That shift exposed a gap that has always existed between how managers experience a calendar full of calls and how software engineers experience the same thing. For a manager, a meeting is a slot.
For a developer in the middle of a complex problem, it is an interruption that costs far more than the thirty minutes it occupies. That gap has not closed with the arrival of AI coding assistants.
If anything, it has widened, because some managers now assume that if an engineer is waiting on a model to generate code anyway, a quick context switch costs nothing extra. Why Uninterrupted Stretches Matter Some software engineering work draws on the full capacity of someone's attention and produces something genuinely novel, such as a design decision, a tricky fix, or a piece of architecture.
Researchers who study focus describe this kind of work as incompatible with partial attention. If a task can be handled while half-listening on a call, it is not that kind of work.
