Joel Spolsky's blog is by far one of my favorites at this point. My RSS reader found a new blog post tonight from Joel that I was reading, and the next thing I know, I find that I've been on his site lurking for almost two hours! On a related note (or will be related by the end of this post), on many of my contract gigs I end up complaining about "changing gears" all of the time. This is because most companies have no idea how to manage IT or run a software company. As a result, they are constantly in "reactive mode" putting out fires on a regular basis...but that topic is for a future blog post. Here's what Joel had to say regarding or "multitasking programmers" (or “changing gears“)
Have you ever noticed that you can assign one job to one person, and they'll do a great job, but if you assign two jobs to that person, they won't really get anything done? They'll either do one job well and neglect the other, or they'll do both jobs so slowly you feel like slugs have more zip. That's because programming tasks take so long to task switch. I feel like when I have two programming projects on my plate at once, the task switch time is something like 6 hours. In an 8-hour day, that means multitasking reduces my productivity to 2 hours per day. Pretty dismal...In fact, the real lesson from all this is that you should never let people work on more than one thing at once. Make sure they know what it is. Good managers see their responsibility as removing obstacles so that people can focus on one thing and really get it done. When emergencies come up, think about whether you can handle it yourself before you delegate it to a programmer who is deeply submersed in a project.
