[mlthoughts2018]

For most engineers, putting product quality and delivery as the top priority is equivalent to valuing your own uninterrupted time highest.

If you stop valuing your own uninterrupted “flow” opportunities, the product suffers, because the work cannot be completed that way.

In this sense you’ve got it backwards. You claim that looking out for your own experience of uninterrupted work is somehow suboptimal or selfish or bad, but it’s not. It’s actually the most customer-focused or product-focused, unselfish way to think.

Believing that you are entitled to turn around in your chair and interrupt the workflow of a teammate at your own whimsical discretion, now that is very selfish and does not place the customer, product or team ahead of yourself.

If you’re interrupting people all day, you’re selfishly prioritizing only what’s convenient for you, and discounting all the damage and delay to shipping the product that your interruptions are creating.