So i've been a dev manager for a little while now. Thought i'd take some time to disambiguate some job titles to let everyone know what they might be in for when joining / moving around a big org.

Title: Senior Software Engineer

Background:
- Technical
- Clever
- Typically has years experience building what management are trying to build

Responsibilities:
- Building new features
- Writing code
- Code review
- Offering advice to product manag......OH NO YOU DON'T CODE MONKEY, BACK TO WORK!

Title: Dev Manager

Background:
- Technical
- Former/current programmer
- knows his/her way around a codebase.

Responsibilities:
- Recruiting / interviewing new staff
- Keeping the team focused and delivering tasks
- Architecture decisions
- Lying about complexity of architecture decisions to ensure team gets the actual time they need
- Lying about feature estimations to ensure team gets to work on critical technical improvements that were cancelled / de-prioritised
- Explaining to hire-ups why we can't "Just do it quicker"
- Explaining to senior engineers why the product manager declined their meeting request

Title: Product / Product Manager

Background:
- Nothing relevant to the industry or product line what so ever
- Found the correct building on the day of the interview
- Has once opened an Excel spreadsheet and successfully saved it to a desktop

Responsibilities:
- Making every key decision about every feature available in the app
- Learning to ignore that inner voice we like to call "Common sense"
- Making sure to not accidentally take some advice from technical staff
- Raising the blood pressure of everyone below them / working with them

Title: Program Lead / Product Owner

Background:
- Capable of speech
- Aware of what a computer is (optional)

Responsibilities:
- Sitting down
- Talking
- Clicking random buttons on Jira
- Making bullet point lists

Title: Director of Software Engineering

Background:
- Allegedly attended college/university to study computer science
- Similar to a technical product manager (technical optional)

Responsibilities:
- Reports directly to VP
- Fixes problems by creating a different problem somewhere else as a distraction
- Claiming to understand and green light technical decisions, while having already agreed with product that it will never happen

My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server

I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.

It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.

One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.

Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.

Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.

Then, next week, it happened again.

My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.

(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).

Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.

I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."

My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.

Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.

Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.

My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.

This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...

So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.

So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.

The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.

One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.

The cleaning staff came in.

Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.

Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.

We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.

You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.

The biggest coding distraction is a horny girlfriend.

Is it OK to make chewing noise when eating in the office a meter away from your colleagues?

I have the answer for you my friend:
.
.
.
ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NO.

Happens all the time....

I ended a 15 year friendship after realizing I've been used as an ego-boosting distraction, rather than a friend. I was sad at first, but then this program I wrote ran perfectly on the first try. 🕺

6 months of internship made me realize that solving other peoples bugs is my biggest distraction.
Apparently I enjoy solving bugs more than writing clean code from scratch. 😐

My dearest devRant.

You have, yet again, caused a great deal of distraction. As much as this hurts me, I shall block you again...

Farewell.

-For two hours at least-

Everything is falling apart. Everything. My father stopped giving our family money. We are in debt, and our bank account got locked.

And the greatest thing is that my father is a politician, sitting on his ass and only eating take out food, while he can’t spare a dime for his family of 3 children. Beautiful.

We are going to be moving out of the house into my aunt’s place. My entire family is going to live in one room. I won’t be able to attend my school while I reside there. All of the plans... all of the studying... all of my progress... well at least we should find money and come back within a couple months, so not all is lost for me.

During all of this stress, I have not programmed at all. When did this stress begin? Six. Ducking. Months. Ago. As a High School Student taming all honors classes, I have a lot of work after school. Usually I was able to finish it and keep learning computer science at high efficiency, but with the stress of the family falling apart, the stress has been doubled.

But, I’m going to admit that I’m lazy too. I’ve been mainly reading, mastering card games, Latin and playing the Fallout series. I think I mostly did this because I needed some kind of distraction from the horrible things going on in my life currently... but I shouldn’t use that to justify my laziness. At least I still remember all of the core concepts. It would just take me a day or two to get back on track with my programming studies.

Sorry if this post was too long for all of you. I haven’t posted in a while for a reason... and this is kinda it. I don’t know if anyone actually reads my posts and follows me, but I still got to get this out of me. This may not be entirely dev related, but it affects my whole path of life.

My co-worker is now raising his hand before asking me a question : success.

View from new office. Another distraction... :D

Biggest distraction is other non-programming required courses to get your degree

My morning motivation on the wall next to my desk.... Have an ever growing collection of Oatmeal art now....

Ok I have 2 more hours to work today. I bet I will get these 3 important things done.

*important email comes in*
*laptop runs out of batery*
*client finally calls back after 4 weeks*
*data structure has to be reorganized urgently due to new requirements*

After dealing with all of that, I close all windows in order to go home. The last window is the thing I wanted to do in the first place.

>be me
>Get hit by a wave of depression
>Question the reason for your existence
>Open laptop start coding as a distraction
>Discover/invent/learn something new
Hey that's nice!!! (wait for the next wave of depression)

Tip for devs (esp front end):

Sublime text (and few other inferior editors) has a plugin called "transparency" that allows your editor to be transparent.

Windows 10 powershell consoles can be made transparent.

1) Open browser
2) Open command prompt over it with 75% transparency
3) Open editor over both with 50% transparency.
4) Set editor to fullscreen, no-distraction mode to center the text (Shift+F11 in sublime)

Enjoy coding while constantly viewing the code, the browser and monitoring the cmd prompt at the same time, without having to click Alt+Tab a zillion times.

The biggest coding distraction is sitting in front of a computer with internet access, let's be honest here.

Distraction..........hmmm..........What is that?..........I'm sure I've heard that somewhere..........well..........Let me Google it!

And here we go again..........

Am I the only one who sometimes puts headphones without music?

Biggest coding distraction - micromanagers and dudes asking 314 googleable questions a hour

I call this the Distraction Stack.

[working on code]

"Hey, can you look at this bug?"

[
working on code,
looking at bug
]

"Can I bother you for a second?"

[
working on code,
looking at bug,
being bothered
]

"When you're done with her can you stop by my desk?"

[
working on code,
looking at bug,
stopping by your stupid desk
being bothered
]

It's enough to make me pop.

To all those fellow devs who wish to have a girlfriend,

Please don't, she'll be a distraction, unless she's in IT

Biggest distraction while coding?

When a colleague (or even worst, your boss) decide to staring at your monitor...

WTF
I don't know you guys, but I suddenly become disable and not capable of using a keyboard.
Leave me f*king alone!!!

My school fucking blocked duckduckgo today.

I'm not surprised, I knew this would happen eventually because this school is a prison and the administrators feel that they have to know your every fucking move.

Honestly I thought it was pretty funny too because I don't know anybody else at school using ddg, which means they probably just saw this one kid getting around being tracked and said "that damn kid." (Imagine I'm waving my finger around condescendingly like an old woman.)

It also could just be that they saw me using an unfamiliar url more than normal and assumed it was malicious or some kind of distraction. But I'm willing to bet money they just didn't like that they couldn't track me.

Biggest distraction: finding the right playlist on Spotify to code on. (The search takes all the while)

.... when you lost your headphones and you realize that the world is too noisy.

Biggest coding distraction - Sleep

I forgot to say the biggest distraction isn't that guy at work, no it's actually my job!

I'm an app developer but I want to be a game developer, it takes me so long to get to/from work.

This job is boring and I want to get another one at least closer to home and can at least pay me a bit more than minimum wage so I can save up more :/ but from the looks of things the jobs listed are the wanting experience without giving any.

I'm very focused today, i added a "required" attribute to a button.
#facepalm

My current distraction is that I have found a local government surplus auction and I keep buying toys. This is my current distraction setup.

Biggest coding distraction? Bugs.

TLDR someone in my team took credit for work he didnt do;

I know teamwork is a good thing and when everyone does their share of the work, it is.

I submitted a computer science project to an event in the UK called the Big Bang fair, I was in a group of 3. We had been meeting every week after for the past 10 months. During these sessions me and uke have been meeting for 1h 30m where as oon could only meet for 1h because "he had stuff to do" and he never saw the point in staying longer. Oon had also been a massive distraction whilst the time he was there as he did no work and messed around on cookie clicker.

Anyway we found out last week that the Big Bang fair was coming very soon and we had not written a write up or done any preparation for the presentation we had to do. Me and uke set up a google doc and started adding stuff to it (as we only had a few days left at this point). Whereas oon did nothing.

I ended up staying up till 3am in the morning finalising the write up over the weekend with uke helping. We asked oon to help but he said he didnt want to stay up late so didnt help.

Then the most stressful 2 days come round. I devoted all of my free time towards the project, uke devoted most of his time and oon devoted 1 hour after school on one day. He said that he couldn't do one lunchtime but I found him in the ICT room playing games :/.

This didn't matter THAT much but what pissed me off is that he started boasting to all his friends about all the work I did and credited it as his own. At the actual event he said nothing during the presentation because he knew nothing about the project. HE DIDNT EITHER BOTHER TO READ THE WRITE UP HE WAS BOASTING ABOUT. What do people get out of taking credit for work other people did.

We didn't win anything and I wonder why

wow thanks for reading all this you deserve a sticker

Boss.

... he is the biggest distraction.

*Intensely staring the screen and solving a problem in my head, I can feel I'm close to the final answer, the answer to the truth, the holy Line of Code and that it will forever chang-*
PM: hey, do you know why my mouse doesn't click anymore?

...

Coding IS the distraction… from my English book and history essay

Why do I ++ like 90% of the rants?
Devrant is HOWSOMEEEEEEE, thank you guys.

BTW, most distraction? Devrant

My biggest coding distraction are my imaginary friends

Alright, this my fucking rant right here. Distraction? This whole company is a distraction! Boss decided to throw us all in an open work environment doing jobs that require careful concentration. Straight outta college I'm getting handed vague ideas, (make a desktop app that helps our customers put data on the internet, make an iPhone app) with out so much as an inkling of what technologies to use, just make it work.
Ok I will but when you hit a roadblock with very little resources to draw in it's hard to stay focused.
On top of that since I worked in support for a year I'm our senior support person! But sometimes support just doesn't use their brains and I'm using my time to solve very basic problems.
That brings me to my next point, the goddamn piece of shit that is our telephone. Fuck that thing when it rings it's never good. Moreover, since I don't want to get roasted for not being responsive I have the motherfucker forward to my personal cell. So I answer every fucking call and I get so many spam calls!
Not to mention I'm mainly running the hardware show around here. Shits broke I'm the one fixing it. Need new shit I'm putting the order together.
Tried to get a new guy to be the sys admin, ordered a 6th gen board with a 7th gen proc, had to pull 3 machines apart to get that sorted. Then he left bc family issues, and has been gone for weeks.
The other devs are also slam up busy, and the main product is about 15 people's piss on a plate of garb age spaghetti. (I got a lot of shit going on but at least I'm the only one pissing in my spaghetti) it's a constant run around if who does what with a code first plan later mentality causing confusion and delay.
Nobody wants to help anybody because they are also annoyed with this setup and are getting bitched at by customers or management.
Sales is mostly composed of a bunch of crackhead yes men and women who just want a commission and only half know the shit we sell and have sold 15 new features that had not been discussed. But management always says make it happen. In what priority? It's all a priority they say! Wtf.
So yea, then it brings me to me, dealing with this much chaos at work makes it seem like a high amount of chaos in my life is normal. I'm just now learning to control this.
I've had to do a lot of growing up as a person and as a developer. I've went from being the most junior to about the 3rd most seniors and I've no doubt my efforts have contributed to the growth of the company.
I'm a big believer in coding flow, and that it takes at least 15 mins to get in that flow and about 5 seconds to break it. There is no do not disturb on the company chat, everything always on fire it seems.
So fuck a lot of this, but I've done the research and where I'm at is the best opportunity in a 100 mile radius. So I am thankful for this job. Plus I usually win the horror story contest.

So TL;DR the biggest distraction is every fucking thing in this god forsaken place.

If I could code for 10 fucking minutes without getting distracted. UGH

Hands down biggest coding distraction has got to be Project Managers.

TLDR; Go to bottom of post.

Around this time two years ago was the start of my group project in University. The project was to write an app in android and have a web side to it too. The group was to be overseen by a member of staff. The first meeting was introductions and to look at the spec, during the second we were to decide a group leader (PM) and other positions.
A person I shall call BD and I volunteered for PM. I didn't have experience with leadership but wanted some, and was the only one with confidence in android, the biggest part of the system. I got four of the votes.
BD, with his scouts experience, not being afraid to breathe down people's necks and bash some heads together, and having been PM last year, with his group receiving 69% (he failed the year and was resitting), earned 5. One guy was missing.
When it came to sorting out roles and responsibilities, BD confessed to not being a strong coder but that he'd help here and there. His role was planning our deadlines, doing our Gantt chart for deliverables, and was supposed to write a really detailed spec. He didn't have it at the meeting of the next week, as it was still in the works, and never messaged anyone. Next week he turned up with a Gantt chart of 1A4 page that only included the deadlines and deliverables in the spec, with three colours. One for android team, one for DB guy, and one for web team.
The guy who didn't turn up for voting got a girlfriend, a job at mcdonalds and did barely a thing. One guy in the web team did everything, carrying his friend who wouldn't do work (and also got swept out to see in a rubber boat with one of his bros lol (he was rescued)), and even though I'd done android dev I wasn't as quick a learner as two others in the team. Out of 10 people, 6 did real work.
The web guys stopped coming to meetings as they were taken over by android talk, and as we were quite behind, BG tried yellow carding them. They turned around with the website pretty much done, this one guy doing more than the 4 of us on android had. Yellow card lifted. We'd already complained about BD and his lack of everything (except screen brightness as he sat at the front of the lecture theatres with his wide brimmed hat looking at 9gag and videos (remembering he said he was resitting that year)) but grew a stronger dislike. Found out that he spent most of his time with his gf at our secretary/fellow android dev's house. Come coding week, he disappears entirely, only to attend meetings. He gave us a shell of the android code used for his previous year's project (along with documentation, complete with names and dates of updates, most of them (including the planning ones BD was supposed to do) bearing either one of two names. It was behind where we were at the time and had a lot of differences to our spec, and if we had used it BD may have used that to pull us down with him if things went wrong. He resurfaced at the end with the final documentation of how we'd all done, including reports on how each member had performed, which we were supposed to have reviewed. Our main, most proficient dev he accused of being irritable and brash, and a bad communicator. He was Norwegian, his voice was just a bit gruff, and he was driven and didn't waste time. He bashed the web team for not turning up, and had already been rude and unhelpful to everyone who voted for him in the first place.
In our own reports we all devoted paragraphs to delicately describing his contributions, excluding his suggestion that we use the code he gave us. Before we had our results and our work was completed, he individually kicked us from our group's facebook group and unfriended us.
Our 43% mark at the end, coupled with his -40% penalty from the red card we had him on, felt good, but not as good as a better result would have, especially as the fool that was BD would be inflicted on a group a third time. He changed to some other course after that year finished, so he must have failed his resit of second year.
During third year, a friend of mine who was PM for a group that passed well passed other things with too slim a margin to be happy, so chose to resit the year. He didn't have to do the group project again, and had that time free. But BD had to resit. His group had 69%. A yellow card with a 20% deduction wouldn't do it, so he MUST have had a red card as PM his previous year. Well that didn't come up when he claimed credit for his team's 69% during elections... My housemate's compsci boyfriend 2 years up overheard me talking about him, he was in 1st year with BD. BD failed and resat 1st year too. 4 years and he couldn't make anything stick. I feel bad for him through understanding the pains lack of work and internet distraction bring, and unfortunately I can't wish bad things on him because he brings them on himself. I wish I never see his face again though.

TLDR; Guy in group project lies and is dishonest from start to finish, getting PM pos by 1 vote. Gets what he earns.

How do you get in the zone?

Distraction behavior is my worst enemy. I'm productive once I'm coding, but I will do everything under the sun before I start.

Any tips or tricks you use to overrule your lizard brain?

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

My distraction lately:

fortune -s -o | cowsay

Sometimes, while coding, I get distracted by a tiny voice telling me: "Stop that! You're at work!"
But then I think: "Well, coding IS work."
To which the tiny voice replies: "Yes, but it's not YOUR work."

Damn you, tiny voice, I hate when you are right.
My current career(completely unrelated to programming or even CS) is probably my greatest distraction... and I hate that. =P

We all know that being distracted while coding is frustrating. That's why me and my teammates (we are 3) we "protect" each other while on "full dev mode" - meaning anyone coming to disturb one of us while in that state, the other push him/her away.
The most productive 2 weeks of my life 😂😂

When I'm in the zone and a spam text interupts me... Fuck you!

I’ve been trying to use Debian without a graphical UI, at least for the most part. I use X window to run firefox since I feel that is the best way to browse. But simply using the terminal for almost everything feels so refreshing somehow.

I start to find these gems such as a music player for the terminal that works really well, my HOME area feels so clutter free and I feel like I finally can finely control and tune my system to a much larger extent. I’m coming from an extensively cluttered windows system so just seeing a few things makes me feel like I can finally focus.

For me it feels like I’ll have an easier time managing my projects by setting up github in a good way in HOME. I’ve been putting more time into my vimrc to make it better for my different workflows and general productivity (and for the sake of minimalism trying to keep it mostly to hand written stuff). I’ve also been looking into Lutris to be able to fire up games or use wine for other necessary tools that I might need during cowork with others.

Generally I believe that if this test works out I’ll truly consider to make this my main OS. The clutterlessness keeps me much more distraction free. The terminal environment make me read about and learn of new ways to do things. And most of the tools I use can either be used from command line, multiple ones with a multiplexer and in the case I truly need to use GUI or want to play a game I can just fire it up on demand.

*happy*

Do you guys have any distraction free OS or setups that you want to share? Anyone with a similar experience of revelation?

The co-worker in my office that gets nudes from his ex girlfriend via web messenger.
(To be clear the distraction is not the co-worker 😂)

Sometimes I wish I could work in an anechoic chamber, alone.
Big open offices can be a fucking pain in the butthole.
Phone ringing here, stupid chatter there, clattering keys and noisy Intel™ stock coolers.
Even 9 hours with over ear headphones, blasting a fresh breeze of technical death metal, can't cover up those distacting noisy cunts.

How do you cope with that?

My biggest distraction: Working at home. I have a student job at my university and work at home. Just visit my boss every other week to show him the results.
So I always thought it's amazing to work at home. No need to travel to the work space, I can arrange my time as I like, noone's constantly watching what I'm doing.
Sounds great, right? Yeah it is, but is it productive? Lol no.

I'm getting distracted by everything. New mail about some kickstarter stuff, one hour wasted. "Can you help me with that computer problem?" Yeah sure. "Wanna play some League of Legends with us?" Sure, but just one round, I need to work. Ten rounds later I wrote like three lines of code.

I could ignore all that stuff, but I'm at home and can do whatever I want, right?
Results in me working through all night, because then there's noone to distract me.

>coding something
>come up with a brilliant idea
>coding that idea
>in that time you forgot what you have coding in the first place

Biggest Coding distraction? Organizing an OpenAir music festival.

We have this lovely little old lady who works in QA and whenever she finds a bug she goes across the office to the developers desk and taps them on the shoulder and spends like 15 minutes explaining and showing the bug...

This is infuriating as you lose all concentration on what you are working on and wastes so much time... But I can't bring myself to tell her to stop just can't find kind enough words. She's a lovely person and means well but it seems her world runs a lot slower than everyone else's.

"a 5% feature (used by less than 5% of all users) is a distraction for all the other users, and is better removed, unless it’s really critical (a small number of users do need to cancel service, for example)." - Neil Hunt

Step 1: Sit down to write my goals
Step 2: Oh, a <distraction>... 🐙🐙🐙

The biggest coding distraction would be fixing crashed Arch Linux, mostly after an update

Someone got me one of these.
Does it count as a distraction? :D

When a co working waves his hand at you every 5 minutes to get your attention and you have your headphones in and try to not see the waves because you know it's just going to be you coding his function for them

Biggest coding distraction is having too easy tasks, I always do them carelessly :/

My business partner who claim to be the best Wall Street programmer, probably 160 years ago, decided to improve our core system written in Go.

He dragged a *shortcut* of *whole* local github folder into Vendor(sort of node_modules), Manually changed commit hash in Gopkg.lock, etc,

Next morning I woke up to 24 failed builds on Master; all protobuf redone with his unknown gogo version, database trigger function with changed logics added parameters, and a text message “has anyone experienced build corruption? Works on my mac”

My other business partners said “it’s okay, He’s going through tough divorce needs some distraction”

F M L

Emails... Emails and again emails...

PS: emails too.

I'll rant on this one. I have two colleagues in a relationship in my office, the *worst* distraction ever is having them sit across of me constantly chuckling, bickering and poking each other while doing *no work at all*. I fucking hate this shit, drives me nuts -_-

Biggest coding distraction - vape breaks. Not too long ago it was totally acceptable to vape inside the office. :-/

My biggest distraction at coding are my parents.

I still live in there house and it's really comfy.

But whenever I code the always come into my room with something random like "my phone is not working" or "how can I delete this?"

I love my parents and Im glad that I can help but always get off where I was after 😂

Looking for some advice....

So I'm a web dev that works remotely full time from home which I love, I'm expecting my first child in late march which is really exciting but I'm starting to think about how it's all going to work with the missus home for at least 12 months and of course a baby that (without sounding horrible) is going to be a big distraction to me when I'm trying to work.

So just wanted to know if there was anyone else out there in a similar position or that has gone through the same thing and how you did it? Is there any advice you can give me?

Appreciate any thoughts.

Leo Moracchioli
Coffee
Intellij IDEA Ultimate (Distraction free mode)

Stepping into heaven ...

Can "being lost in Hot Network Questions column of StackOverflow" be a valid reason of late delivery of code?

When you just figured out a fix for a bug, your on your way to the fix, but suddenly your co-worker asks everyone in the room "Would you rather be on a helicopter or airplane that lost all power". Then you get into a 10 minute discussion about which and why, and now that bug is permanent.

Open plan office. Distraction hell.

Phones ringing. Endless people walking past. People talking shite nearby. Constant interruption in one form or another.

I only take gaming breaks to heat up my computer to keep my coffee on my computer warm in order to code more its not a distraction it's efficiency

Everything is a distraction, if you are not in the mood for coding.

If somebody wants to do something constructive, this kind of website design distracts the flow.....

Story of my life

Staying away from distraction.

My dog waits until I'm super focused and in the middle of something to let me know she has to pee.

I can't remember the last time I had THIS MUCH FUN developing an Android app! 😳 Have a paper due, but learning RN is actually making this pet project a huge distraction! 😳 This is a whole new world of mobile development 😆, but what if another framework takes it's place 😵. But there's still people who know Angular, and that's widely used...right 😓 and moble dev has never been this easy, so maybe it'll stick around like Node...

who cares... I'M FUCKING LOVING React Native now!!! 😆

Biggest coding distraction... Clients.
Having to explain to them how to use their own website, or fix something they fucked up and then tell them to refer to the manual we provided them.

It would be easier to swim down to the Mariana Trench without any aid

What a distraction from SO.
it makes me remember youtube. *Open some IT stuff video, 15 minutes lates, watch how a giraffe giving her baby..

!dev

Fuck I woke up understanding that it's Monday but it's Sunday, for the first time I was having such a romantic dream, it soothe me soo much, calmed me so much, put me off the problems...

I used to think having is a distraction but after this dream I am proved so wrong which I hate.

It was damn bad idea to break up in the first place

Usually my problem is that my colleagues are too distracting.
I just put on headphones and play black metal or hypergrind.
The first is relaxing, the latter overloads my brain to release me of other distraction. It helps me to escape and keep only those things in mind that I actually need.

Anyone else here that, if working on a challenging problem, just needs silence (rather than music or background noise?) Seems to be an increasingly rare thing, especially with younger folk.

If I'm just doing boilerplate coding / something not too challenging I can work with whatever. If I really need to think however - I do that way better with no auditory distraction.

It is time for my own dumbass's favorite pastime: not letting go on retro tech.

I am gonna build a small and complete RESTful web API with Vbscript and Classic ASP with errrthing thrown in this mfker including JWT authentication and i am gonna see how the idea of an ORM goes. I know that COM interop was a thing, dunno if it still is.

I am fucking bored. The graduate degree is killing me and I need a distraction.

Thinking about being a purist and keeping the COM libraries to be made with VB.NET :P

Fuck yeah for being a masochistic retard.

I legit love vb net tho

My biggest distraction seems to be when I notice other problems in the code I'm fixing/modifying. I then spend too long putting things right!

Today was nice. All the owners were out on vacation except for one. He took me out to lunch and went home after. Even though the office was silent and free of distraction, I did not work... I watched a webinar and played Hearthstone and ingress. Nationallazyday enjoyed.

Text from crushes are biggest distraction . Next few hours are gone for sure 😂😣

Fuck you devRant I'm trying to study for an exam tomorrow!

Distractions are neither created nor destroyed, it just changes from one app to another ;-)
The Law of Conservation of Distractions

I get distracted too easily at home

My laptop battery is shit so I can't use it outside

That moment when: you lift your gaze from your phone to understand the sudden quiet is because your expert opinion is needed in the meeting.

The ultimate distraction:

Programming challenges

`WeChall`,
`Project Euler`,
`The Python programming challenge`,
Etc.

Is i am only one who tries to use a smartphone as a knowledge source and ends up exhausting my data on thing which is actually nothing about the knowledge or learning

Biggest distraction for me after noise, is someone challenging me for a chess game, i can't say no to that!!

Am I the only one that can only work with pure silence or white noise? Any kind of music/distraction will mess up my concentration.

Smoking break are the biggest distraction.

Biggest coding distraction:

My own code.

I swear I'll snap if someone tells me it's weird that I resize applications to be taller than they are wide. I keep them that way because widescreen monitors came into existence when computers became mainstream and the market shifted to the plebs who only used them to watch videos and wanted to not see any bars on screen, and now we all have to suffer.

Web pages are organized vertically so it makes no sense for me to browse the web in full screen, it wastes space where otherwise all the content is contained and distraction free, most pages strip the side-bars so you'll also see a few less ads. I can also use and organize multiple apps how I want. Small thing too but browsing the web in full screen means pages can find the exact dimensions of your screen and learn more about you (I don't care about this but it's also worth mentioning).

I promise you there are so many good reasons to not use apps in full screen.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

I have healthy anxiety, it started around 15.

I have melanonychia right now, which is a change in a nail pigmentation. I have a grey vertical line running from the the start of the nail to the end.

I had it checked out 6 months ago with a dermatologist and he said it was fine, to do a checkup later.

I took a picture now and it's a bit wider than 6 months ago but it still seems pretty regular and doesn't seem to have signs of subungual melanoma (skin cancer beneath nail, which is the only danger).

Because of getting wider, I'm doing another checkup this week. I wished I had more money.

Meditation is helping me a lot, like big time, but I feel that it's just a distraction for a potentially early demise.

I fucking hate this part of my life. It's too painful.
I'm not depressed enough to not want to be alive, but sometimes I wished I wasn't.

Working with a group on a startup idea. We have weekly Google chat meetings with the full team and sometimes me and the other two founders have side calls. Our group is getting bigger so the weekly is getting longer so the 3 of us were talking about ways to make them more efficient. One was, background distractions like TV, random people talking in bg, kids...

So then yesterday the 3 of us went over a different topic and the guy who had brought up the distraction issue was in the bathroom shaving and trimming nose hairs the whole time. He kept asking questions about the agenda which we all had access to. I shouldn't even care much. I drink through the meetings anyways.

Better ideas:
I love building stuff and when i have something that I'm really into, it's hard to concentrate on the boring stuff i need to finish first.

Sometimes i just need to do what i feel like doing, doesn't matter. No, i won't go to bed, no i can't do the other stuff, i need to do that!

Never get distracted.

Actually I dont but the website makes the distraction.

Currently, I am working on task and has deadline by tomorrow.
Try to find solutions over portals like SO etc etc.

In SO, I am going through the question comments and answers; yoh see hot questions. I love those. They always attract me.

And devRant to post about it.
Now you can say, why my deadline still on my neck

To me, the single biggest coding distraction is other coding, i.e. When there are more things to work on than there are developers and priority changes on a whim. My runner's up would be people who come to you directly for non-urgent matters disregarding that you're busy. The third would be meetings, but I consider meetings to be a necessary evil. Almost nothing is worse than too little communication and the resulting mismatch in expectations.

I'll just say that I have just finished removing my biggest distraction/time suck for the last 2-3 weeks... I can now return to my regular scheduled activities like learning React... and creating a new app and I guess other things I probably should've done.

The huge weight of an urge to finish what I started is finally gone!

I'm about to graduate and I'm fucking exhausted ALL THE TIME. When I'm not in class, I'm at work. When I'm not at work or class, I'm working on projects. Trying to cover all my bases has left me incredibly anxious and unable to rest, so I don't sleep well and I'm fucking tired constantly, making it more difficult to do *anything*.

And if I hear "it's almost over" ONE MORE TIME :| yes, I know it is, that's why I'm freaking the fuck out, because I have 3 major projects I'm trying to balance on top of my internship.

I'm also trying to lose weight so I have to curve the stress eating. I cut out nicotine but I'm slowly picking it back up because

If I'm constantly stressed
And I can't rest
And I can't enjoy food
And I can't enjoy hobbies

Im basically just sitting here for HOURS every day losing my fucking mind without any distraction. 3 weeks until I graduate and it feels like an eternity. Every day is pain.

Coding distraction
To be honest - task distraction

1. Starting a task, you need to do
2. finding old code you want to refactor
2. Doing some improvements
3.Fixing the bugs created by prev actions
....
Task not finished
But that's kind of fun. Livin' on the edge

My favourite math operator? Distraction!

We are all experts of distraction, because we have been practising for more than 10000 hours.

I've never known what hot coffee tastes like. The distraction of coding magically turns it into cold coffee everytime.

Mastrubation is a distraction from programming tasks. #handsOffOurWeenies

mom: stop wasting time on Facebook (still she says like that and I do not have a fb account)
wife: she cant stand me working from home, and when she is home she hangs on my shoulder to see what I am typing. a big distraction.

I love coding on vacation. We sometimes take long flights like 5hrs an then another 5 hrs. I get so much done in flight without the distraction of phone calls or the internet (YouTube).

What I've learned from working on side projects is that distraction is caused by poor time management and planning skills. Why is this realization so important? Because it applies to every area of your life. Just think about it.

I only code at work.
Now that I don't have an employer I don't code.
The distraction is no employment.

IMO, music plays a vital role in writing software for me. Without it I can’t get into the “zone”... or as I call it the “grove”, because I don’t really zone out.

I have different genres, songs, and playlists for different situations and languages.

I also, begin to type to the beat of the song.

I have been known to put a song on repeat for hours to lose track of time.

Have a standup desk has really helped with concentration, as once I’m in the grove, I will start moving around to the beat as I work.... It seems like a distraction but it helps.. maybe I’m just ADD.. lol 😂

Anyone else do the same of some sort? What gets you in the grove?

I'm self-employed and devRant has at least cubed the difficulty to get motivated!! #justafewmoreminutes 😂

A hear people have mixed feelings about listening to music when programming. I listen to chill step, upbeat electronic or rap mostly. Do you like to listen to music when programming? If so, what kind of music?

Not much tops the orgasm from powering thru 500+ lines of code in the zone... in vim...no debugger.. and without compiling just visually seeing in your mind the assembly be generated... and code being stepped thru.. and then compile and test and everything works as expected.. not sure anything tops that feeling ... definitely have to be in the zone.. one distraction and boom gotta compile to make sure nothing broke

I need your help.
I think I'm addicted to distractions and diversions. It's ruining my life and any chance to get experience.

Instead of actual developing, I constantly watch development tutorials and courses, listen to podcasts about development, read books and articles about development, post on development forums and go to development meetups.

I can't write a few lines of code without being 100% concentrated first, and afterwards I get distracted by everyday life events only to find myself at the end too tired to do anything productive and then surrender to sleep.

I'm getting depressed. How can I fight this? How can I push myself to work and be an actual developer?

My biggest and favorite distraction...

My queen, my servant... My girlfriend

Have so much support from her. Without her, i would be a mess

One that understands one's need for distraction-free work area in exchange for producing quality. Also, encourages research, uptraining, and learning.

My best tool for avoiding procrastination and getting a lot of focus is having a job with a great work culture in which I get to work on a project that challenges me and makes me learn new stuff. When it's not like that, I tend to lose energy and that sends me straight to devRant and other sources of distraction.

When it's early into the night
When the temperature is just right
When I'm surrounded by silence
And no distraction makes me defiance

When I'm feeling cozy and ready to read papers and program for my thesis
But I ruined the perfect night work genesis
BECAUSE I PROMISED TO GO TO MADAFUCKIN DINNER WITH FRIENDS

DAMNIT!

A VR/AR OS, with gesture recognition and virtual tools, to substitute workstations.

Imagine painting a picture in a AR canvas, for example.

Or using photoshop in VR for a distraction free enviroment. For coding, I would want to use a real keyboard, of course, but I would use virtual screens for everything.

The possibilities are endless, but people would probably use it mostly for porn, obviously.

Coding distraction: accidentally finding out about some Vim plugin or cool tool you didn't know about and having to stop searching for that error code to check it out.

Losing focus and distracting myself while I wait years for my tools to load.
Also I should probably stop using slack, thats distraction too.
And talking to people, thats a distraction.
And thinking and things unrelated to the task at hand despite removing as many distractions as possible...

I get distracted very easily 😞

Hey guys... What are the ways to deal with group of NOISY coworkers?

Yes... I tried asking them to Shut up...
And, No... I can’t ask my fucking manager coz, he’s one of them...

When instead of propperly coding one ends up adding syntax highlighting to emacs for specific terms and just other fancy functions...
I mean hey, it is somewhat more readable now I guess. 🤷‍♀️
...
Guess I'm just distracted and aoiding the issue ^^'

Finally decided to delete my Facebook account to avoid being distracted. Deletion is scheduled on May 19, after that there is going to be a lot less useless distraction

Anyone use the coffee machine as a distraction when bored and between projects ?
Just trying out the different varieties... We have this weird "Espressochock" that's basically hot chocolate with a shot of espresso, shit is weird...

Thanks for the distraction :P

Coding is my distraction to life, not the reverse.

Meetings I have to attend without any useful result or decision

For me, the biggest distraction is definitely hunger. It just pops up sometimes and overtime it gets unbearable. And then I need to cook something. So much wasted time.

Hey guys!!
So... there are already a few sites, web apps and stuff related to Devrant out there.
Like the DevRant banner and stuff...
Can you please tell me/us about stuff what we already have and what people already made?
Thank you.
PS.: I'm needing a project urgently, I'll be making a DevRant portal today with all the stuff you say here, even if it's just for me. need the distraction.
some Html, PHP, CSS, and Bulma, didn't finish a project like this yet, it's time.
Thanks for your support so far guys.

To those developers who have fidget spinner does it really help you or is it more of a distraction!?!?

Biggest coding distraction? Real world things like eating and sleeping ;-;

I'm thinking of writting off 4 years of my life i.e 2011 - 2015 i.e my college life. The baggages from that period is the biggest distraction in my life.

I made some bad choices and chose a stream that i eventually lost interest in, while on the other hand, i found my interest in programming. It was too late for me when i find my interest.

When my course completed, i had nothing to brag or be proud about but over 15 backpapers.

Two years since then the count of my back papers is down to 1.

Having to study for these failed exams on subjects i don't care anymore makes me hate myself.

But, I'm just 1 exam away from this stupid degree.

2 uses that i see in this degree:

- can confidently add in my resume that i graduated college.

- parents can be "proud" i finally have a degree and increase my chances in finding a match in matrimony. :/

However, these 2 advantages don't align with the life i vision. I don't want to live 9 to 5 work life, I'd rather be self employed in some way.

If i don't make it in the next exam, I'm gonna write it off. I might have to live with strained relationship with my parents and relatives after that.. :/

I need to make a prototype. I've needed to make it for weeks. I need to have it made by the end of June.

Fuck you Netflix!

Fuck you right in the balls!

Biggest coding distraction? Gen eds.

Interns asking for help.

Also recently new boyfriend but that's a more welcome distraction

any place to find mates for group study or rather group coding?

alone i got distracted to check FB, devRant, my sites, mails, my tools, plugins, twitter, whatsapp ... 😫

Biggest coding distraction:

Life

How do ppl just keep coding. I can't stay on it for shit. Anything that comes to mind will distract me and keep me from starting or working on.... It sucks, its not even like i dislike coding. I actuay enjoy it once i start but games wirh friends n shit always take Priority for some reason :(

Biggest coding distraction: people, human, homo sapiens

I tend to be my biggest distraction. Sometimes I will get half way through a project and start to wonder if I should have written it using another language and then scrap the whole thing and start over.

Biggest distraction is a cool idea popping in my head, or someone telling me they have a problem that would be easy for me to solve.
I have to resist the urge to jump right in and build a solution.
In that sense, I am my own biggest programming distraction.

I want to be productive but the only thing on my mind is Pop Team Epic.

Help! 😭

I work from home and my biggest coding distraction is when the house is a wreck. I also love in a small 2 bedroom apartment and my office is in the living room..

Anyone got recommendations on a monitor setup above 1080p and 24" for developing in a unix environment? Don't know if I should go vertical, dual, or widescreen. I've seen research that dual monitors creates distraction. Thoughts?

Women on the workfloor.

Guys, how frequent do you face distraction while working? Like while coding, I'm always distracted with my phone. I know i can just throw it far away, but I do this habit on browser as well by suddenly opening a new tab to browse fb, for example.

One way to get around this is by using Pomodoro technique. But that only works if I'm not reluctant to do so. Another one is by limiting tabs opened in firefox by using an addon.

ITT: How do you deal with distraction?

I just went back to Old School Runescape and I played it 7pm - 2am last night so I guess that's my new distraction

Biggest distraction:
Climate change

Biggest distraction - Status calls 😑

Usually it's customer support.
We are a small team, so developers handle support, on a rotation basis though. But this is a hell lot of distraction because of the context switch. :(
Sometimes there are really disturbing tickets like how do I call this API using HTML? (*cries in spanish)

Greatest distraction when coding -> Annoying project managers really. I quit a company after working 4 days because the PM on the project just wouldn't respect boundaries. Always asking for updates every 10mins.

That bastard wasp is circling around me like a hungry shark all the time today. Now what is distraction if this isn't?

Biggest coding distraction, when you're in your zone and your boss calls you in for a meeting just to tell you how amazing his holiday was.

ugh, finally. Every time I decided on one someone would post something else and I'd realize nope, that one is just much of a distraction. But someone just said drills and instantly it was triggered....

Vacuum cleaners...

It doesn't matter whether it's a shop vac, house vac, or even one of those nifty little, super quiet robot ones (elvis more has the problem with those, personally I think there cool as shit... but don't tell him that 🤫) most definitely, unanimously, vacuum cleaners....

Not even joking either. The first thing I started doing when I moved was ripping the carpet out of the bedrooms so I didn't have to use one.

And I can run drills, sanders, impacts, whatever all day long. The only thing that even comes close to amount of irritation the sound of that electric motor, at those rpms, causes is the sound of the little handheld pneumatic... um, rotary thingy... No idea what those are called, I don't think I've ever worked with anyone that did 🤷🏻‍♂️

I need to stop messing with all the new vim plugin package managers. The plugins themselves were already distraction enough. ;_;

When my one of my two twelve-or-more-year-old Belinea 101920 displays has one of these local distortions just on that one very important word...

Kids for sure are a distraction. Mostly working 40 hours a week and being exhausted from that is the prime factor.

When you strive to get better and you got battle pass levels to grind through

The biggest distraction in all issue trackers is the hemorrhaging backlog of tickets that will _never_ be done, or aren't important yet.

This is why I just choose not to even bother opening it and let my PM close them out. :-)

The biggest distraction is every other bloody department in the organisation, other than development.

Well at times, almost anything. Sometimes the wall becomes so interesting to look at that you actually waste 10 good minutes.

When another song starts and I feel I have to adjust my Calf 12-band equalizer again — I have Modecom MC-S1 and an equalizer is just a necessity.

Biggest coding distraction: The waffling designer sat next to me