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Comment by soared | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr:

More clickbait. This blog assumes that employees are earning $110k a year, get interrupted 6 times a day, and each interruption requires 23 minutes to recover from. So each employee spends 2+ hours a day "costing the business".

Despite the interstellar sized logical jumps, the article is weak. Self-selecting high performance workers? Assuming everyone earns $110k? Etc.

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If your best and brightest 10% are losing 30k, it's worth asking if the effects are worse (even if it's only 3k per average employee, assuming there are 80% of them, that's a lot of 3k), and if it's worth it for the benefit the least capable or experienced 10% will get.

And please, don't latch on to the mathematical definition of average. I'm talking about a roughly bell curved distribution of talent.

I wish I only got interrupted 6 times a day. I usually get interrupted that often by lunchtime. I don't think it takes a full 23 minutes to recover from that, but 5-10 isn't uncommon.

I get about 23 full, uninterrupted minutes in a day.

When I'm in the office, I wonder if my coworkers wait for me to start working just so they can ask me how my day is going or to tell me a joke.

If you are paid $90k per year, your cost to the company is at least $110K a year, if not more. Company's share of payroll tax on $90k in the US is nearly $7,000, office space at $30-$40/square foot can be $2,000 a year, ten paid days off a year cost nearly $4,000, hundreds of dollars a year more for desks/computer systems.

Then you add medical/dental/401k matching, etc, etc.

If they offer stock options that can be easily tens of thousands more in imputed costs.

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