by Jonathan Erickson
Multitasking is good when it comes to computer programs, letting them do more with less. But when computer programmers start multitasking, productivity flies out the door.
For one thing, when programmers have to shift tasks, it takes “a really, really, really long time,” says Joel Spolsky, host of the Joel On Software Web site and co-founder of Fog Creek Software. Programmers have to keep a lot of things in their heads at once, Spolsky says, and the more they remember, the more productive they are. “A programmer coding at full throttle is keeping zillions of things in their head at once,” he says, “everything from names of variables, data structures, important APIs, the names of utility functions that they call a lot, even the name of the subdirectory where they store their source code.”
