[Simon_O_Rourke]

As a manager a lot of the annoying interruptions I put down to, and I chafe at using the word, a lack of hustle.

Okay, so I view my job as primarily giving devs some strategic direction and priority, but also unblocking them from getting work done.

On the later, the kind of interruptions I get are from folks who just don't want to do and figure some things out for themselves. Need access to a database... Go ask infra support. Don't know who wrote this API client, go look in git. There's folks who just don't bother to go search for these things themselves.

[kelnos]

I agree with you on that from the perspective of a senior developer. Far too many times people would come and interrupt me for something that they could have figured out themselves. Sure, it might have been something that I knew offhand and could tell them in 15 seconds, but would take them 2 minutes to research. But it was so very very frustrating to me.

I would get that with junior folks for deeper questions, even, stuff that would take 15-30 minutes to go over with them. I started asking them questions up-front, to try to determine what research and steps they'd taken on their own before asking me. I would generally be pretty gentle with my "go away" patter: "ok, so through the questions I've asked you, I think you should have a few avenues of research that you can pursue on your own; if you're still stuck after that, let me know". But the repeat offenders who just didn't seem to get it... sigh. It was also clear to me from how some of my questions were answered, that often I wasn't suggesting anything they didn't already know; they just didn't feel like doing the research on their own, and wanted someone else to tell them how to do their jobs. So exhausting.

[awalsh128]

I find these moments to be teaching a person to learn to fish. Not only tell them how to get the answer, but then ask questions to see if they put in the work needed before coming to you. If it persists, maybe address it directly in a one on one meeting. If it's systemic across different people, maybe there is a documentation or organizational problem. Sometimes it's training the person to help themselves, other times it's seeing things that are broken that prevent them from helping themselves. I see this especially in highly complex systems where there are large and multiple teams, and the person needs to be able to work across these areas.

[forgotusername6]

If you're a manager, and those requests are coming from your team, isn't that just part of the job and not an interruption? Giving direction and priority is not a full time job, surely.

[kelnos]

It depends on the question and situation, though. If someone comes and asks, "hey I need access to the Foo database", and your answer is, "you need to talk to the ops team about that; there's a form on Jira for that", and that fact clearly documented and easily discoverable on the internal wiki (or whatever), then this is just a case of a lazy person who wants someone else to solve their problems for them.

But sure, if internal documentation is garbage and it's difficult to find information or understand who needs to be asked to get something done, then yep, manager is gonna get hit with these sorts of requests all the time, and just has to deal with it. Part of the job.

[machomaster]

But how large is the internal wiki, how well is it updated, how easy is it to find the information?

If it takes 10 minutes to search for info and 1 minute to ask, then the latter is a more efficient way. That's the job of the manager, to make developers more efficient, give them more time, preferably uninterrupted.