Distracting software engineers is way more harmful than most managers think
I've always known this informally: quick questions can cause large drops in work for devs and other deep thinkers.
It takes 15 minutes just to get going and only by the 45-minute mark (!) you will hit your peak, when you are fully immersed in the problem.
Every time you’re distracted, that clock resets thanks to context switching. In a study done by Meta, they’ve shown how severe the problem is - engineers get just 2 1-hour sessions a week! (And I find it crazy that a 3 minute session is considered ‘focus time’ at all).
Was happy to see Anton Zaides' well‑sourced piece have some evidence for this.