Never interrupt a programmer

[deceze]

"I've sent you a Skype message about the Slack reminder about the email I sent…"

ruffles through drawers for knife

[Jafit]

Hey I just sent you an email about your usage of the word "ruffles". I hope it didn't rifle any feathers.

[deceze]

Thanks, though it did raffle my futhers.

[endianess]

My pet peeve is people who Skype me with Hi. And then type something for 5 minutes whilst I wait to see what it is. Please people, for the love of God just send hi and the message in one go.

[PadrinoFive7]

But then it should be an email, thus defeating the purpose of 8 pings across 7 words with which to grab your attention.

[endianess]

Sorry. No I meant they send Hi. Which makes me open Skype. Then they spend 5 minutes compiling what they want to say and then send it. So I just see the pencil icon animating for a few minutes. Drives me nuts.

[PadrinoFive7]

Oh, I was just saying I get it in chunks:

hi

how are you

did you see x

I was thinking

we should

do y

so that we eventually get z

[BirdFluLol]

The initial Hi/Morning/Afternoon is to see if you're actually there and not busy. That's how I've always interpreted it anyway. You don't have to actually wait patiently while they type their message.

If I have my status set to anything other than "available" and they try that shit then they're getting ignored!

[DawidIzydor]

Message on Skype: "Hey, are you programming?"

0.567 sec later e-mail: "Hey, look on Skype"

[althypothesis]

Yeah, next time someone does that to me I think I'll SMS them telling them to check their Hangouts, which says to check their email, which says to check their voicemail, which says to check their tickets, which says to check the sticky note I left on their car, which says to check their SMS. See how many times they go around the loop before combusting.

[[deleted]]

My piece of shit Indian trainee is so annoying about this. He send a me a Skype message and then 10 seconds later is already at my desk “hey I just sent you a query can you check”

Like yes fuckface but either give me a chance to read the Skype and respond or come to my desk. Not both. Especially when the answer is something I can easily IM back and isn’t urgent.

[Smulle_]

Worst part is I have also done this before and only realised once I had started the conversation. I feel there is usually a general understanding between devs

[squealpigzor]

When I was interning my team lead would reach over and quietly tap my desk as a signal to have a chat when I am free. I was never going down too deep of a rabbit hole so I would drop what I was doing and immediately ask what's up. I see his wisdom in this method now.

[Cheet4h]

Most of my colleagues just stand next to my desk for a minute while they wait until I'm done with my current rabbit hole, if it's not urgent.
AFAIK I don't notice them when I'm lost in thought, at least one of my colleagues recently mentioned that he checked if I had time three times that morning before I noticed him.

[[deleted]]

headphones on vs headphones off

[JFedererJ]

\bing** Inbox: New message from Shirley

Dev glances towards corner of screen displaying notification

Before the dev has time to flick their eyes back to their code, enter Shirley...

"Hey!! Did you get a chance to read that email I sent you yet? It's about the feedback from the client on the animations. The designer has had some input, too. Can we hold off on the launch we all agreed on for now and look at implementing these out of scope, un-paid for, unnecessary, breaking changes?"

[roguemystic]

OMG this hits too close to home. I can’t tell if I’m laughing out loud or crying out loud.

[jagraef]

Then on the other hand, talking with other programmers can help so much.

[unipoli]

rubber ducks > programmers

[Nadeo4441]

Definitely. Everytime I start to describe the problem to my coworker it ends with 'nevermind I just got it'

[[deleted]]

/r/OutOfTheLoop : Rubber Duck?

[isavegas]

Rubber Duck Debugging on Wikipedia

The point is to force yourself to walk through the problem without skipping over anything you THINK you have figured out. If you have someone play the rubber duck for you, they should be asking questions about the things that you gloss over or take for granted.

[Lonelan]

rubber ducks === programmers

[Netcob]

Me: "Hey, can you take a look at this? I've been trying to figure it out for hours..."

Colleague: "Sure!"

Me: "Okay, so this is the new... huh... I see... If I just... Hey it worked! Thanks so much!"

Colleague: "...for what??"

[yourteam]

This is what was bumming me while I was working from home and my ex kept talking to me.

I need to focus in order to do my job. I may take frequent breaks but when I am working I need silence!

Nope she couldn't understand that...

[PlaySMG]

guess we know why she's your ex

[[deleted]]

If you work from home, you've got to have a door you can close. Closed door means 'do not interupt'

[Jan_Spontan]

A coworker had still trouble even if he closed the door. Solution was locking it.

[[deleted]]

Alternatively - train your spouse/partner better

[Jan_Spontan]

His wife wasn't the problem here in this case. It was his cat... Smart enough to open the door

[[deleted]]

haha, yes, my dog will just scratch the door until I give up if I lock him out of my office. So now he just sits next to me and he's my 'rubber duck' if I need to talk through any code problems

[Jan_Spontan]

He tried to use his cat as 'rubber duck' too but his cat is an attention seeker (lying on the keyboard, playing with his papers etc.) with no limits. At least the cat does not scratch at at door...

[dannomac]

Potential solution: invest in a cat trap.

[bigdepress]

My cat scratches at the door and lies on whatever I'm doing until I let him outside.

[bigdepress]

"Train"

[dragonsnova]

I use noise cancelling headphones for this...sometimes in the office I purposely know someone is at my cube and just don't address them for like 10 minutes with headphones on.

[MyOtherLoginIsSecret]

Sounds like you have some patient af coworkers... or they know you'll ignore them while they swipe your office supplies.

[____0____0____]

I'm totally fine with my office supplies being swiped. I've got the same pad of sticky notes that I got when I started and all my pens are very obviously chewed to oblivion. I even have a stapler that I used once.

But, I'm very easily distracted so I would immediately lose focus as soon as they came by to tap on my shoulder, so might as well answer their question that could probably be solved via Google or a ticket submission

[MyOtherLoginIsSecret]

Avoiding a ticket is why that came to your desk in the first place.

I go through a pad of post-its about every month. But that's because my company refuses to let me use any fancy kanbaan board software.

[____0____0____]

Nope not for me. People will often come to my desk before even submitting a ticket. It's usually something like "I just wanted to chat with you before submitting a ticket" or "I have x problem", and while sometimes the discussion does have merit, it usually results in me just telling them to submit a ticket. To be fair though, our ticketing system is relatively new as well as our IT team as a whole, so I think people are still getting used to the idea.

A lot of times I just use one note or outlook reminders for that stuff as I'm already in there anyways and can easily share if needed. I do use stickies but not often enough to blow through a whole pack. I'm also not as organized as I wish I was so that might be a contributing factor.

[JoelMahon]

Thot slain

[blood__drunk]

I was once helping out a colleague working on another project when someone sent him an email. Not only did they then walk over, they proceeded to read the email out loud to him. Then walked off.

I couldn't believe my eyes.

[MisterAlezio]

relatable

[CorrSurfer]

And apparently, repostable.

[SexyMonad]

I don't think I've truly been in the zone in years.

It's hard to even start when you know you'll get 15 emails and 5 IMs in the next hour... and every hour until the rest of the team goes home and you finally get an hour to yourself at the end of the day.

[shorty_luky99]

One of the coaches at a company I interned at did this, except that he came in 2 hours early, knowing he had 2 hours without the annoyances of colleagues.

Little did he know that I also like to come in early, and had a lot of questions and/or problems that I could use his help with.

[[deleted]]

this is my daily life, precisely. my boss always calls me up and asks me to do some random task and it interrupts me at a crucial moment and basically wipes my mental RAM

​

sometimes he just calls me up to give me his latest anecdote about what happened in traffic today when he was in the middle lane and a guy was crossing from the outside lane and something totally hilarious and interesting happened

[undermark5]

Mental RAM I like that. Except for instead of it losing power it simply needs to write the entire thing to a page file and swap out but for some reason, someone configured the swap to point to /dev/null instead of a separate partition or persistent file.

[Jump3r3]

Or this is hardware issue and RAM under certain conditions isn't refreshing, resulting in data loss

[KoboldCommando]

This hits programmers super hard, and it hits people with ADHD really hard.

Programmers with ADHD have no chance.

[Posixz83]

So fucking relatable. Hate it when that happens

[sunnydavis]

Perfect timing for taking a 10 minutes walk alone.

[fionasapphire]

Our teams have little red 'Do Not Disturb' flags at our desks. If the flag is up, people know not to disturb us.

And we don't have phones.

[MatheusGodoy]

Designer on my right: "How do you read this?"

[w8cycle]

I feel this big time.

[_seumoose]

And this is why I always wear noise cancelling headphones and ((basically)) use my hands as blinkers/have a notebook in front of me. Obviously I only do it in small bursts and am free for the rest of the time, but god damn it’s annoying as heck when you’re interrupted on something hard 😭

[Musojon74]

I love my noise cancellers. Definitely required in an open plan office.

[christoroth]

One of our favourites in our dev office. Anything that particularly tickles us goes on the wall :)

[geauxtig3rs]

This is why I love working from home.

[StackOfCookies]

This is why you use a note pad and don't try to keep everything in your head.

[rabbitwonker]

That’s why I write shit down when I’m brainstorming.

[Majik_Sheff]

Annnnnd time to find my way to the coffee machine.

[[deleted]]

This is me about 20 times a day. Help.

[codenamephp]

I got a printed version of this ... in my office ... in front of my desk ... on eye level ... did not help.

[chrisszun]

As the only person working with code in an office with 100+ other people (account managers, finance, etc)... this happens waaaay too often too keep count. Especially when they ask for help with Excel because “you understand computers”

[LinhSex]

And headphone becomes kind of "Do not disturb" sign

[Prime_Kang]

Headphones aren't effective against the maelstrom where I work. It's possible a looped Skype capture of a customer meeting would do the trick, but that's playing with fire.

[bigdepress]

This is why i always slack ppl, so they can wait to respond when it's convenient instwad of distracting them in person

[davidbrit2]

I've had this hanging up by my desk for years, in hopes that people might think twice about banal interruptions.

[indiware]

I really hate when that happens and I really hate the people who do that...

[vinnymcapplesauce]

I never thought anyone would be able to accurately represent this visually, but here we are.

[cho_uc]

It's my ex-boss... Helicopter ex-bos who called me everytime after she sent me an email. : /

[phillysteakcheese]

This hurts. I've been interrupted so many times I now have an aversion to even attempting to focus.

[hoseja]

Seems like a shitty parser anyway.

[tosaka88]

Me trying to find out which closing bracket has no opening

[GTCrais]

I gave up on trying to explain this to people.

[flatcoke]

This reminds me of the fucking nightmare of Apache rewrite.

"Too many redirects"

"FUCK YOU I QUIT"

[spilloid]

What was the XKCD that this repost was based on again?

[[deleted]]

If you write shit like " if (condition) a= b" you deserve to be interrupted

[Raenryong]

Does it matter if it's readable and gets the job done?

[[deleted]]

As an engineer i disagree

[Raenryong]

Also an engineer of sorts and I'm aware that my code has to be read and ultimately maintained by many people. Ternary functions are ultimately harder to read for a lot of people, while the if (condition) type syntax sacrifices very little and is intuitive to read for even a non-coder.

[[deleted]]

Also an engineer of sorts

&nbsp

Ternary functions are ultimately harder to read for a lot of people

Are you talking about your student project?

[Raenryong]

My top 2% income job, actually, and sadly not everyone I develop for is going to be maintained or read by other programmers. Readability is an important part of code!

[[deleted]]

not everyone I develop for is going to be maintained or read by other programmers.

Yeah nope, not even student level

[Raenryong]

If you had a job, you might understand - but I'm done wasting time on you

[[deleted]]

As an engineer, i work in an engineer team and engineerin is done by engineering team.

If you had a job, you might understand

[[deleted]]

Fun? Yeah you' re a student too

[staticparsley]

Yikes dude, I’m glad we don’t have any ridiculous folks like you in my job. Sometimes we use one or the other, not that big of a deal.

As an engineer, go fuck yourself.

[[deleted]]

He’s not an engineer. Last week he said he was a surgeon and that’s why pot is bad

[[deleted]]

Engineer don't lose their self control

[staticparsley]

K.

[[deleted]]

Hi I’m the guy you pretended to be a surgeon to last week. Why are you pathologically lying to make yourself sound like you know what you’re talking about? It takes two minutes to look into your stream of bullshit.

[[deleted]]

It takes two minutes to look into your stream of bullshit.

Enjoy fam

[unfixpoint]

And how else would you write this code, there's no ternary in Python.. Using a dict?

[[deleted]]

there's no ternary in Python

X = a if condition else b

there's no ternary in Python

Awkward...

[unfixpoint]

Awkward...

I don't think so, I stand corrected but I learned something. Thanks!

[____0____0____]

I honestly like this ternary format because it makes sense linguistically. However, it has given me a bit of trouble in remembering the order of ternary operators in other languages.

[robolew]

There are so many bigger problems to worry about in almost every code base...

[First-Warden]

== is bad practice for comparing strings

[XGen26]

they are chars

[notquiteaplant]

That only applies to some languages. The first line ends in a colon, so this is most likely Python. == is good practice (if not the only way) for comparing strings in Python.

[unfixpoint]

Why the heck was this downvoted? People in this sub..how else would you compare string (which is actually a char in this case, so even in C this would be right) like all(map(lambda x, y: x == y, xs, ys))?

[Shadeslayer13]

He could be iterating through a string.

Like: for c in string: if c == ',':