Stack Exchange: How does noise affect programmer productivity? | Hacker News Reader

Stack Exchange: How does noise affect programmer productivity?

programmers.stackexchange.com

69 pointsjohnaspden31 comments

In my experience, it isn't noise itself so much per se, but the type of noise - talking in particular is distracting to me. But I do find that some types of music, and noise, seem to engage my brain in a way that lets me focus better than with no noise at all... and as a bonus, it also drowns out some of the more distracting noises. Ambient music, some electronic music, and computer generated sound really help me.

If I were to start up a company again, I would issue each employee a nice pair of over-the-ear noise cancelling headphones as part of their office equipment. I think it would work wonders for their productivity.

Related - for some pink noise, here is a commandline (for those with sox installed) that I find soothing. Play with the last two variables some, to tune it to your tastes - it has somewhat the effect of noise from an empty beach:

  play -t sl -r48000 -c2 - synth -1 pinknoise tremolo .1 40 <  /dev/zero

I posted the above not too long ago in another story, and someone else (shmerl) replied with another one, that resembled the noise of [edit: not space] Star Trek:

  play -c2 -n synth whitenoise band -n 100 24 band -n 300 100 gain +20

"the noise of space"

Sorry, on the deck on the Enterprise :)

I presume that means "the noise of the starship Enterprise"...

Over the last few years noise of many types has become extremely distracting. I won't say debilitating, but it feels like it on occasion (just not perpetually constant).

The one thing I've done is taken to wearing in-ear earbuds and running whitenoise (actually, pinknoise usually) as well as sometimes mixing in sounds of oceans or other water. It's not foolproof - it doesn't merge out all distractions, but it does reduce noise distractions considerably. Whether people in another room or minor road traffic (a killer for me), the earbuds with whitenoise has helped.

Regular music doesn't help much, though I may mix in some classical behind the whitenoise some.

I don't bother with 'noise cancelling' stuff. I get cheap earbuds - I'm just using whitenoise in them(!). I usually pick up 3-5 at a time from biglots for $5 each (or less during their friends and family special days). They don't last forever, but at $5, who cares? I've been far more productive with these over almost any accessory I've ever bought.

Total side note: one of the big benefits of a macbook for me a few years ago - after linux on several laptops - is that there was never any contention between audio programs. Music just plays. Sound effects just play. Concurrently. I don't have to futz with various alsa/pulseaudio crap, or worry that because pidgin is running that skype won't be able to access the sound drivers, etc. Yeah, I'm sure I'm the only one ever who had those problems, and linux "just works" fine for everyone else, or it was my fault for not researching properly all the driver support for the 5 laptops I chose to buy over a few years, and yeah windows would have done this just as well as the mac. There's a few things I miss from linux boxes. Sound issues are not among those things.

This is probably why I find the song A Looming Resonance by Wolves In The Throne Room[1] so soothing, it has a white/pink noise track during the entire song, I am sure other musicians have done similar.

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO_EuNDCSZs

It's not just auditory noise, visual noise is a problem as well. The trend toward putting programmers in open plan offices has driven me to telecommute. I wish we could go back to the days of the boring cube farm with white noise speakers in the ceiling.

I've noticed that as I get older I require more control over my environment to maintain concentration than when I was in my early 20's.

I used to ride the stress to some extent to (temporarily, partially) overcome the distraction. This no longer works -- a caution to younger readers: I have found it to be a recipe for burnout.

Peopleware is a book every software manager should read.

And ALL mangers I have worker for in large corporations had read it, but it did not matter! Noise and cubicles everywhere!

So my question, is how do we prove to a majority of large companies that noise negative affects their bottom line?

Is dubstep noise? Because I seem to work just fine with that turned way up.

No but seriously, aren't headphones the great equalizer (pun!) when it comes to noise? Our office has a good bit of road noise these days, but a quality set of over the ear headphones makes it all disappear. And when it's not been road noise, it has been coworkers distracting me.

I've done it so long that my headphones are both a signal to those around me that I'm getting work done and not to interrupt, and a weird signal to myself to get down to business. I find that I reach for them as a reflex when I know I need to really think through something and concentrate.

At my place of employment, I seem to be the odd man out. On any given day, there are 5 to 10 people programming at our desk. All of them seem to be able to focus deeply. I, on the other hand, have immense trouble with distractions such as TV. Why would TV be a distraction at work? Oh, there are 5 large screen TVs within my field of vision. Often the sound from different TVs is slightly out of sync so I can't ignore it, no matter how hard I try.

I end up using ear-plugs and try to raise my monitors to keep moving pictures away from my eyes. The joys of working on a trading desk!

I think that different people are affected by noise more than others and I put it down to the learning style that person gravitates towards. My wife is an auditory learner, where I am more visual. I have real trouble paying attention to conversation when a TV is playing in the background (with the sound off), where she can't concentrate if there is too much noise.

I find this stream (stuffed through some Sennheiser HD25 SP headphones to block everything else out) improves my productivity considerably! http://bluemars.org/cryosleep.php

The noise of humans or machines doesn't however.

I personally find a little white noise helps me focus. Sounds of the seaside or rain work very well. Of course, YMMV

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ask-the-bra...

Goran Soderlund, Sverker Sikstrom, Andrew Smart (2007) Listen to the noise: noise is beneficial for cognitive performance in ADHD Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 48 (8), 840-847

(writeup of above: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health/new-health/condit...)

I agree, its why I always have http://www.rainymood.com/ running when I want to focus on things.

Absolutely yes, and how it does depends on the type of noise.

I read something similar on reddit/r/askscience time ago, referred to studying with music. Programming and studying are different activities that will probably activate different areas of the brain, but they are both very demanding and I believe similar enough for the comments on that thread to apply here.

The fact is that when listening to vocal music the brain needs to do "decoding", no matter if you like the music or not. Apparently, it only happens with vocal music. This takes a dent of your brain "processing power" and study worse than the control group.

I believe something similar might be happening when programming. If you are not 100% in the task because your brain is busy working on useless data, it is going to affect the results.

Link to "How music effects the intake of information": http://redd.it/oi2pc

There was a good quote from someone wise about getting over the desire to stop interruptions by learning to deal smoothly with them, the argument being that any feelings of frustration with being interrupted was far more disruptive than many of the interruptions, it's not a skill that comes easily to me, but I can appreciate it's desirable nature!

That may be true for some people, but for others[1] your advice is similar to telling color-blind people to just learn to deal with red and green; or telling deaf people to just learn to hear to deal with people who talk quietly.

[1] Some people with Asperger's in particular.

answer: wonderfully http://simplynoise.com

Simplynoise is great, and its brown noise stream is half of my solution to cubicle noise. The other half is a pair of shooting range style earmuffs. The model I use is called "Peltor Optime 105," and I find them very comfortable.

I put my earbuds in, put my earmuffs over them, and set the brown noise feed playing at a very low volume. It's kind of silly looking, but the ability to concentrate regardless of what's going on around me is well worth it.

Workers who reported that their workplace was acceptably quiet before the exercise were 1/3 more likely to deliver zero-defect work.

Interesting that I get to work and sit down to see this, then immediately have to put in headphones to drown out the noise.

My anecdotal evidence indicates that noise makes it hard to concentrate and it's hard to be a productive programmer if you can't concentrate.

In my experience it's not so much the noise itself, but the noise being an indicator of the probability that you'll receive a really distracting question.

I have noise cancelling headphones. They cost maybe $50 dollars. Therefore, it doesn't effect my productivity at all.

Unfortunately, this result might just mean that there's a correlation between noise tolerance and performance. It would have been better if they had studied objectively measurable noise levels instead of subjective acceptability of noise levels.

That's what it seems from the comment that as the noise increased, 66% of the zero error workers still found the level acceptable, while only 8% of the one more defect workers found the level acceptable.

I think it's less tolerance and more focus. Workers that can focus appropriately can store the requisite information to solve the problem in their mind. Those without focus will introduce defects as information not task related is encountered and processed.

Right, the difference became more pronounced, but that doesn't really tell me what I as a planner would want to know. Consider two possible explanations.

(1) Some workers who had previously produced defect-free code started producing code with defects as the noise level increased.

(2) Some workers who had always produced code with defects started complaining about the noise as well.

In one of these cases, keeping noise levels down would make a difference. In the other it would not, and the numbers as given don't tell us which scenario applies. They also don't tell us the relative numbers of noise-tolerant vs. noise-intolerant programmers. If those affected by noise are a small minority, then an employer might make the choice to maximize office density and let those affected "select themselves out" by going elsewhere. OTOH, if just about all programmers are affected, that's not much of an option. If the authors reported that the number of programmers producing defect-free code went from X% at 20dB to Y% at 50dB to Z% at 80dB, then that would be much more useful. Similarly, these studies don't seem to measure time to task completion or ability to complete multiple tasks per day, which would be other factors in such decisions.

BTW, this is more than a theoretical issue for me. I'm working at home today because the noise level in my office - due to high density and low partitions - has become utterly intolerable. Just about everyone wears headphones all day, presumably because they feel likewise. I'm a bit disappointed that one of the most-cited studies in this area does not really support any useful conclusions that can be brought to management.

I listen to music all day every day when working (from home) and feel it helps me to be more productive, mainly because I'm relaxed and enjoying it, which in turn contributes to me enjoying my work. However, if my other half comes home and starts having a phone conversation–at a significantly lower volume in another room–the muffled voice really distracts me.

I certainly feel there is a correlation between _tolerance_ and performance.

>However, if my other half comes home and starts having a phone conversation–at a significantly lower volume in another room–the muffled voice really distracts me.

I find hearing a muffled conversation is actually worse than hearing a plain conversation. My pet theory is that either way, the brain has to commit some resources to parse the voice into actual concepts, but if the conversation is muffled it has to do even more work to 'clean the signal'. Using resources that are taken from your concentration ability.

You can consciously try to ignore the voice as much as you want, your subconscious still have to parse it. At least i've never been able to avoid it. I think that thats why white noise or music does not affect concentration nearly as much as a conversation of the same Db-level.

This is why headphones, noise-canceling or not, are not a perfect solution to the problem of conversational noise. You can still hear conversation through noise-canceling headphones; it's just quieter. And not necessarily so quiet that you don't parse it.

You can try to train yourself not to parse conversation, to think of it as a slightly irritating set of noises. I think we all try to do this to some degree – it may be one reason why programmers are famously uncommunicative when we're in the zone. I mumble and wave people away when I'm trying to sustain focus, and even if I deliberately break focus I tend to take a couple of minutes to snap out of it and get back into the flow of conversation, and in the meantime I struggle to produce words.

But, like you, I'm not convinced that consciously ignoring words really works. Your brain is still parsing them at some level. It's like the studies which show that noise, in general, is stressful, even if that noise is just white noise. Your brain is trying to find signal in the noise. It never really stops trying. The more noise there is, or the more structure your brain detects in the noise, the harder it will try.

Studies have shown, and my own experience bears out, that voices are hardest to tune out, and that structured music is also relatively distracting: Your brain parses music too. Ambient music, which is deliberately designed not to attract conscious attention, works better for me. White noise works, too, to some degree, but silence is still best.

Of course, some people are conditioned to have noise all the time. These people are both lucky and unlucky, in my opinion.

A large part of that problem: s/he's your other half.

Socially, and evolutionarily, we've adapted to pay attention to those who matter to us. That means boss, co-workers, and especially family and community partners. We're also adapted to picking out signal (especially speech and movement), which is why muffled talking (more effort to hear and understand it), and any moving video, can be so distracting.

It's why working in a "busy" spot (cafe, other public area) in which those around you are not part of your immediate society can be easier than working in an otherwise quiet location with someone close to you (and why getting to know people at the cafe "ruins" it as a working location).

Know your inner animal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com