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Did anybody else here ever work in the Tea Rooms in Shoreditch, London? Or any of those "incubators" around the A10 "Silicon Roundabout"? It was a massive ware
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
Did anybody else here ever work in the Tea Rooms in Shoreditch,
London? Or any of those "incubators" around the A10 "Silicon
Roundabout"? It was a massive warehouse and popular low rent facility
filled with startups circa 2010. You could rent anything from a desk
to a whole floor.
Only one problem. Constant construction noise! Hammering, drilling,
sawing, cranes and trucks moving. Shoreditch was a trendy place for
tech companies at the time because the whole area was under
gentrification. Every coder in that building had ear-buds in and
blotted-out the din with louder music. For management meetings we had
to go find a basement coffee shop.
I met a guy called Julian Treasure and we did some projects on sound
management in public spaces. He wrote some stuff about the impact of
noise on productivity and quality. The background research looked bona
fide. It will scare you.
After that I realised that every single line of code produced in the
companies I was around at that time was probably broken. When I tried
talking about this to other founders and managers people basically
shrugged.
It may be that "work from home", where you have more control over your
acoustic world, may be the best thing to ever happen to code quality.
- wizofaus 4y agoThat's surely worthy of more serious scientific study. It definitely wouldn't surprise me to see a strong correlation between code quality/ correctness and background distractions (not just audio) at the time of it being written. Or at least between the rate of correct code output and level of distraction. Personally I very rarely find any benefit to having music playing while coding, unless it's to block out other sounds I can't avoid. Whatever increase in immediate enjoyment there might be would be quickly canceled out by the realization I'm not focused 100% on the task at hand and making silly mistakes/taking too long over it.