Like so many of us, I spent a lot of my early career suckling (metaphorically) at Joel Spolsky‘s teat. Although he’s stopped writing, the archives are still a gold mine for people who might not know about him yet. For instance, back in the 2001 stone age of computing, he came up with this particular bit of knowledge about multitasking:
On the individual level — have you ever noticed that you can assign one job to one person, and they’ll do a great job, but if you assign two jobs to that person, they won’t really get anything done? They’ll either do one job well and neglect the other, or they’ll do both jobs so slowly you feel like slugs have more zip.
I’m not really into the whole « choose an idol and become a fan » thing, so whenever I read something online that makes sense, I start looking for the special cases: those boundary conditions where it stops making sense. Not only is it fun to nitpick about things written nine years ago, it’s also excellent food for thought.
Multi-tasking is a necessary evil. While a 1991 genius programmer could write a new OS from scratch for a whole six months, stopping only for brief restroom pauses and keyboard-pillowed naps, he would miss the early stages of Linux and fail to contribute his efforts to a larger project.
Your brain needs a co-pilot. While your main thought process spends all day working on a given task, there should be another smaller thought process that deals with the « why am I doing this? » question. What is important here is that the co-pilot should look at the work being done with a different pair of eyes in order to ask the relevant questions, without being blinded by the assumptions that have not been context-switched out yet or the emotional involvement related to sunk costs. Four eyes are better than two. That’s why there’s an actual co-pilot on most commercial flights.
It helps if you have an outspoken, annoying co-pilot personality. One that isn’t afraid to speak out when something is boring, demeaning or a waste of your time and money. One that can bullwhip you into correcting a nasty situation instead of letting it rot slowly. The kind that you’d love to punch. In the face. With a pineapple.
(And in case you were wondering, the title is a Duke Nukem quote from Balls of Steel).
Hi. I'm Victor Nicollet,
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