At the beginning it was pure calm. Junior developers do not have to do a lot more than coding, and to be clear it is about coding something that probably someone else have been already designed. Those days when I started coding remind me when I was a kid at the school. I didn’t have a lot of responsibilities and of course, the life was easier than now.
Then I became senior programmer, and then architect, and then system designer (Oh Dear God). Why? It’s probable because it is a natural process to grow up and get experience, knowledge and, obviously because it also means.. most of the times… a salary raise. But then I noticed that my whole perspective about software development had been changed. At that point I wrote the first draft of the Pee Paradigm. Please take a minute to read and understand it – you can also leave a comment.
When you are a programmer and you have to pee, you can just leave your desk at any given moment with one or few problems pending to be solved. Some minutes later -depending on your personal needs of course- when you come back to your desk you can be sure that 99.99% of the times it will be the same set of problems -nothing have been changed. And to make it even better, it is possible that while your were doing “your stuff” you came up with a solution to those problems! Amazing!. In contrast, assume that you get additional responsibilities including management tasks and you have to “pee”. So it comes the time when you have to LEAVE YOUR DESK and even when you will have a small set of “pending things” to solve or do, you can be absolutely sure that once you come back you will have additional items. And maybe you can solve things during your “reduced personal time off” but it will be certain that instead of solving things you will remember additional stuff.
Few months ago, when I was Production Manager for a huge project for one of the most famous brands in the world, I used to received more than 250 emails every day. Can you believe it? It was a mess. Obviously it was a failure inside the communications plan but it was true. So I created few rules to colorize my emails assigning colors depending on the recipients list. Let’s do some simple maths to clarify the situation:
250 emails x 1.5 minute reading
= 375 minutes
= 6.25 hours.
At this point I didn’t send an email, make a call, o even received it. I didn’t went to bathroom or do anything else than open my email client.
Could you imagine somebody asking about an specific email like “did you checked the Fulano’s email about the X situation?” – while my reduced set of neurons tried to evaluate and solve the question, another even more reduced set of neurons where thinking something like “Ah? Blah? What are you talking about? Was my name at the beginning of the email content or as the email subject?”
Since then, I wrote the Pee Paradigm and decided not take drinks at the office. Also I feel really concerned about have to pee during my working hours 