Why a programmer should not be interrupted
I've searched for this a few times on the Internet before, and found some examples, but none as clear as Joel who, as usual, has produced a hilarious article describing the issue. It is amazing how true all this is, he worked at Microsoft, so I guess he's had plenty of experience. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html Look at point 8. I copy the funny part, but read the whole article as it contains other important steps any company should follow. Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since h