7 ms·

Just as a different counter point, I have coded in lots of environments including factory floors full of thundering industrial equipment and in the Gobi desert

Just as a different counter point, I have coded in lots of environments including factory floors full of thundering industrial equipment and in the Gobi desert using a noisy smelly diesel generator as a power source etc. I think I did some of my best work when assigned a desk essentially in a corridor. A constant stream of people behind me, no privacy, noise etc. There was no half-concentration which privacy can encourage e.g. flicking to email/web every 5 mins. It was either get 100% wired in or don't bother trying. Concentration is partly a learned skill and being an environment of disruption is a training ground. Concentration begets concentration - if you have deep focus on a piece of work and made great progress, its much easier to get back to that state than if you have been farting around at the surface. If you have allowed yourself to indulge in "semi-work" then you are not like a rested athlete but an unfit one - you will have to train yourself back up to high-productivity. The really tough environments have been temperature extremes (your mind/body just stops functioning), noise at the truly headache inducing level (sitting 10m away from a drive-train rig the size of an Olympic swimming pool) but the worst of all for me is emotional noise e.g. people bickering. Trapped in a small office with unpleasant people is where I say "never again".

nzjrs 10y ago
Good point. I agree that concentration is a learned skill. We should recognise that the same self discipline stopping oneself from checking reddit every 5 seconds is closely related to the ability to retain concentration.
richardw 10y ago
What's possible is that while you were essentially forced to learn to concentrate (and therefore developed the skill), many don't know they have to learn. They're semi-interested in the events around them, don't know it's a problem and don't know the solution is to develop the necessary skills. Chitchat in an open room filled with developers and their challenges is different to the drone of a loud machine, or chatter of factory workers whose interests might not overlap with yours. It's a bit like having the internet at your fingers - far too easy to be distracted by interesting chatter.
heisenbit 10y ago
Noise may be disturbing but I can filter that out. I have a lot more problems with stuff that raises to the level of my consciousness and triggers processing there. Words like build or defect, grunts by known users/testers of my code, a manager mentioning aspects of the schedule or features that may have implications on code or architecture.
- jfoutz 10y ago
  This is a good point. For me fairly random, non threatening noise and activity isn't that distracting. The hallway example was good. When you work across the hall from someone for a couple of years, a sigh can be distracting.
- ChoHag 10y ago
  Why do these things need your attention now, even before it has been explicitly requested?
  - nitrogen 10y ago
    Because your subconscious brain said so. The vast majority of processing done by the brain, auditory or otherwise, is on a subconscious level with the ability to raise a priority interrupt.
    - ChoHag 10y ago
      Your subconscious should work for you, not the other way around. If it's requesting attention that's not needed, it's faulty and should be fixed.
      - depr 10y ago
        what the fuck
        ChoHag 10y ago
        If your subconscious is triggering on things you don't want it trigging on, it's a liability not an asset. Your OWN BRAIN is a LIABILITY. People are OK with that? If your brain is not working right it should be retrained so that it is. This site is supposed to be full of programmers and engineers. How the fuck can anyone in here not know how to reprogramme their own brain?
raverbashing 10y ago
I've done some "high pressure" development as well (not as bad places as these - the excess noise levels would have killed my productivity) While pressure helps and you won't sweat the small stuff, at some point you just wanted some peace and quiet and think about the problem
reitanqild 10y ago
Different strokes for different folks. I hate slacking at work. Actually don't count it towards my hours unless it is compile time or reading something useful (biggest trap for me). Yet what helps me is just removing 1. the interruptions (noise is OK) and ideally 2. the risk of interruptions. 1. helps me concentrate eventually. 2. helps me concentrate almost immediately. So, no, privacy won't make me slack of and browse HN, that is what I do when I cannot do anything else but want to be in front of my PC anyway.
eellpp 10y ago
> I think I did some of my best work when assigned a desk essentially in a corridor ... > .. but the worst of all for me is emotional noise e.g. people bickering. Trapped in a small office with unpleasant people .. There lies the problem. If its some unrelated people discussing stuff that doesn't interest us then its just background noise and get filtered out. But in office space it is exactly the opposite. You sit around with people who are doing similar work and most often what they discuss is directly or indirectly related to you/your-work. This is a problem. Another thing i notice is that concentration is multi stage process. Sometimes when you are between something then its easy to get into the zone. But at times when doing some meta thinking, analysing where your thought process is correct or when trying to get grasp over a difficult problem, where again you have do analyse your thinking, it requires conscious effort to stay focused. If the environment is conducive then it becomes that much easier.
- gbin 10y ago
  Exactly! I can work all day long in coffee shop, but an open space is pure torture to me.
  - joezydeco 10y ago
    The distinction, and this is why offices are important to me, is that in a coffee shop you can 99% expect that nobody is going to come up to you and bother you. In an open plan, that expectation is nearly 0%. Even if you're wearing headphones and wrap yourself in custom made police tape labelled GO AWAY, someone will still come up to your field of vision and poke you in the shoulder.
    - chrisbennet 10y ago
      A friend of mine has a sign on the back of his chair that say something like "Please do not disturb me when I'm wearing headphones." and people still disturb him because it is easier than emailing him. His manager told him that he's "unapproachable". LOL!
      - 10y ago
JoachimS 10y ago
I enjoy coding at airports. Headphones jacked in, sitting on a bench with people around is surprisingly good for focused work.
JoachimS 10y ago
I enjoy coding at airports. Headphones jacked in, sitting on a bench with people around is surprisingly good for focused work.
viruwruin 10y ago
Has any study been done on noise-profiles ? The office I program in now is kinda quiet, but not quite. There's a someone who plays with something that makes a random clicking sound and another person who snorts their phlegm backwards up their nose and another who constantly snacks. This near-silence but with very annoying sounds at random intervals I find very difficult to filter. On the other hand I can program just fine in a noisy cafe or a building site (which I have done).
exceptione 10y ago
For the managers reading this thread: just because some people can stand the noise and the distractions shouldn't mean it's safe to opt for a henhouse floorplan. There is a significant number of people (probably even more so in software development) whose noise filtering is broken on a hardware level. They CANNOT learn to filter better. If you have a noisy environment, you probably shouldn't hire people with ASD/AD(H)D for example.
- tzakrajs 10y ago
  The reason managers want this is because they dont know how to tell their employees are actually working so if they see the employee in the office, then they feel better. Sad but true.
  - closeparen 10y ago
    This has "truthiness" but I doubt it. Engineering managers at big tech companies (which are so fond of open office spaces) tend to be former engineers. Pointy-haired bosses who can't tell what their reports are doing are more of a hallmark of cube farms than open offices.
    - tzakrajs 10y ago
      I think it comes down more to them not knowing exactly when the sausage is made. They can agree if the sausage is good or not when it comes out of the factory, but what happens in the middle is less clear. The thinking goes, "code gets output typically when this person sits at this desk, and so when I don't see them sitting at this desk, they probably aren't outputting code."
- tzakrajs 10y ago
  I have ADD and work in an open floor plan hell hole. Google is great for most things, but the open floor plan is killing my experience the most because of my condition. They dont really care because they have too many employees to afford switching from open floor plan now.
dwc 10y ago
There are disciplines that have been teaching concentration for hundreds of years that produce people who can concentrate at will under pretty much any circumstance. To teach beginners they choose a very quiet, distraction-free environment. Your advice seems to advocate throwing people into the deep end and taking a sink or swim approach. Train people to concentrate until it's something that's familiar and available to them on demand, and then they can do it in the face of distraction. That you managed to make it work the way you did is great. Some people may have much more trouble than you did in similar circumstances.
- sdrinf 10y ago
  > There are disciplines that have been teaching concentration for hundreds of years that produce people who can concentrate at will under pretty much any circumstance. To teach beginners they choose a very quiet, distraction-free environment. Can you point at specific resources (name of the discipline, quintessential book about subject) for learning how to practice deep concentration, even in the face of very suboptimal environments?
  - delluminatus 10y ago
    Zen Buddhism is a classic example.
  - dwc 10y ago
    As delluminatus says, Buddhism. Zen, Vipassana, and others teach concentration as a tool (not the end goal). There are many, many books. See Mindfulness in Plain English[1] for a good one that's available to read free online. 1. http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html and more directly http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe1-4.html http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe1-4.html
    - 819238129 10y ago
      What is the intellectual output of Buddhism apart from religion and a couple of witty Koans? Meditation is something different -- actually I find it has adverse effects on critical thinking. The only thing that works for me is (courtesy Feynman): 1) State the problem. 2) Think hard. 3) Write down the solution. I cannot do these steps for programming or math in "any environment". I could write Koans though.
ChoHag 10y ago
That was indeed the only thing I decided I didn't want to allow myself to put up with.
inimino 10y ago
This thread may not be the place for it, but I'm intrigued to know what kind of career includes such a variety of conditions!
- vidanay 10y ago
  There's a TON of industrial programming that is leaps and bounds beyond CRUD applications. I develop machine vision applications, and although my days of programming in the field are behind me, I have seen many similar environments over the last 15 years.
ryanmarsh 10y ago
People have differing levels of ability to focus with auditory disruption.

nzjrs 10y ago

Good point. I agree that concentration is a learned skill. We should recognise that the same self discipline stopping oneself from checking reddit every 5 seconds is closely related to the ability to retain concentration.

richardw 10y ago

What's possible is that while you were essentially forced to learn to concentrate (and therefore developed the skill), many don't know they have to learn. They're semi-interested in the events around them, don't know it's a problem and don't know the solution is to develop the necessary skills. Chitchat in an open room filled with developers and their challenges is different to the drone of a loud machine, or chatter of factory workers whose interests might not overlap with yours. It's a bit like having the internet at your fingers - far too easy to be distracted by interesting chatter.

heisenbit 10y ago

Noise may be disturbing but I can filter that out. I have a lot more problems with stuff that raises to the level of my consciousness and triggers processing there. Words like build or defect, grunts by known users/testers of my code, a manager mentioning aspects of the schedule or features that may have implications on code or architecture.

jfoutz 10y ago
This is a good point. For me fairly random, non threatening noise and activity isn't that distracting. The hallway example was good. When you work across the hall from someone for a couple of years, a sigh can be distracting.
ChoHag 10y ago
Why do these things need your attention now, even before it has been explicitly requested?
- nitrogen 10y ago
  Because your subconscious brain said so. The vast majority of processing done by the brain, auditory or otherwise, is on a subconscious level with the ability to raise a priority interrupt.
  - ChoHag 10y ago
    Your subconscious should work for you, not the other way around. If it's requesting attention that's not needed, it's faulty and should be fixed.
    - depr 10y ago
      what the fuck
      - ChoHag 10y ago
        If your subconscious is triggering on things you don't want it trigging on, it's a liability not an asset. Your OWN BRAIN is a LIABILITY. People are OK with that? If your brain is not working right it should be retrained so that it is. This site is supposed to be full of programmers and engineers. How the fuck can anyone in here not know how to reprogramme their own brain?

raverbashing 10y ago

I've done some "high pressure" development as well (not as bad places as these - the excess noise levels would have killed my productivity) While pressure helps and you won't sweat the small stuff, at some point you just wanted some peace and quiet and think about the problem

reitanqild 10y ago

Different strokes for different folks. I hate slacking at work. Actually don't count it towards my hours unless it is compile time or reading something useful (biggest trap for me). Yet what helps me is just removing 1. the interruptions (noise is OK) and ideally 2. the risk of interruptions. 1. helps me concentrate eventually. 2. helps me concentrate almost immediately. So, no, privacy won't make me slack of and browse HN, that is what I do when I cannot do anything else but want to be in front of my PC anyway.

eellpp 10y ago

> I think I did some of my best work when assigned a desk essentially in a corridor ... > .. but the worst of all for me is emotional noise e.g. people bickering. Trapped in a small office with unpleasant people .. There lies the problem. If its some unrelated people discussing stuff that doesn't interest us then its just background noise and get filtered out. But in office space it is exactly the opposite. You sit around with people who are doing similar work and most often what they discuss is directly or indirectly related to you/your-work. This is a problem. Another thing i notice is that concentration is multi stage process. Sometimes when you are between something then its easy to get into the zone. But at times when doing some meta thinking, analysing where your thought process is correct or when trying to get grasp over a difficult problem, where again you have do analyse your thinking, it requires conscious effort to stay focused. If the environment is conducive then it becomes that much easier.

gbin 10y ago
Exactly! I can work all day long in coffee shop, but an open space is pure torture to me.
- joezydeco 10y ago
  The distinction, and this is why offices are important to me, is that in a coffee shop you can 99% expect that nobody is going to come up to you and bother you. In an open plan, that expectation is nearly 0%. Even if you're wearing headphones and wrap yourself in custom made police tape labelled GO AWAY, someone will still come up to your field of vision and poke you in the shoulder.
  - chrisbennet 10y ago
    A friend of mine has a sign on the back of his chair that say something like "Please do not disturb me when I'm wearing headphones." and people still disturb him because it is easier than emailing him. His manager told him that he's "unapproachable". LOL!
    - 10y ago

JoachimS 10y ago

I enjoy coding at airports. Headphones jacked in, sitting on a bench with people around is surprisingly good for focused work.

JoachimS 10y ago

I enjoy coding at airports. Headphones jacked in, sitting on a bench with people around is surprisingly good for focused work.

viruwruin 10y ago

Has any study been done on noise-profiles ? The office I program in now is kinda quiet, but not quite. There's a someone who plays with something that makes a random clicking sound and another person who snorts their phlegm backwards up their nose and another who constantly snacks. This near-silence but with very annoying sounds at random intervals I find very difficult to filter. On the other hand I can program just fine in a noisy cafe or a building site (which I have done).

exceptione 10y ago

For the managers reading this thread: just because some people can stand the noise and the distractions shouldn't mean it's safe to opt for a henhouse floorplan. There is a significant number of people (probably even more so in software development) whose noise filtering is broken on a hardware level. They CANNOT learn to filter better. If you have a noisy environment, you probably shouldn't hire people with ASD/AD(H)D for example.

tzakrajs 10y ago
The reason managers want this is because they dont know how to tell their employees are actually working so if they see the employee in the office, then they feel better. Sad but true.
- closeparen 10y ago
  This has "truthiness" but I doubt it. Engineering managers at big tech companies (which are so fond of open office spaces) tend to be former engineers. Pointy-haired bosses who can't tell what their reports are doing are more of a hallmark of cube farms than open offices.
  - tzakrajs 10y ago
    I think it comes down more to them not knowing exactly when the sausage is made. They can agree if the sausage is good or not when it comes out of the factory, but what happens in the middle is less clear. The thinking goes, "code gets output typically when this person sits at this desk, and so when I don't see them sitting at this desk, they probably aren't outputting code."
tzakrajs 10y ago
I have ADD and work in an open floor plan hell hole. Google is great for most things, but the open floor plan is killing my experience the most because of my condition. They dont really care because they have too many employees to afford switching from open floor plan now.

dwc 10y ago

There are disciplines that have been teaching concentration for hundreds of years that produce people who can concentrate at will under pretty much any circumstance. To teach beginners they choose a very quiet, distraction-free environment. Your advice seems to advocate throwing people into the deep end and taking a sink or swim approach. Train people to concentrate until it's something that's familiar and available to them on demand, and then they can do it in the face of distraction. That you managed to make it work the way you did is great. Some people may have much more trouble than you did in similar circumstances.

sdrinf 10y ago
> There are disciplines that have been teaching concentration for hundreds of years that produce people who can concentrate at will under pretty much any circumstance. To teach beginners they choose a very quiet, distraction-free environment. Can you point at specific resources (name of the discipline, quintessential book about subject) for learning how to practice deep concentration, even in the face of very suboptimal environments?
- delluminatus 10y ago
  Zen Buddhism is a classic example.
- dwc 10y ago
  As delluminatus says, Buddhism. Zen, Vipassana, and others teach concentration as a tool (not the end goal). There are many, many books. See Mindfulness in Plain English[1] for a good one that's available to read free online. 1. http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html and more directly http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe1-4.html http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe1-4.html
  - 819238129 10y ago
    What is the intellectual output of Buddhism apart from religion and a couple of witty Koans? Meditation is something different -- actually I find it has adverse effects on critical thinking. The only thing that works for me is (courtesy Feynman): 1) State the problem. 2) Think hard. 3) Write down the solution. I cannot do these steps for programming or math in "any environment". I could write Koans though.

ChoHag 10y ago

That was indeed the only thing I decided I didn't want to allow myself to put up with.

inimino 10y ago

This thread may not be the place for it, but I'm intrigued to know what kind of career includes such a variety of conditions!

vidanay 10y ago
There's a TON of industrial programming that is leaps and bounds beyond CRUD applications. I develop machine vision applications, and although my days of programming in the field are behind me, I have seen many similar environments over the last 15 years.

ryanmarsh 10y ago

People have differing levels of ability to focus with auditory disruption.