I disagree. I can move through quite alot, quite well, when I can work in a deep flow. 2-4 hours of deep work can be incredibly productive end to end and we follow TDD pretty strictly, which lends itself well to really thinking about problems and their solutions in my experience thus far, but it requires the ability to really walk through a problem space.
Our code quality here has improved significantly around this, and we are shipping faster than ever.
That isn't to say I'm unavailable (or anyone else) its that there is an acceptance that not all things are urgent, and if they are, its warranted to break through any focus periods.
Doesn't sound like we disagree that much. You are actually available, but not all things are urgent. I'd say the difference at my workplace is that pieces of the product are extremely old, developed under different architectures with different technologies under multiple management regimes of varying quality. There's a lot of tribal knowledge, so everything is kind of urgent by default as someone new to a specific piece of code can't move forward efficiently without picking the relevant SME's brain. Forbidding interruptions would be akin to mandating "only the SMEs can work, and the rest of you need to waste money twiddling your thumbs or banging your head against obscure legacy code until they feel like helping you". Most of the time when I'm interrupted it's because someone's blocked and I have the knowledge to unblock them, or I can at least point them to who does, so my loss of flow state is their gaining the ability to move forward at all, and everyone benefits.
By contrast it sounds like you guys designed your product around maximizing the impact of flow states and minimizing the need for interruption. I bet you have good documentation too. I'm honestly jealous, it would take tens of millions and years of re-writes to do the same here, and our prime customer wouldn't be willing to accept the delay even if we had the funding.
It may not be that "only SMEs can work" but that "SMEs don't have 5 tickets this sprint but 3 high level deliveries over the next quarter" thus they are allowed work uninterrupted from the daily churn and focus intensely (contributing to their already high base knowledge). Whereas other engineers are constantly distracted and stay surface level trying to stay afloat.
I completely agree with this way of working, and we have the same “protocol” as it were. I check my comms once every one or two hours to see if there is any pressing matters.
So little is actually urgent, unless you have some business critical infrastructure you have to maintain, but that sounds like a different role entirely.
Our code quality here has improved significantly around this, and we are shipping faster than ever.
That isn't to say I'm unavailable (or anyone else) its that there is an acceptance that not all things are urgent, and if they are, its warranted to break through any focus periods.