Re: How to fend off a tech writer

[Bruce Byfield <bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com>]

puffwriter -at- darksleep -dot- com wrote:

> On Fri, May 10, 2002 at 03:07:33PM -0300, Bruce Byfield wrote:
> 
> > I'm not altogether convinced of this idea. True, I'm sometimes annoyed
> > when my concentration is interrupted. However, uninterrupted periods are
> > so rare or so short on the job that most of us have to learn to be
> > productive despite interruptions.
> 
>      Hm, well, you have no evidence for this, either.

Only the evidence of experience. I've worked at more than two dozen
companies. They've varied in size from international corporations to
small startups. No matter what their size or business, I haven't seen
many people in any department who had the luxury of uninterrupted time.
Nor, if they ever got it, they didn't have it for long. Yet work does
get done, and deadlines are met, so people somehow manage in these less
than ideal conditions.

> 
>      The fact is that for jobs involving a lot of contextual information
> that you have to keep in your head, uninterrupted periods of concentration
> are important.  The greater the amount of context, the more important
> "flow" is.  Saying "too bad, learn to be productive in spite of it"
> is cute, but pointless.

It's not cute. It's realistic. There's not much point in waiting for the
perfect moment to get a good bout of work done when that moment doesn't
happen very often. It's not easy. It's just necessary.

All you're really doing here is stating your belief in the hacker
mythology.

>      Developers collaborate all the time; "cowboy programmers" who don't
> want to communicate are a problem for developers as well as for writers.
> Collaborating with the writers isn't a question of collaboration, it's a
> question of collaboration with writers.

Exactly. Communication with writers needs to be understood by
programmers to be part of their job.  

>      Well, to be bluntly _realistic_ about it, the economics say otherwise.
> If it were so unrealistic, programmers who are productive while being
> interrupted all the time would be easy to find and the ones who aren't
> would be out of a job.  Reality says otherwise; programmer productivity is
> greatly affected by interruptions; this fact is sufficiently universal that
> employers have decided to put up with it.  

You mean that many employers believe in the hacker mythology. Many of
those who used to believe in it lost their companies in the dot-com
crash as programmers were allowed their head and spent their time
grooving on the mystique of the profession instead of meeting deadlines.

I worked at several companies where employers started off by believing
in the hacker mythology. Then pressures of investors and high burn rates
made results necessary. The employers started asking for regular
reports, and for interaction with the marketing and production staff.
The programmers grumbled. They used much the same arguments that you do,
claiming that productivity would suffer. When the employers insisted,
guess what? The programmers met expectations, interacting and producing
code. Not only were there no signs that productivity suffered, but,
since deadlines were actually met and products actually released, some
people might say that productivity actually increased.

Ironically, two of these employers were originally programmers
themselves. Faced with larger concerns, they soon abandoned the hacker
mystique in exchange for results.

> > But the
> > reverse is also true, and I'm not inclined to give anyone special
> > treatment simply because doing so fits into their personal mythology.
> 
>      Coming from a member of a profession that spends a lot of time talking
> about their own personal mythology - writing is valuable and difficult, you
> just don't understand! - that comment is fairly ironic.

Not really. This particular member of the profession has never bought
into that mythology, either. If you want to discuss that mythology, I
would be just as dismissive. It's unproductive and destructive, too.

>      Most of the competent programmers I've known - both while I was
> writing for a living and since I've been programming for a living -
> recognize and respect the writer's domain.  Frankly, the abilities I
> developed as a writer rank among my most useful skills as a programmer;
> most programmers aren't able to tackle a nebulous, unknown situation and
> bring order out of chaos.

At last, we agree! I've worked with some of the best programmers in
Linux, and, with all of them, the way to win their respect was to
produce and contribute.

-- 
Bruce Byfield 604.421.7177 bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com

"We may be in a hallucination here, but that's no excuse for being
delusional."
- Kim Stanley Robinson, "The Years of Rice and Salt"


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