When Ballmer took over Microsoft he exercised his hatred of developers by taking the attitude that we *should* be able to absorb any number of interruptions and go straight back to a maximally productive state. All the research said otherwise.
Many younger developers have never experienced the flow state and there is a growing belief that it's fiction, that people who want to work uninterrupted aren't "team players" and may in fact be mentally ill.
Some of them believe in a monstrous indignity called pair programming in which two developers share one keyboard and are in constant communication. After three hours of this, I quit my job the next morning and eleven years later went into therapy for what was, astonishingly, diagnosed as PTSD.
My generation read books. A lot of younger developers cannot read a design document, and hardly anyone can write one. They have grown up on computer games and channel surfing and have never learned to concentrate. So they have to attend meetings to keep their attention from drifting away.
Software engineering has been destroyed by management fads. Specifically, constant interruptions in the form of meetings.
The key to great work is prolonged unbroken concentration. We call this flow. One meeting and flow is gone for the day.
At Microsoft in 1990 we had a single one-hour meeting per week. Management’s highest priority was insulating us from interruptions.
Now? Two or three meetings every day.
Get rid of agile and scrum, only have interruptions for dependency management, let is focus again.
+1 - Meetings are definitely a bane for engineering productivity
When Ballmer took over Microsoft he exercised his hatred of developers by taking the attitude that we *should* be able to absorb any number of interruptions and go straight back to a maximally productive state. All the research said otherwise.
Many younger developers have never experienced the flow state and there is a growing belief that it's fiction, that people who want to work uninterrupted aren't "team players" and may in fact be mentally ill.
Some of them believe in a monstrous indignity called pair programming in which two developers share one keyboard and are in constant communication. After three hours of this, I quit my job the next morning and eleven years later went into therapy for what was, astonishingly, diagnosed as PTSD.
My generation read books. A lot of younger developers cannot read a design document, and hardly anyone can write one. They have grown up on computer games and channel surfing and have never learned to concentrate. So they have to attend meetings to keep their attention from drifting away.