Comment by SheepSlapper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SheepSlapper | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotal Devil's Advocate:

The most productive I've ever been in a job was when I shared an open office totaling around 500 square feet with 7 other devs. There was always something blasting on the TV in that office. There were always people discussing/arguing about one aspect of our software or another. Jenkins would blare a Lo Pan sound clip[0] on build success/failure. And yet, with all this, I put out the best work of my career (both in terms of speed and quality).

I'm not sure why, but it probably has something to do with the atmosphere that was less like a business and more like a place I'd like to go hang out during the days. It didn't feel like work, which was oddly conducive to getting things done. And if someone needed to concentrate and couldn't with the noise, they could toss headphones on and drown out the nonsense (which most of us did very, very rarely) or take a conference room.

Oh, and the private office I had a few years prior to this (incidentally about the same square footage as the 8 man office) had the opposite effect on me. Not great quality, no passion for the job, super quick burnout. For whatever that's worth.

So what I'm saying is: If you need silence, cool. Seek it out. Do whatever it takes to be the most productive you can[1]. But not everyone wants to live in a sound vacuum, and some people thrive in the environments that are the polar opposite of what you think is ideal. Some of us like collaborative spaces and occasional distractions they bring :)

[0] http://www.realmofdarkness.net/pc/sb/movies/lopan Our build failure was "Now this really pisses me off to no end!"

[1] How do I make things bold here? Because that's supposed to be bold. In <blink> tags. font-size: 3em.

> So what I'm saying is: If you need silence, cool. Seek it out. Do whatever it takes to be the most productive you can[1]. But not everyone wants to live in a sound vacuum, and some people thrive in the environments that are the polar opposite of what you think is ideal.

I agree that different people work better in different environments, but I think what you've said should be flipped:

If you like noisy environments, cool. Seek it out. But don't ruin the concentration of others just because you work best in a place with noise and distractions.

I used to work in a noisy environment and it was hell because there were literally no quiet areas to work. I would have happily moved elsewhere, but there was nowhere to go. Virtually every office space has conference rooms and break rooms where you can go if you want to be noisy or work in a group. Very few office spaces have "quiet areas". Silence should be the default around people's desks and noise should be taken elsewhere. If you're being noisy in an open plan office, there's a good chance you're disrupting a silent majority.

I disagree that silence should be the default, I think that whatever the majority of people in the environment want should be the default, with the understanding that we should try to accommodate everyone. If I was the one developer out of 8 in my office that thrived on quiet, I wouldn't have punished the other 7 by mandating that silence should be the default[0].

If you're in a loud environment and need quiet, then communicate that to your boss. Ditto for <insert productivity issue here>. They've got a vested interest in you doing your best work, and will try to make it work the best they can for everyone. If they don't, then they're probably not worth wasting your skills on anyway (plenty of fish in the sea). But if you don't speak up, then you've no one to blame but yourself.

[0] Pertinent side note here, after about a year of working in the loud office, the owner mandated that we stop the distractions. No more TV, fewer breaks to mess around, etc. He thought it was affecting our work, and boy was he right (but not in the way he thought). The net result: Our productivity went down. Measurably. Strange world we live in, eh?

> If you're in a loud environment and need quiet, then communicate that to your boss.

I did, on many occasions.

> If they don't, then they're probably not worth wasting your skills on anyway (plenty of fish in the sea).

I agree, I quit that job :) There were many reasons of course, but the distracting environment and the lack of response to honest employee feedback didn't help their case.

> If I was the one developer out of 8

I think we're coming from different perspectives. If you're working with a small number of people, I totally agree that the group should be able to come to a sensible agreement (I would never demand that my 7 other co-workers act like they're in a library just to please me). My previous post was from the perspective of someone in a larger office (say... 20+ people to pick an arbitrary number) with the typical office layout (cubes, some private offices, conference rooms, break rooms). In such a situation, you're going to have more than a few people who prefer quiet when they're working. Those people are assigned a desk with little choice in the matter, and there's no viable alternative workspace for them to escape to. In this type of situation I think it's rude to intrude on a person's one and only workspace with noise, and silence (or at least low volume) should be the default.

If things were perfect, everyone would get to choose how they work. But things are rarely perfect :)

I guess the moral to take here is "people have different working styles, and should seek out the conditions they need to do the best work they can in their environment."

I do some of my better work with symphonic metal[1] blasting in my ears, but I wouldn't impose that on anyone else. For one thing, it's an acquired taste.

[1] - See e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYjIlHWBAVo

Have some real metal from a fellow hacker that blasts while coding: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FttgsegQyAU

Have a very metal season of darkness.

after experimenting with many different pandora stations, i've found that trance music is awesome for programming. anything with lyrics or irregular beats (like dubstep) is particularly distracting, even though outside of work i like listening to pretty much anything.

this is often why when people ask me, "what music do you listen to?" my answer is always, "for what?"

Indeed! I tend to play the more minimal techno (that is so popular here in the Berlin club scene). Sometimes even some Prodigy.

The benefit of private offices is that people can choose to be in them with the door closed. I've been in both environments, and there's certain work that I do better in each environment, so getting to choose what you want when you want it is the best solution.

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