The Mind of Ross

I do hereby apologize in advance: This post is almost certainly offensive to somebody (sigh).

I have been a software engineer for nearly 25 years now, and have worked as a telecommuter most of that time. For a while, it amused me that I could drive to Redmond, plop down into my office cube, and my developer colleagues would still use a chat client to communicate with me.

However, I soon realized that I, too, preferred it that way. Oh sure, planning meetings work best around a table and a whiteboard, but normal work periods require that we are alone with our most concentrated thoughts.

Why? Are we makers of software anti-social? Hmmm, that is probably a bad question since so many of us are, but as it turns out that isn’t actually relevant.

The real reason is a state-of-consciousness called flow. Software engineering is not productive until the engineer gets into a flow state. Wikipedia has an entry about flow, but there is one particular part of the article that is most significant. The Wikipedia authors describe flow as,

“…a deep focus on nothing but the activity – not even oneself or one’s emotions.”

I think every software developer worth their salt knows when they’ve hit the flow state. Sometimes it is so deep that when you finally leave you feel like you’re waking up. It isn’t that I am drowsy, it is that I have shut down the rest of my senses and cognitive functions and it takes a while to bring them all back online–just like when I wake up in the morning. It feels remarkably similar.

A phone call abruptly and completely terminates the flow state in exactly the same fashion that an alarm clock ends the sleep state. It is about as pleasant, too, I might add, at least when the phone first rings.

This is not merely unpleasant or inconvenient, it is, in fact, a major productivity hit. According to most literature on the subject, it takes a minimum of 15 minutes to achieve a true flow state. So your 10 – 15 minute phone call more than likely knocks nearly 30 minutes out of my work day.

At best.

Like sleep, sometimes flow comes easy and sometimes it does not.

That is why I gave telemarketers so much grief–they do me real and significant harm.

Chat and email are not nearly so intrusive. Implicit within a chat thread is the assumption that if I am focused on something important, it will be a few minutes before I respond. Email is the same except that acceptable “polite” response time is much longer, usually something like one to four hours for close colleagues and one day for everyone else.

Imagine a phone call where I just fail to talk for 10 minutes while I finished a particularly troublesome bit of code. You’d hang up and be irritated with me. Not so with chat or email.

If you think your call is really important and I’d want to talk to you, then by all means call. But if I get just two short calls a day that means I have to work an hour later, and that takes an hour away from my family. I know this sounds, well, anti-social, but I get very few calls that are really worth an hour or two of family time, especially when they could have been emails that didn’t interrupt my flow state.

I will write at length in email–you’ll probably even be surprised at my loquaciousness and verbosity.Who knows? I may hit a flow state of consciousness while responding to your email and produce a masterpiece of artful prose.

But just don’t call… please.

P.S. Yes, I have indeed heard of voice mail and call screening. I am, in fact, a verifiable expert having written such systems for a telephony company. I use them profusely. But I get a lot of flak for it. And somehow telemarketers seem to have found my most private business cell phone number… I think many bad thoughts about these people.

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