Source
nuuur32•

Almost sounds like heresy or poking a hole in a dam. I like the facebook approach that was blogged about recently, covering the period of recent growth and changes as compared to the myspace stagnation. Basically, the core developers were insulated by another layer of developers, and yet another, like an onion. Seems to me that's a reasonable way to dial up the concentration levels in the information age. (Perhaps it's also termed the Xerox Parc approach, though that could be a little different)

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markvp•

Following the principles of extreme programming helps a lot. To me the two most important ones of these principles are unit testing, and working no more than 40 hours a week. Unit testing avoids a lot of debugging. And working as much as he describes is just insane, you need to live and sleep to be productive.

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skulgnome•

Ha! Suits interrupting workers out of whim has been around for centuries.

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trevdak2•

I'm the Lead Engineer at a small start-up with almost 4000 clients. As such, I'm the most experienced developer of our platform, and when one of our Big Clients has a Big Question, I'm sometimes the only one who can answer it. And we have about 1000 big clients, each of whom has multiple people employed full-time using the platform that I wrote. As a result, account managers "bother" me 40-50 times a day with questions, requests for code snippets. I respond to about 200 emails a day, and still find the time to work on the platform and keep the bug list manageable.

My pointers:

  1. Accept that some days, you will get nothing done because there are too many interruptions and you can't get more than 5 minutes of continuous time to dedicate to your task. Instead, use that day to conquer as many tiny issues as you can.

  2. Start training an underling. If you're derailed more than once per hour, and your company can afford it, bring someone else aboard to share the load. You don't have to suffer alone.

  3. Work late. After 6pm, my number of interruptions drops to 0. Then I can really get stuff done.

  4. Keep track of your interruptions. if two clients interrupt you for similar requests, consider adding what they requested as a feature on your platform. Generally, each new feature is enableable, so if someone else asks for it, we just need to flip a 0 to a 1 in the database.

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[deleted]•

[deleted]

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