Multitasking — useful tool or necessary evil?
According to popular belief, multitasking is something men are incapable of and women excel at. Countless are the stories of the hapless husband forced to do housework for a day and failing miserably at the first hurdle. But by that logic I must be a woman, seeing how I’m a pretty capable multi-tasker. Who would have thought!
Jokes aside, what is multitasking about, why is it traditionally considered a female area of expertise, and is it really a good thing? In this article we will take a closer look at and attempt to answer those questions in the context of software engineering.
I’m not really sure if I was always good at multitasking, or if I simply rose to the occasion. Back in 2006 I joined a small Swiss software company called SVOX as project engineer. My task was to do porting and customization of the company software to the various customer platforms, which were typically embedded devices running real-time OS’s of varying types. Sometimes porting was just a matter of cross-compiling, other times it required code modifications and a lot of trial and error.
Since I was the only project engineer in the company I became the bottleneck through which every customer delivery had to pass, and when the number of customers started growing rapidly I soon found myself a very busy man indeed. And here’s where I found out…
