Pretty much nothing you've written here refutes what I'm saying. You're a programmer, so naturally, you assume that your optimal use is programming, and you draw conclusions starting from that assumption. But if you moderate that assumption a bit (you're also well-used as a planner, an organizer and as a communicator, among other things), you arrive at a different set of conclusions.
"The appearance of productivity is usually far more important than the reality"
No, that's just cynicism talking. Larger organizations care about your personal productivity, but they care less than small organizations.
Part of the brilliance of modern corporations is that you don't always have to be at peak productivity as an individual in order for the company to profit. Which means, in turn, that you can do things like get sick or have a family without having to give up your job. The flip side of feeling less efficient is that you have some cushion when you actually are less efficient.
"I think Joel Spolsky covered this neatly somewhere. If you kick a programmer out of The Zone with a distraction, you can lose whole hours of useful productivity."
You obviously don't want to interrupt someone gratuitously, but the point is that your perspective on what's important can differ wildly from your employer's perspective. Keeping someone in "The Zone" is not the only goal. An employee in "The Zone" who is churning out "The Wrong Thing" is worse than no employee at all. So you need communication. And as soon as you need communication overhead, people are going to be interrupted. It's a cost of doing business.
"The appearance of productivity is usually far more important than the reality"
No, that's just cynicism talking. Larger organizations care about your personal productivity, but they care less than small organizations. Part of the brilliance of modern corporations is that you don't always have to be at peak productivity as an individual in order for the company to profit. Which means, in turn, that you can do things like get sick or have a family without having to give up your job. The flip side of feeling less efficient is that you have some cushion when you actually are less efficient.
"I think Joel Spolsky covered this neatly somewhere. If you kick a programmer out of The Zone with a distraction, you can lose whole hours of useful productivity."
You obviously don't want to interrupt someone gratuitously, but the point is that your perspective on what's important can differ wildly from your employer's perspective. Keeping someone in "The Zone" is not the only goal. An employee in "The Zone" who is churning out "The Wrong Thing" is worse than no employee at all. So you need communication. And as soon as you need communication overhead, people are going to be interrupted. It's a cost of doing business.