Just saw this company ad on the sidebar on StackOverflow.

I've applied for and taken enough jobs now that I finally know what questions like these actually reveal about the company asking them:

• Can you wear many hats?
• Are you a good multitasker?

They mean management stinks and they (management) have collectively punted on getting things working more smoothly. Aka, they've punted on doing their job. Do not take such a job unless they've grossly made up for that mismanagement somewhere else in your negotiation.

You may have seen the link in the footer of this blog for the Spolsky post on getting "in the zone" when you program. It's one of my all-time favorite posts, and it's aged fairly well. 

This is a long quote, but it's important:

Here’s the simple algebra. Let’s say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we’re really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can’t remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he’s sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds).

Now let’s move them into separate offices with walls and doors. Now when Mutt can’t remember the name of that function, he could look it up, which still takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which now takes 45 seconds and involves standing up (not an easy task given the average physical fitness of programmers!). So he looks it up. So now Mutt loses 30 seconds of productivity, but we save 15 minutes for Jeff. [emph mine -mfn]

One hundred percent true. Except 15 minutes might be low in some cases.

I've found I multitask as well or better than most. I can juggle several ideas reasonably well and I context swap competently.

It's still an exceptionally expensive operation compared to doing one thing to completion without distraction.

In the "many hats" jobs, I've often found that I've gotten the most done after working late into the evening in the office. Is it because I am more productive after 6pm? Maybe. You know what else is different, though? Nobody's there. I can work on what I'm doing to completion. Amazing.

In my current job, where meetings are minimized, I get long swaths of productive time -- get this! -- during the working day. It's not perfect, and I still get plenty of interruptions, but peak productivity can happen during the day. You're shocked. I know.

Don't wear multiple hats. Or don't change hats until you're done with the task you're working on now. I mean, can you imagine the metaphor stretched to its breaking point? A train conductor swaps to a ship captain's hat before they get to Wabash? Or sees an ad on StackOverflow and opens their blog editor?

Wait, what was that second one?

You can't encourage your staff to set down today's job to put out fires without your entire culture eventually gravitating towards everyone being firefighters. And no matter how well you hire for the ability to context switch, you'll always be moving forward more slowly when they have to flex that hat-wearing prowess.

Worse, you're reinforcing that culture with each new "superstar" you hire who has had the unfortunate occurrence to learn to thrive in such an environment.

If you hire for the exception, the exception becomes the norm.

Labels: business, corporate culture, youve-been-warned