My friend Todd wrote about information overload and linked to this Seattle Times article. Is it possible to do good work when there are constant interruptions from inside and outside your head? When there is more interesting stuff in your RSS aggregator than you could possibly read? When friends and coworkers constantly interrupt you?

I would say that if you contrast my average and best work, this is one of the most striking differences.

At my paying work, I sit in a cubicle. I listen to music on headphones continuously because it covers up the noise of people talking around me, which is far more distracting. I believe this environment subtly discourages focused thinking. That is bad because in programming, a well-considered design decision can replace hundreds of lines of code—you can reach an equivalent or better solution with less work for yourself, your testers, and your successors; but not if you're never able to concentrate for more than two minutes. Consequently, there is a subtle, subconscious motivation to be a bad programmer. This reinforces the cultural misperceptions that programming is a rote activity and that programmers are commodity workers.* Another consequence is that any person not content with doing a mediocre job is urged to go into management. This makes the environmental problems self-reinforcing, because managers—whose daily business is primarily communication, not prolonged focus—both favor an interruption-friendly workplace and hold positions of power.

* Although I call the belief that programmers are a commodity a misperception, this isn't always true. In some cases, such as projects for which offshored development is successful, programmers are a commodity. If you are running a software development project, you should be honest with yourself about what you building and whether it's better to have a brilliant team or a cheap, mediocre one.

By contrast, in the programming I do in my spare time, I am rarely interrupted. I would estimate my average time spent focused is on the order of 5 minutes, with peak focus lengths of 30-60 minutes. By contrast, at work average time spent focused is probably about 2 minutes, with peaks of around 10 minutes. I focus more at home for a few reasons:

• I personally love the project.
• I sit alone, in my attic office with nobody around. Or I sit downstairs on the couch, but I can easily ask people to not interrupt me (or to stop interrupting) and they honor my request.
• I never have to wait for my editor or compiler. This means I am not given lots of 30-second gaps perfectly suited to going off and reading stupid websites.
• Because the edit-test-success/failure cycle is so tight, I don't get distracted enough to wonder if I have any email. So I reduce my checking from once every 5 minutes to about once every hour (I just instrumented my mail checker to measure this, so I should have real data to back this up in the near future).
• I don't have to work on it if I'm tired, upset, or preoccupied.
• I know the project better because I did most of it myself.
• Because I designed the software, I can understand its design and I don't feel held hostage to idiotic design or technology decisions. (I.e. I feel more ourness.)

Of course, not all of these are luxuries employers would want, or be able, to afford their employees. All the more reason to push the feasible ones.

Question for audience participation: Businesses are inclined toward productivity improvements that are measurable. I think businesses could realize productivity gains if they understood some of stuff I just wrote, but I don't know how they would measure progress. Can you think of a way?

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Why organisations need some structure to ensure they are democratic

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Seth Godin has plain & simple advice for how to get what you want in life.

Having met some successful people, I can assure you that they didn't get that way by deserving it.

Truer words…

[via gapingvoid]

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Great stories from the developers of the original Macintosh. Industry insights, technical challenges and solutions, and the dish on the celebrity personalities (Steve Jobs and Bill Gates).

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When I was an Israeli paratrooper a general stopped by to give us a little speech about strategy. In infantry battles, he told us, there is only one strategy: Fire and Motion. You move towards the enemy while firing your weapon. The firing forces him to keep his head down so he can't fire at you. (That's what the soldiers mean when they shout "cover me." It means, "fire at our enemy so he has to duck and can't fire at me while I run across this street, here." It works.) The motion allows you to conquer territory and get closer to your enemy, where your shots are much more likely to hit their target. If you're not moving, the enemy gets to decide what happens, which is not a good thing. If you're not firing, the enemy will fire at you, pinning you down.

How does this relate to software? If you're supposed to be making a product but keep on being distracted by the barrage of buzzwords, you're pinned down. Keep moving, even a little bit, every day.

Also good by Joel: an article on measurement dysfunction in the workplace.

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Joel Spolsky has a great guide to interviewing, useful to people on both ends.

Before the interview, I am very, very careful to avoid anything that might give me some preconceived notions about the candidate. If you think that someone is smart before they even walk into the room, just because they have a Ph.D. from MIT, then nothing they can say in 1 hour is going to overcome that initial prejudice. If you think they are a bozo, nothing they can say will overcome that initial impression. An interview is like a very, very delicate scale — it's very hard to judge someone based on a 1 hour interview and it may seem like a very close call. But if you know a little bit about the candidate beforehand, it's like a big weight on one side of the scale, and the interview is useless. Once, right before an interview, a recruiter came into my office. "You're going to love this guy," she said. BOY did this make me mad.

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Sage advice about how learning from your mistakes makes you more clueful.

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Via Gregor's blog, a concise and useful template for planning your career. Nothing groundbreaking in here, but a straightforward approach to writing a plan that will force you to reflect intelligently on your goals and accomplishments.

I've been thinking about making a plan like this for a little while. On one hand, it seems kinda lame; something that ambitioneers (think Harvard undergrads) do in high school and follow to a T. That always seemed dangerous to me, because it would preclude risk and serendipity. I like serendipity. If you could fit that word onto a license plate (SERNDIPT?) I'd seriously consider it.

But planning starts to become appealing once you've left school. The conception of life as an unending journey of 6-month classes suddenly vanishes. After college, I became much more individualistic; the things I do have their most important consequences not for school or for the company, but for my abilities, fitness, happiness, and wealth. Of course, it was always the case that I was in school to better myself, not out of some obligation to the education system; I could have easily dropped out and made enough money to sustain myself. But I never thought about it that way before. In retrospect, schooling is like building personal infrastructure. Now that I'm not 100% focused on my infrastructure, I can take some time to leverage my accumulated education and wisdom and build some really kickass stuff on top of it.

Building really kickass stuff requires a plan. In school, you have little control over your schedule. Sure, you can choose which classes to take, but the choices are extremely constrained. In plain old life, you can switch careers, be unemployed, take long breaks, travel, seduce women, work 80 hour weeks for a year or two, commit crimes, devote yourself to family, or even go back to school. Many of these options are appealing, while others are idiotic. In deciding which is which, the key problem is your limited resources. Too many things are worth doing, and there's not enough time to do them all. In a way, it is about accepting mortality.

But it is also immensely empowering to realize the degree of control you have over the outcome of your life. There's nothing fundamentally different about famous, successful people: they were just lucky or smart at the right times. I've met a few people I consider famous/successful since moving to Boston, people whose achievements I'd be quite proud to match. They are smart, intriguing folks, but they're not infallible. Stack me up against one of them, and I think I'd win on some counts. If they did it, so can I. I just have to make a good attempt. That means I'm making a plan and following it until it seems stupid. And then I'm making a better plan.