as an isolationist

The past 2 weeks was possibly one of those weeks where I had dreams every night of all sorts of strange events. I was jolted out of bed once in the morning at 6+ am by a vibration of my phone (silent mode) that was one metre away from me, and I normally wouldn't have noticed. I was woken up at 5+ am almost everyday because yaya was choking over her cough in her sleep. I met up with a network vendor today, the vendor asked why my namecard says applications, and said that nobody will know that I don't have any infra experience. Passed.

So I was just looking back at all the events and thinking about how different I am from others, prompted by a HR guy asking me what kind of education I went through to produce a someone like me (apparently word of mouth has spreaded that I have proven that any applications person without network/infra background can learn and pick up the knowledge easily), because he wants to hire more people like me, which was flattering, but at the same time means I have a higher market value. Hmph.

Background: I was assigned a new role 2 months ago, covering both application and infra (server and network) security, so it's like a third dimension to my work.

I also got hooked on a book, Susan Cain's Quiet, that really helps me understand myself better, and I will extract some content here:

Tom DeMarco, a principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild team of consultants... noticed that some workspaces were a lot more densely packed than others. He wondered what effect all that social interaction had on performance. To find out, De Marco and his colleague Timothy Lister devised a study called the Coding War Games. The purpose of the games was to identify the characteristics of the best and worst computer programmers; more than six hundred developers from ninety-two different companies participated. Each designed, coded, and tested a program, working in his normal office space during business hours. Each participant was also assigned a partner from the same company. The partners worked separately, however, without any communication, a feature of the games that turned out to be critical.

When the results came in, they revealed an enormous performance gap. The best outperformed the worst by a 10:1 ratio. The top performers were also about 2.5 times better than the media. When DeMarco and Lister tried to figure out what accounted for this astonishing range, the factors that you'd think would matter - such as years of experience, salary, even the time spent completing the work - had little correlation to the outcome. Programmers with ten years' experience did no better than those with two years. The half who performed above the median earned less than 10% more than the half below - even though they were almost twice as good. The programers who turned in "zero-defect" work took slightly less, not more, time to complete the exercise than those who made mistakes.

It was a mystery with one intriguing clue: programers from the same companies performed at more or less the same level, even though they hadn't worked together. That's because top performers overwhelmingly worked for companies that gave their workers the most privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption. 62% of the best performers said that their work space was acceptably private, compared to only 19% of the worst performers; 76% of the worst performers but only 38% of the top performers said that people often interrupted them needlessly.

So you know my secret - isolation.

Hint: When your interrupt-ers (irritating-like-hell-mates-or-users) are on leave, you will be able to perform better.