in a sense, but I have some gripes with that too. It's bivectors that help a lot. The 'geometric product' I'm less sure about (this is always my complaint when GA is brought up).
I find that I can tolerate distractions like getting up to get a cup of coffee or stretch or do a few push-ups without much issue. I am able to maintain complex state and jump back into the flow. Maybe this is just a young brain thing and will go way, but in any case, this advice seems to be more tuned to those sorts of distractions. What happens in an office is entirely different. Your working memory is finite and social interactions are complex. Moreover, most people become personally offended (whether they will admit it or not) if you do not appear to be paying full attention. This was a particularly bad case but I once had a boss who would become visibly angry if you even stopped to write some notes when he showed up to interrupt you. Many of these interruptions are totally irrelevant too. Your boss does not need to stop by 4 times a day to get a detailed progress report. Your chatty coworker does not need to talk about his weekend at the lake. It's perfectly natural to feel some annoyance in a situation like this and it seems kind of absurd and subservient to me to ask devs to bend over backwards to accommodate the personality flaws of their bosses and coworkers. Sure, you shouldn't let this annoyance derail you, but that doesn't mean you also shouldn't tell your chatty coworker to shut up occasionally. Okay, maybe you shouldn't be so rude about it, but you need to set healthy boundaries and be allowed to block off time for the work you need to do. If you aren't, you are probably working for a shitty boss or organization. No amount of distraction management is going to help you there.
Beyond that, I think that there is a limit to the complexity of problems that can be tackled without periods of extreme focus. Some problem domains are full of deep and irreducible complexity. It's probably true that we often mistake accidental complexity for irreducible complexity or fail to break down problems, but, and this may come off as arrogant, I find that it is generally people that have never had to deal with a problem domain with such irreducible complexities who think that we can solve all of our problems by breaking up work into smaller chunks. Sometimes you also have to deal with business requirements that effectively turn accidental complexity into irreducible complexity. Like, yes, technically things like regulatory compliance are accidental complexity but we also can't just simplify them away without facing serious repercussions. It's also much much easier to maintain context and state in problem domains you have worked in extensively for years, and you tend to be able to write more concise yet still complete descriptions of things within that problem domain. I suspect that has something to do with why the author only adopted this working approach later in life, in addition to the health problems he mentions. For instance, I find that I can pick up physics and math problems with minimal friction because I spent the better part of a decade studying those subjects intensely, but ask me to debug a SQL script (an area where I have minimal domain knowledge) and I will need probably 30 minutes before I can even think a useful thought about it. Most devs do not have the luxury of only working on problems they are domain experts on. Business requirements and capacity are fluid things.
The war on drugs has been a resounding success at it's principle functions (none of which have anything to do with controlling drug use behavior). It helps maintain a permanent underclass which applies a downward pressure on wages via prison slave labor, allows the ruling class to more effectively criminalize dissent and propagandize against subversive groups, and provides an excuse to continue to militarize the police force.
The total US federal prison population working at jobs unrelated to prison maintenance numbers in the 10s of thousands, producing a value of $1Ms. A drop in the bucket, nationally. As an 'underclass' they are almost invisible. Don't know about the 'criminalize dissent' part but hey there's always the internet.
It's interesting and rather revealing that your first reaction to a critique which draws an analogy to material wealth is to defensively frame it as nasty or distasteful.
Oh man, you are so close to realizing what's actually going on. Once you realize that creating a permanent underclass to apply a constant downward pressure on wages is a feature of market economies and not a bug you'll be all the way there.
This is the right way to look at it. In fact, your brain is plastic enough that if you wear glasses that flip your vision upside down for several days it will eventually relearn the mapping of retinal cells to neurons so that you see things normally while wearing them. This was studied in the 1890s by a guy called George Stratton.
While I am sympathetic to the idea of unionizing development and IT work, I have a hard time imagining a practical path. Vaguely libertarian ideologies seem to be the norm in these professions.
That was because, IIRC, Congress mandated a launch code be added to the system, so the military added one and set it to all 0's as a loophole, because their main concern was to make sure the system would work as intended. Not having a launch code when you need it would be a bad thing. None of this precluded the existing, strict, chain of command, which included the famous "biscuit" that the president needs to launch missiles. And I believe the whole thing also needs to be authenticated by the Sec. of Defense.
To me this kind of thinking from management is, frankly, negligent. If you're working on a simple e-commerce site I suppose it's excusable, because in the end, the customer is going to pay the cost of poor design in lost business and that is their decision. For safety critical systems it is absolutely inexcusable, and the manager responsible should face criminal liability. No one should die because some middle manager was cutting corners to hit his quarterly targets.
