Whether you’re working on a website for your local corner store, or writing software on the next super-jumbo jet’s critical systems, distractions can contribute to a pretty unhappy working life as a developer or technical writer. Our very trade requires making calculations, creating complex logical paths and holding large amounts of information in your mind all at the same time. Please give us some peace and quiet while we do this… Please!
In the Mike Judge movie Office Space they show a scene where the main character Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) arrives to work and slowly over the course of a morning experiences the living hell that can be a programming job in a loud cube farm; including being seated next to a department secretary who repeats her greeting ad nauseam (this very scene is where I got the title for this post).
Developers want quiet workplaces because there are less distractions. Less distractions means more efficiently written, elegant code (yes this is an assumption without stats to back it up, but I can tell you from my own personal experience that the best code I write is either at night after everyone at work has left, in the morning before everyone has arrived or quietly in my home office after a long day, as all these places offer less distractions).
Studies have repeatedly shown that distractions reduce performance in the workplace. And yet these studies aren’t actually specifically looking at developers at all! Most of the studies I've read simply look at cognitive performance and recall – no wonder as developers we’re all a grumpy non-communicative bunch with our headphones in.
And yet at nearly every place I’ve worked that isn’t a tech start-up, management has implemented or tried to implement open plan workspaces “for easy interaction”. They then usually add workplace music or play the music channel from cable TV under the guise that it will make the workplace “more fun” and “more productive”.
Are they all crazy?
He’s plugged in!
In the movie The Social Network, whenever someone tries to talk to a developer working with headphones on, Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake) discourages disturbing the them by yelling “He’s plugged in!”. I have had some non-developer co-workers mention this in the past as a reason for ignoring the problem of a noisy workplace, but this is tantamount to an Ostrich placing its head in the sand. “But he can just listen to music on his/her headphones to help him/her concentrate if he/she has to”. Some workplaces actually have the complete opposite and ban headphones as they may be considered anti-social…!!
Just to show you how much of a large increase in productivity that workers can gain from not having intermittent distractive noises in the workplace, Herman Miller did a study of devices that mask the sound of other things in the workplace by creating white noise to drown out everyone around you. The results of this study are astounding to say the least:
Studies of sound masking systems have reported productivity gains of 8 to 38%, stress reduction of up to 27%, and job satisfaction increases of 125 to 174%.
Stepping back from these results would lead you to believe that placing these devices in every workplace would be the thing to do right away – hell, think of the ROI within 2 years of installing them!
Anyone who works in sound or music production will tell you though that this is a fallacy, and that if you have one loud channel in your mix it’s always better to turn the loud channel down than the soft channels louder. Add to this that I can only assume that after sitting inside a workplace that sounded like a datacentre server room all day (to drown out all the noise) I may have been more productive but i almost certainly won’t have the greatest hearing after a few years.
We are legion hear us…
While some of my non-developer readers may think that all of this may sound a bit excessive and immature (“we can’t all have what we want, people making noise are just doing their job”), I must remind most of you that if you are in an industry that relies on software products or services workplace satisfaction is really what most employee longevity boils down to. Good developers know this and will simply move on if you don’t create the right environment for them to go about their business – again this may sound immature or unrealistic but you only have to conduct your business badly for a period of a few months to a year before you’ll start to experience what we in the biz call the Dead Sea Effect.
Basically, this boils down to a simple truth: If you make your employee’s working days filled with multiple, never read again TPS reports and constant aural distractions, your good developers will leave and you’ll be left with only the average ones who are too scared of losing their jobs to make a peep. This is not the best outcome for any business that relies on software production – usually losing even a bad developer costs you dearly as you train a new one up on your businesses processes.
When it comes to loud noise in the workplace I am not the first person to bring a mention of this over time – pretty much anyone worth their salt in the programming game has talked about it at some time.
As usual Jeff Atwood eloquently and humorously makes his point very well in his post in 2004 This is your Anti-Productivity Pod.
Joel Spolsky does an equally good job when talking about The Joel Test for Software Development Companies, by placing quiet on a list of must haves for anyone writing software as part of their job.
So what do we do about it
None of the answers below may be rocket science, as nearly all workers enjoy a bit of peace of quiet even if they aren’t in the role of software production, but some of the things required to make it happen can sometimes appear to be simply too hard for some management teams to even begin to think about.
Create a workplace that is quiet.
This has got to be first and foremost. If you have a loud office environment maybe move your developers to a separate part of the building or floor, you may think we’ll feel like we are missing out by not hearing about how many times Barry from finance barfed at the last work party – but I can almost assure you we won’t; we’re developers after all, so a lot of the time hearing about how many times the guy next to you totally p0wned on Battlefield 3 last night or how sweet the surf was before work today is scales of economy more exciting or fulfilling to us.
Create a culture of respecting each other’s aural and brain space.
As with most things that add to the vibe of an office culture, culture in general is something that is built, it doesn’t happen instantly or magically; so start small today.
While you will never hear me mention The Social Network and “there is some good insight there” in the same sentence ever again, if you take the movie at face value I think they’re onto a good thing here – if Sean Parker really did yell at people for disturbing programmers he has moved up a notch from the douche of the universe that the mass-media has painted him as over the last decade.
If you see that someone is busy in thought smashing away on a keyboard, maybe walking up to their desk to ask them for the 10th time today whether they are any closer to fixing “that bug” will be counterproductive – maybe send them an email instead. If you use internal chat or messaging and someone is marked as “away” or “busy” maybe they actually are – again maybe shoot them an email or wait for their status to change.
If you see someone else doing something similar to another colleague maybe stop them and have a word – when you are next busy and someone does the same thing you’ll thank yourself. Together it’s never too late to implement change.
Conduct meetings in meeting rooms or separate workspaces away from other workers.
Last but not least, if you think that general banter and office music are a bad distraction, placing 10 people in an open plan meeting room in the middle of an office is taking things to another level. Organise meetings away from workspaces and people’s desks. If you have segregated areas that are away from the main office floor such as meeting rooms or glassed-in sections of the office floor, use them. Your developers and co-workers will thank you.
We can all create a little more Zen in the our workplace, but recognizing that it’s actually a problem is definitely the first step.