Makers, Don't Let Yourself Be Forced Into the 'Manager Schedule'

I totally understand. I'm on the same page. If I get interrupted and have to take my headphones off it also takes me 20 minutes to get back into it 100%. One of the best management strategies I've experienced was a core hours for meetings. Meetings were only allowed to be scheduled from 11 - 3. And devs were allowed to work whatever hours they wanted outside of that uninterrupted by meetings.

That works well for meetings, but what about interruptions from other devs asking questions? This is something that I feel a lot of devs don't see the bigger picture for. Within reason, it's better for a senior dev to be interrupted by a dev with a question even with knowing that senior dev won't get back into the swing of things as quickly. Why? Because if two or three devs get their questions answered and they can get their work done because of that in 1 hour with help rather than 4 hours without help (and higher quality code) then that's better for the team as a whole. Sure, the one senior dev might not produce as much work that day, but the team produced more output because of the interruptions.
Of course, there comes a point where a senior dev is constantly getting interrupted and never producing any meaningful output, or being forced to work overtime to get their work done. And, that's a problem. But, overall, I'm pro-interruptions for senior devs. Software development is a team endeavor, not a single rockstar process.

/r/programming Thread Parent Link - blog.nuclino.com