And how do you resolve this contradiction? Teach your employees that if you don’t want to be interrupted you better write good documentation. And have one dedicated team member each day responsible for supporting other teams. I think both of those are mentioned in the article, but it was a little a while since I read it.
"Teach your employees that if you don’t want to be interrupted you better write good documentation."
And reward them for doing it.
If your company do "360 degree" evaluations where your peers praise you for your quick answers to their questions, you are effectively incentivised to NOT document and instead be interrupted...
One does not preclude the other. Your quick answers can come in form of sending them links to the relevant parts of the documentation you wrote earlier.
And if their question is not something that can be answered that way, you can improve your documentation so that next time the question is asked, you do not have that problem.
I would be inclined to say that interruptions to help your colleagues should be accepted. Writing good documentation is actually hard and if you not willing to invest the time to do it well and to make sure the documentation can be found when needed you had better not write documentation at all.
It's not something to be taught. For majority of devs an average working day is too short to do everything they theoretically should. So they make choices based on feedback/motivation which rarely favors writing good docs over writing more code. On top of that many good devs are simply unable to write comprehensible documentation because its very different kind of skills, or just because English is not their native.
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