Here’s a hot take: disrupting coders isn’t all that bad.



Some disruptions are certainly bad but they usually aren’t. The coder community has overblown the impact. A disruption can be a good thing. How harmful disruption might be a symptom of other problems.



There are different kinds of disruptions. They are caused by other coders on your team, managers and other non-coders, or meetings throughout the day.



The easiest example to debunk is a question from a fellow developer. Imagine someone walks over to your desk or they ping you on Slack, because they have “one quick question.” Do you get annoyed at the interruption when you were in the middle of something important? You help out your teammate quickly and get back to work, trying to pick up where you left off. That’s a kind of interruption we complain about frequently, but I’m not convinced this is all that bad.



You are being disrupted but your team, of which you are only one member of the whole unit, is working smoothly. You unstuck …