Music While Programming?

BubbaDoom writes "In our cubicle-ville, we have programmers intermixed with accounting, customer support and marketing. As programmers, it is our habit to put on our headphones and listen to our portable music players to drown out all of the noise from everyone else. The boss recently sent an email just to the programmers demanding that we do not use our music players at work because he thinks it distracts us from our jobs and causes us to make mistakes. Of course, we've explained to him that prattle from the other people is much, much more distracting, but he insists his policy is the right one. What is the Slashdot community's experience with music at work for programmers?"

Comments

Programming without music?

[javaguy]

Without music at work there won't be any more programmers, the issue will be moot

Re:Programming without music?

[otravi]

Working without music is fine, as long as there isn't any noise to avert your concentration. The easiest way to solve this little issue it just go to work with a pair of earmuffs. Your argument for using them should be obvious.

Re:Programming without music?

[meerling]

Too much silence if even more distracting for some people, myself included.

Music makes good background, and can be easily tuned out.
On the other hand, conversations are something I can't help but respond to, especially when it's a question.
Even worse, a questions of a technical nature regarding computers.

Re:Programming without music?

[sg_oneill]

This attitude sucks, "If you dont like it, then get another job" roughly paraphrased.

Bullshit.

People seem to forget that without workers, the value of a company is nothing. Trying to hand-wave away problems on the premise stated above forgets that the most socially valuable part of a business isn't the product, nor is it the employer or shareholders, but the employees , the value they bring to society and the fair reward they get for their labor.

We SHOULD be discussing what makes a pleasant workplace, because the fair alternative is we all stop working.

But that isn't going to happen.

My alternative: Bosses: If you don't like the employees simple requests that make the day pleasant and productive, [i]get the hell out of business and hand management over to someone who will[/i].

Putting up with injustice , even by just walking away , makes you complicit in that injustice.

Re:Programming without music?

[Anonymous Coward]

By walking away you are in no way "putting up with injustice".

As you rightly point out, employees are the most valuable part of a business... You are punishing them, by removing a valued employee. This is the way capitalism (should) work, the companies compete for employees, if they don't offer good terms, they don't get them. Through this process, the terms on offer improve.

As I said above, you can quite reasonably approach your boss and say "hey, this really isn't making my day either pleasant or productive... change it, or I'll go". If he doesn't, then do the right thing, and punish him for it.

Re:Programming without music?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you were DISTRACTED by the MUSIC.

Re:Programming without music?

[manicb]

Of course this affects everyone differently. (I'm an engineer, not a programmer, but much the same issues should apply.) I actually can't really 'tune out' music any more: maybe I could in the past, but since I started writing and producing in my spare time I can't help but analyse EVERY piece of music I hear. Regardless of its actual merit. One long day of working in a lab with Radio 1 on in the background pretty much made me hate the world. Even at my desk where I can listen to my own choice of music, I only listen to music if doing something repetitive and mundane - I can't solve problems when I'm thinking about how well the bass part fits around the drums. It's a bit of a curse: similarly, I know enough about the art of magic that I don't enjoy bad magicians any more, but enjoy the good ones all the more!

That said, I think I can make my own decisions about what will distract me and what won't, and be responsible for the quality of my work. Some people will be more distracted than they think - I guess the danger is that it's difficult to tell if this is the cause of somebody's poor productivity. Tricky one.

Re:Programming without music?

[zippthorne]

I would avoid making any ultimatums. The problem with ultimatums is that you have to follow through, and that puts the other party in charge of your actions.

Re:Programming without music?

[paganizer]

Sort of different, sort of similar.
I was working doing CAD at a place called Campbell-Rhea in the mid 80's. My habit at the time was when i got to work, I would grab a bottle of Pepsi from the machine in the breakroom, go to my cube, and review what I had to do for the day, what I did yesterday, while sipping Pepsi.
One day, the owner was walking by in the hall as I was walking out of the breakroom, trying to dodge the various people grabbing their morning coffee; when I got to my cube, my department head told me the boss wanted to see me. went to his office, and he started asking why I was taking a break before I even got to work. I told him that I didn't like coffee, so unlike everyone else, I grabbed a Pepsi when I first got in.
long story short, Coffee was perfectly acceptable 1st thing at the job drink, but soft drinks were only for breaks.
I was still sort of caffeine shy, and very confused; I kept thinking he was trying to haze me in some way, so i tried to get him to explain it.
10 minutes after I walked into his office, he was nice enough to give me the option of quitting, or being fired.
BTW, I was his fastest, most accurate CAD guy out of 7. got a raise 2 weeks before this for productivity.
The Moral: The Boss is the Boss. sometimes they do stupid shit. either live with it, or leave.

Re:Programming without music?

[MrNaz]

While I can accept that music would be less distracting that office chatter, I simply don't understand the concept that music is better than silence. I can work with music, but if I need to concentrate on something intensely, like a complex coding problem or making decisions based on a large amount of data, I need silence.

I blame life in a modern city causing people to hardly ever hear silence, which makes them uncomfortable with it. I grew up on a small country town, and silence was just something I got used to when walking in the bush or playing in the yard. Even traffic noise was not present. I remember finding the constant sound of cars going past when we moved to the city to be a novelty, and soon an annoyance for many years after moving to the city. To this day, 22 years later, I still find my trips to the country a relief from the sensory barrage that is life in a city.

Re:Programming without music?

[Kreigaffe]

Hahaha.. you're suggesting that you confront your boss with evidence that he made a wrong decision, and that that evidence is your poor work? That might work, but more likely your boss will see "My policy is working, and this jagoff is sandbagging and throwing a tantrum to get his way, so I'll just have a talk about his dropping work quality and tell him we're concerned about his future with the company if it continues. I AM FUCKING GOD HERE!!"!1!!"

yeah, bosses be crazy, yo.

Re:Programming without music?

[easyTree]

I've found the second half of this to be persuasive in the past:
  * http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html

--
Here's the trouble. We all know that knowledge workers work best by getting into "flow", also known as being "in the zone", where they are fully concentrated on their work and fully tuned out of their environment. They lose track of time and produce great stuff through absolute concentration. This is when they get all of their productive work done. Writers, programmers, scientists, and even basketball players will tell you about being in the zone.

The trouble is, getting into "the zone" is not easy. When you try to measure it, it looks like it takes an average of 15 minutes to start working at maximum productivity. Sometimes, if you're tired or have already done a lot of creative work that day, you just can't get into the zone and you spend the rest of your work day fiddling around, reading the web, playing Tetris.

The other trouble is that it's so easy to get knocked out of the zone. Noise, phone calls, going out for lunch, having to drive 5 minutes to Starbucks for coffee, and interruptions by coworkers -- ESPECIALLY interruptions by coworkers -- all knock you out of the zone. If you take a 1 minute interruption by a coworker asking you a question, and this knocks out your concentration enough that it takes you half an hour to get productive again, your overall productivity is in serious trouble. If you're in a noisy bullpen environment like the type that caffinated dotcoms love to create, with marketing guys screaming on the phone next to programmers, your productivity will plunge as knowledge workers get interrupted time after time and never get into the zone.

With programmers, it's especially hard. Productivity depends on being able to juggle a lot of little details in short term memory all at once. Any kind of interruption can cause these details to come crashing down. When you resume work, you can't remember any of the details (like local variable names you were using, or where you were up to in implementing that search algorithm) and you have to keep looking these things up, which slows you down a lot until you get back up to speed.

Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds).

Now let's move them into separate offices with walls and doors. Now when Mutt can't remember the name of that function, he could look it up, which still takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which now takes 45 seconds and involves standing up (not an easy task given the average physical fitness of programmers!). So he looks it up. So now Mutt loses 30 seconds of productivity, but we save 15 minutes for Jeff.

Anyway, I fully expect that most of you, reading this, will write to say, "what the heck are you doing reading Upside anyway? You get what you deserve". How true. Serves me right.
--

Answer

[KefabiMe]

Your boss is a retard.

track the difference

[Cederic]

Find a way to measure relative productivity, and relative error rates, for before and after you had to stop using music.

Use objective facts to show your boss what a twat he is.

Other reason

[mseeger]

I am pretty sure, that the official reason is not the real reason. My best guess is that other employees have complained about the privilege of the programmers (listening music while working). Since your boss knows that giving this reason would create dissent, he has choosen the quality issue as official reason. That is the reason why discussing the pretended reason will not make him change his mind. I have seen this happening a hundred times... humans are so petty. CU, Martin

Constant Noise

[adamchou]

I've heard bosses and professors before say that if you're listening to music, then you're not 100% focusing on your studying/work. In an environment where its perfectly silent, then I can see how music can be distracting. However, most of us work in an office where there are cubicles with people within earshot talking about work or talking to other people on the phone. The problem with that is that people talking is very erratic. Pitch and volume changes unpredictably and those unpredictable changes suddenly distract me from my work. On the other hand, the music I have playing is, for the most part, music that I've heard numerous times. On top of that, there's a consistent "flow" to the music. It drowns out the distracting random noise and provides some constant noise that lets me focus on my work.

Earplugs

[javax]

I never had any problems regarding this issue. What might be a solution is to use earplugs. A colleague of mine uses earplugs when he is doing "serious" work (as he says) and he seems to do just fine. It's just a little bit funny that you have to ask him everything twice, as he won't hear it the first time and first has to remove the earplugs -- ad you don't know beforehand if he is currently wearing his earplugs as you can't see them (at least not from two meters away). The earplugs have the psychological advantage of making other people disrupt you less often: It takes some time till you remove the earplugs and they have to ask their question twice, so they think twice if the effort of this is worth the answer -- Dummy-questions good-bye!

be constructive

[obarthelemy]

I assume, since he's a boss, that he has a private office ? If that's the case, offer him to come do some cerebral, non-social work (not on the phone, more like writing a report or something) for a half day in one of your cubicles, and judge for himself if he really thinks he wouldn't have worked better being isolated from the chatter.

Stress out to him that it's not like you're buying 10 new CDs a day and listening intently to them while on the company's time, but just whiting out very distracting noises so that you can focus on your job.

Show him how you come to work with your music already chosen, and spend 0 time on it (I can spend hours building a playlist :-p )

Be careful to NOT discuss music with you coworkers for a while, nor visit any music sites...

Try and find examples of companies that he will judge well-run (not geeky nerdy ones, more in his frame of reference - Google, MS... don't count) that do allow music for programmers.

If all that doesn't work, try and work out an agreed playlist / music genre, or just wear earplugs/muffs ? That would suck, though.

Re:be constructive

[mopower70]

I assume, since he's a boss, that he has a private office ? If that's the case, offer him to come do some cerebral, non-social work (not on the phone, more like writing a report or something) for a half day in one of your cubicles, and judge for himself if he really thinks he wouldn't have worked better being isolated from the chatter.

No kidding! My company refused to move me until I made the facilities woman come over and stand in my cube and listen to Chatty McSnotsucker gabbing about her latest cleansing diet and the quality of her shits when the laxatives kick in, all the while trying to clear her sinuses from a chronic post-nasal drip evidently made of horse-glue. She lasted three minutes before she left my cube gagging. I got my transfer.

Re:Def better with music

[DangerFace]

While I agree that music is much less annoying than the noise of other people trying to get their jobs done, sometimes when I'm coding alone in my house I need to crank some Aphex Twin or other discordant mentalism just for a base level of distraction - I find if 10% of my mind is trying not to get distracted it helps the other 90% just get on with the job in hand.

I suppose it's sort of like chewing gum or fiddling with stationary - there's just a bit of your mind dedicated to looking out for tigers, and if you're confident there are no tigers in your office you need to give it something else to do.

Then play fair but play to win - ask for data

[Eternal Vigilance]

It sounds like your boss isn't a programmer, otherwise they wouldn't even be making their assertion. sigh...

So your boss claims when you listen to music you're collectively distracted and you make more mistakes. You should then, since you take anything that can improve the quality of the code seriously, hold this meta-contribution to the corporate codebase to the same standard as anything else - in other words, require it be tested and verified before committing it.

While from your standpoint this is likely to get you what you want, since it's very unlikely that your boss has anything factual to back up their position, it's also the most respectful way of considering your boss' potential contribution. "OK, even though you're not a skilled programmer, we'll still accept and treat your contribution just as if you were. Now here's the level of quality we all expect and demand from everything we put in our product - does what you intend to add actually meet the standards our company requires?"

And this also gives them the possibility of showing you how they're right, and for whatever reason the programming group is distracted and error-prone. Even if music isn't the immediate cause (perhaps more of a late-stage symptom of some other systemic problem), that would still be very helpful to know.

Of course, if you're just a bunch guys sitting around slinging code, you're gonna be SOL in this if you don't have any structure, testing and metrics to your development - and if you don't then your boss might strictly speaking be mistaken but indirectly be life's way of helpfully prompting you to get your act together. :-)

Good luck improving your work environment. Rock out with your awk out!

Re:Def better with music

[Rakshasa Taisab]

So what you're saying is that the OP should get the boss to add free-roaming tigers to the cubicle landscape to provide the 10% distraction?

Re:music as a distraction? depends

[something_wicked_thi]

however i don't think slapping on headphones is the solution; music is also a distraction

Huh?

as a technical manager myself

Ah.

Re:Your boss is...

[tsm_sf]

One of the best moments of my programming career was when my boss came over and said he hated to see me with my feet up and hands interlaced behind my head (the classic 'kicking back' pose). My manager interjected with "right now he is earning the money you pay him".

So rare to get a manager that understands the process.

This is like sociology....

[Joce640k]

...and the only conclusion ever reached by sociologists is: "Some do, some don't!"

Re:Programming without music? Listen Up Cog

[Sxooter]

This is an extreme, and inaccurate oversimplification. There are thousands of unemployed programmers, but honestly most of them are shitty and I would never hire them. During this current downturn we interviewed about 25 developers for an open position and found 2 acceptable candidates.

Plus, you invest a lot of time and effort training someone in how to work at your company with your development process. It takes them time to become familiar with the code they're working on. Employees in general, and coders in particular are not simple cookie cutter replacements and your boss knows this. The average cost to bring a new coder up to speed measures in the 10s of thousands of dollars.