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The Myth of Being “Busy”
Engineers measure productivity in:
Tickets closed
PRs merged
Meetings attended
But high-impact engineering requires something rarer:
Uninterrupted cognitive depth.
And most teams structurally prevent it.
Context Switching Is Not Neutral
Every time you switch between:
Slack
Code
A meeting
Another repo
Another decision
Your brain reloads state.
State reload has cost.
Not visible cost. Cognitive cost.
It reduces problem-model depth.
And shallow thinking produces fragile systems.
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Why This Matters More at Senior Levels
Junior engineers can survive shallow cycles.
Senior engineers cannot.
Because senior work involves:
Multi-system reasoning
Long-term tradeoffs
Second-order consequences
You cannot reason about distributed systems
in 12-minute fragments.
The Structural Problem
Most engineering orgs:
Overload calendars
Normalize constant Slack
Reward responsiveness
Confuse motion with progress
Responsiveness feels productive.
Depth builds durable systems.
They are not the same.
The Experiment
Try this for one week:
Block 2-hour deep work windows.
Mute non-critical Slack.
Batch meetings.
Notice the quality difference in your thinking.
Complexity reveals itself, only when attention is stable.
The Real Upgrade
The engineers who think clearly are not always the smartest.
They simply protect depth.
And depth compounds.
—
Hamza Saberi
Reply with one word:
“Busy” or “Deep”
Let’s see what engineering culture is really optimizing for.