[hnbear]

The best approach to warning off interrupters I’ve seen was an engineer at a previous gig.

He built a little literal interior counter with an LED display and button to increment that sat on his desk. He reset it to zero each day.

For every person who came up to ask a question he hit the button, then answered.

He used it as a metric for his manager, and as a gentle passive-aggressive way of pointing out you’re interrupting him. The button pushing had a flourish to it.

That said, he was always very gracious about answering questions.

One of the best infra engineers out there, I’d must-hire him again, interrupt counter and all.

Pretty quickly people learnt to stick to important questions, or chat during downtime, not focus time.