The weekly sync
was mostly other teams.
Camera off.
Microphone muted.
You opened a pull request
in the other window.
Two jobs for the price of one.
You approved it
before the call ended.
Then someone said your name.
Somebody had asked you a question
a minute ago.
You had heard the sound
and none of the words.
That afternoon
the pull request broke the nightly import.
The bug was in a file
you remembered scrolling past.
You did not remember reading it.
Here is the mechanism.
In 2001
David Strayer and William Johnston
at the University of Utah
put people in a driving task
and gave them a second job.
Some talked on a phone.
Hand held or hands free
made no difference.
The ones in conversation
missed about twice as many red lights,
and reacted more slowly
to the ones they saw.
The ones who only listened,
to the radio
or a book on tape,
did no worse than before.
Their hands were free.
Their eyes were on the road.
Their attention was not.
A conversation
is not just sound.
You have to follow it,
keep its thread,
and be ready to answer.
That work
draws on the same limited attention
that reading code needs.
Your eyes kept moving
down the diff.
What they passed over
was seen,
and not read.
And it fails quietly
in both directions.
You did not feel
you were missing the call,
or the code.
Each felt half done,
and half done
feels a lot like done.
So pick one.
If the call needs you,
be in it.
If it does not,
leave it,
or ask for the notes.
Review when you can give
the diff the whole of you,
because the diff
is where the bug is waiting.
If you must stay on,
do work that can be wrong cheaply.
Tidy your inbox.
Not production.
And when you approve something,
ask yourself
which parts you actually read.
If the honest answer is some of them,
do not approve all of them.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
