Truth of the day
Friday, August 18, 2006
Programmers have a reputation of being anti-social. In particular, they hate going to meetings. Let us consider, however, that software is a very complex matter of tying together different threads. The designer or programmer, while designing, spends a great deal of time lifting a set of ideas up, holding them together in her head. She then starts typing, holding in her head this tangled construct, tracing the chains of links as she types. If you call a meeting at this point, the whole structure falls to the ground, and she must rebuild it after the meeting. If can easily take 20 minutes to get into this structure, and an hour to make progress. Therefore, any phone call, discussion, or meeting, distracting her for longer than a few minutes, causes her to lose up to an hour of work and an immense amount of energy. Is it any wonder programmers hate meetings? Anti-social behavior, meeting-avoidance in particular, is, therefore, a valuable part of their profession.
from http://alistair.cockburn.us/index.php/Software_development_as_community_poetry_writing