Project Management: Minimizing interruptions to software developers

Author: Jacek Trociński, Last Revision: 2022.12.09, Topic area: Project Management

Interrupting software developers is a managerial sin that most managers and even developers commit. From a business perspective it’s the equivalent of taking cash, putting it in the oven, and watching it turn to ash.

Programming, like many other disciplines, requires an intense amount of concentration. There’s this concept of “getting in the zone”. The zone is this place where you’re balancing multiple lines of code, variables, programming concepts, and various other thought processes in short-term memory. It takes anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes to get in the zone, and if you’re interrupted while in the zone then you can’t just go back to being in the zone. Being in the zone is when programmers produce their best code, it’s when tasks get finished at lightning speed, and it’s generally where the magic happens.

Every time a developer is interrupted that's time wasted, and as we all know, time is money and developers don’t come cheap. You might be thinking, I'm just sharing a funny meme, or that the question I have will only take a second to respond to, but what you don't realize is that this throws the developer off their game. That person must now stay after hours to finish a task that they could have done in the morning when their brain was still fresh and at peak performance had they not been constantly interrupted. Is that critical issue you had or that hilarious meme so important that it couldn’t have been shared in an email or during a coffee break? 99/100 times the answer is no, it wasn't that important. In fact, there is almost never a valid reason to interrupt a software developer, not even for a microsecond, just don’t do it!

As a developer, what can you do to protect yourself from being interrupted? If you’re working remotely the answer is simple, just turn off your chat while working on a task. The answer gets more complicated if you have kids. Either way, just try it, I guarantee you nothing important will happen in that one to two hours that you’re offline from Discord/Skype/Slack and you’ll get twice the amount of work done. If you’re in the office, things get a bit trickier. You’ll have to petition your manager to let you have a desk away from the marketing team, and let your teammates know not to bother you, which is sort of an awkward situation. It’s the main reason I hate open spaces, they’re a software developer’s worst nightmare.

From a business point of view though, wouldn't you want developers operating at optimal capacity? Recognizing that software developers shouldn’t be interrupted and placing safeguards to ensure that doesn’t happen saves both time and money. It’s a win-win situation, for both the business and developers.