[coward8675309]

You've touched on something that irks me to no end — the tendency of many Elite Coder Bros to say things like, "Didn't you see my enormous headphones on?! Can't you see I'm coding — don't you realize I think for a living?!"

Yeah, dude, we're all thinking. As a hands-on programmer-manager I can report that creating slides for the fundraising deck that'll raise money to pay you or writing that email about you taking bags of beef jerky home for your post-workout recovery meal can take as much sustained concentration as you spinning in your `while 1 { copy_compiler_error(); stack_overflow_it(); paste_code(); }` infinite loop.

[spacedcowboy]

I tend to get given large projects to do. I'm fairly senior, and once we've got past the brainstorming stage, the ideas have flowed forth, and the direction is, if not clear, then at least aspirational, I often get given the job of breaking ground.

Here's how I think.

I model interaction between distinct parts. I have a mental model of how X fits with Y, how X can affect Y, and how Y can in turn affect X. I'm not doing it with just X and Y, I painstakingly build this mental model[1] over as much of the problem space as I can, and having done this for many years now, I can cover a fair amount of ground before the complexity gets beyond my ability to model. It takes a while to create this, and then when some middle-management type wanders along, taps me on the shoulder and disturbs the concentration, and it all comes crashing down around me, I am less than best-pleased. Bonus points if it's just to "touch base" or "remember we have a meeting in 2 hours time", or ... you get the picture.

Why do I expend this enormous mental effort to gain such a fragile and ephemeral state ? Because I can mentally throw boundary conditions at it and "see" how things will react. It's how I deal with inherent complexity of large systems, and a couple of hours of mental effort can prevent me spending a week coding down a dead-end path. It's happened often enough now that even my line management understand it's worth the time - there's been plenty-a-meeting where I go in and say "yeah, I know we wanted to do <insert X> but I think there's a problem when Y and Z come into play under conditions A, B and C. I think <insert option gamma> is a better route even though we didn't think so at first".

Sometimes you really do just need to be able to be left alone and think. As someone who used to own the company before he sold it, and who's done pitches to VC's and other investors, I can quite categorically state that (for me), the slides, presentations, and client management is nowhere near the level of mental investment. Nowhere near.

Just my $0.02

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[1] It's not visual, I have aphantasia, it's more firing-condition-based.

[waheoo]

My wife and I discus this all the time. Not all jobs require the same level of thought. Her work involves a lot of mechanical movement, practice, skill, talent, and some thinking. But most of her day to day can be done listening to a podcast like she's driving.

I can't do that.

So no,

We're not "all thinking", some tasks require deep thought and long periods of uninterrupted concentration.

The problem is working in a team requires communication, and management of interruption, it is not useful to be like this dick with the headphones on, that creates barriers (the attitude, not the headphones) to communication.