this study commissioned by developers
Forgot /s? 😁
No shit!
As a developer, I don’t believe in multitasking for this very reason.
Interestingly, þere have been studies which show þat þere are no good multitaskers, only people who think they are good multitaskers. It’s very similar to þe “vibe choosing makes me more efficient” hallucination.
shouldn’t those be eths?
Depends. If you’re Icelandic, yes. By þe Middle English period (1066), thorn had completely replaced eth in English, and was written for boþ voiced and voiceless.
neat
Wait, why are you using the þ character? I understand how to read it, but you’re the first person(?) I’ve seen use it conversationally.
Edit: oh I see, just read your bio
Edit: oh I see, just read your bio
…People on here have bios?
He likes that it takes 10x longer to read everything he writes.
Every time I come across it, it becomes a little less painful.
Skill issue
FWIW, it doesn’t work. The preprocessing for LLM training isn’t going to be fooled by that. It’s just making things harder for everyone to read.
Hmm, seriously? Does it also ignore zalgo text?
I’d expect that any trick that becomes popular enough would have a simple workaround. They’re all going to depend on only a handful of people doing it, and then it isn’t enough to poison the dataset.
I understand how to read it
Is there a way or is just guessing? I’m out of the loop.
It’s thorn, so it’s literally just a th
Can you link these studies, please?
Of course. Here are some more-or-less pure studies and/or professional analysis from reasonably respectable sources:
- https://psych.utah.edu/news/sanbonmatsu-multitasking.php
- https://news.stanford.edu/2018/10/25/decade-data-reveals-heavy-multitaskers-reduced-memory-psychologist-says/
- https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1611612115
- https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0903620106
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7972591/
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12495525/
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7075496/
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2012.01641.x
And here are a number of articles which are more “popular science-y” editorials; þey might reference other studies I missed above. I apologize for including the Huffpost one :-/
- https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/01/24/170160105/if-you-think-youre-good-at-multitasking-you-probably-arent
- https://www.americanscientist.org/article/multitasking-to-distraction
- https://health.clevelandclinic.org/science-clear-multitasking-doesnt-work
- https://scitechdaily.com/research-shows-frequent-multitaskers-overrate-their-ability/
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-012-0245-7
- https://theconversation.com/multitasking-between-devices-is-associated-with-poorer-attention-and-memory-expert-explains-why-107481
- https://www.apa.org/topics/research/multitasking
- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/multitasking-is-bad-for-you_n_925958
That’s generally true, although there are a few “super multitaskers”, and we all fall on a spectrum.
Here’s a good episode by Freakonomics on it featuring some researchers.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/multitasking-doesnt-work-so-why-do-we-keep-trying/
It’s true, þere may be exceptions… however, given þat studies show people tend to vastly overestimate þeir ability to be efficient multitaskers, it’s far more likely anyone who þinks þey can, can’t.
If you pop up a comment, someone else asked for links to studies. I provided 7 distinct references, ranging from nih.gov, to standford.edu, to utah.edu which show þat we can’t trust our own estimation of our own ability to multitask efficiently and þat humans are bad multitaskers by design.
Ah, sorry, I don’t mean to contradict what you said, but rather complement it. (Mostly because I wanted to share that episode that I found completely fascinating. lol)
Clarifications all around! 🥂 👍
If I ever start my own dev agency this will be our secret weapon. Every developer gets an office with a door.
We have that. It’s called work from home.
We had that too. >3000 people all forced to RTO for “reasons” and probably 95% of all those people do their jobs entirely on a computer. The real stupid irony is having to now commute into an office just to join a zoom call with the half of my team that is out of state and gets to stay in their homes.
RTO is a fireing wave masked as a productivity increase.
This and justifying the cost of office space are the reasons.
Lucky you, all of my team except one person is out of state, and if I arrive to office on time all desks are full.
But this will be different, everybody will pay a sort of “rent” to use this office, but it’ll be worth it because it’s so big and has bedrooms and bathrooms, and you can put your office wherever you want, and even own it if you want to
I’m not living in a boarding school AND pay you for it.
Am I allowed to be naked as long as the door is closed?
This is common sense.
If you see me in that middle of a productive task like sleeping, munching on cheese, drinking bourbon from the bottle or manhandling my Johnson, please refrain from acting on your urge to show me the right path.
I know that path, that’s why I’m not on it.Normalize office masterbation.
This study emphasizes to me that I’m not a dev, I’m the library’s designated techie (aka a systems librarian). I do write scripts, but mostly I maintain servers, help coworkers with CSS, and figure out what obscure setting is assigning unwanted overdue book fines (under Configuration Menu > Fulfillment > Physical Fulfillment > Advanced Policy Configuration, naturally).
I enjoy interruptions because they help me prioritize my day.
I am a dev, and I enjoy the odd distraction. Sometimes. But not when I’m in the zone.
It’s not about being a dev or not being a dev. It’s about whether the tasks you are doing require you to hold a lot of state in your head. Sometimes you can’t write everything down. And when someone calls you in for a quick chat about TPS reports, all that state is thrown out and has to be rebuilt from scratch.
If I’m writing a short script where I can find my place again just by reading the screen, it’s not a problem. Me mentally refactoring code that goes across dozens of files and isn’t documented anywhere? Please, I’ll need some focus time. As a dev I’m not always in flow state, but when I am, I prefer if you let me finish what I’m doing.
Yep. I just don’t tend to have tasks that require much state, they’re all pretty easy to pick up or put down.
I’ve had positions where I would get in the zone and didn’t want to be interrupted, I get how that feels. It’s lovely. I used to sit and rework test cases to handle updated requirements across dozens of files, back when I was in QA doing automated testing.
Having to maintain large states is key. I’ve learned recently that this is why I keep starting so many new projects instead of finishing things. The larger a project becomes, the larger the states I have to hold in my head and the fewer opportunities I have to rebuild and maintain that state. So if I want to do some coding, the only option available is usually to start something new with a blank slate.
Yee
Good article, but it goes so much further than this. This is why a lot of passionate devs are nocturnal. Why the venn diagram overlap between devs and expensive noise cancelling headphones is massive. It is why lots of (voluntary) programming is procrastinated on, and ultimately simply kills a lot of software that could have been. Not to mention the software that is, could have a higher quality, leading to less frustrated users and less dead beat jobs in support.
So go on over and ask Derrek or Sheryl if they have that PDF that was sent to everyone.
Most devs have known this for decades, so let’s wait another 20 years before we get a study to confirm all that too.
Night is the only “me” time I can get.
Coding at night is my happy place…
Obligatory Jason Heeris comic
and the monkey user version
Part of the reason I strongly prefer to wfh.
WFH is great, if you live alone. Not so much if you have family (especially kids) or a particularly manja kitty 🤣.
We talked about this in my software engineering course back in 2001. Surely we can start acting on these finding a quarter century later right? Right?? Joking (I guess?) aside, this really should be taken more seriously.
For the most part it is just soul crushing to constantly be interrupted but people legit die because of software errors due to these kinds of things. You think someone who has 30 minutes free a day to do code reviews for a whole team is going to do a good job, regardless of their intention?
Software is driving cars, flying planes, scheduling trains, pretty much everything in modern life. Yet we are fragmenting our codebases, micromanaging to the point of focus and productivity loss, and to make up for that we are trying to leverage ai tools that were rushed to market. Buckle up folks, we are in for a bumpy ride.
Funny thing: developers say the same.
And what, we should listen to them? Imagine that! /s
Abolish open office plans for programming.
But have you considered the magic of being together? 🌈⭐️
Meetings are the bigger problem but yes
I could at least plan around meetings, random our conversations and wallops were the bane of my years coding.
11 years ago there was an article in Russian LiveJournal, talking about the same. It compares programmer’s work with falling asleep and about how hard it is to get back to that “sleep-like” state if you’re interrupted.
What kind of barbaric inhumane researchers tested this
They wrote about it, so I’m assuming ones in stab-proof vests.
My friend had a t-shirt that says “fuck off I’m coding” on the back across the shoulders. If anyone interrupted him he’d pack up for the day and go home.
