Programmers, Teach Non-Geeks The True Cost of Interruptions

Interruptions are one of the biggest sources of inefficiency for programmers. Now, to be fair, they’re probably a big source of inefficiency for everyone, but relatively speaking, they’re worse for programmers. To understand what I mean, let’s take someone whose job is in sales. A lot of the day is probably spent on the phone or in transit to and from meetings. In a given meeting or while reviewing notes prior to a meeting, an interruption to a sales person means time spent dealing with the interruption, a shake of the head, and a “where was I… oh, right.” For a manager, the day is often just a series of never-ending interruptions. In a management capacity, I find it common to sit down at lunch, still not having done the first thing I planned to do that day. Paul Graham has an excellent article about the different natures of the day for managers and for people he calls “makers,” a group that clearly includes programmers.

For a programmer, an interruption is oh-so different. There you sit, 12 calls into the call stack. On one monitor is a carefully picked set of inputs to a complex form that was responsible for generating the issue and on the other monitor is the comforting dark theme of your IDE, with the current line in the debugger glowing an angry yellow. You’ve been building to this moment for 50 minutes — you finally typed in the right inputs, understood the sequence in which the events had been fired, and got past the exact right number of foreach and while loops that took a few minutes each to process, and set your breakpoint before the exception was triggered, whipping you into some handler on the complete other end of the code base. Right now, at this exact moment, you understand why there are 22 items in the Orders collection, you know what the exact value of _underbilledCustomerCount is and you’ve hastily scribbled down the string “8xZ204330Kd” because that was the auto-generated confirmation code resulting from some combination of random numbers and GUIDs that you don’t understand and don’t want to understand because you just need to know what it is. This is the moment where you’re completely amped up because you’re about to unlock the mysteries of what on earth could be triggering a null reference exception in this third party library call that you’re pretty sure —

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