, but wouldn't make sense anyway. We talked a bit here and there but 80% was actually doing the work, not talking about it. Management had no idea what we were doing and metric porn did not yet exist.
A lot has changed. More complicated tech stacks means more deeper specializations, requiring more handovers. A lot is outsourced now so you may need vendors to move things. You may have off-shored things. Nobody has clarity on what you need to do, hence you need to hop the organization to find out the details. You need to pass legal and the privacy office. You need to report status constantly to an army of bean counters. Testing has become amazingly complicated and so is system administration.
It requires super human effort to move things by an inch. So no, "collaboration is not a force multiplier". Collaboration isn't a product or outcome. Ideally you'd have an absolute minimum of it. The ideal workflow is that you create a clear and detailed work package, hand it over to the worker, whom you then leave alone to actually do it.
Your companies' purpose is to ship software or whatever else it does, it isn't to ship emails, chat, status updates, approvals and documents.
It is absolutely baffling to me how highly paid office workers' productivity is pissed away like this without intervention. Don't send them to a yoga class to cope, fix the fucking problem. You're setting your money on fire.