Poll: Programmers who work in an office. Do you listen to music? (poll)

[Bigsy]

Open plan office which has music playing, but you can add your own things to the office playlist.

We make a music app so pretty much everywhere around the office has music playing most times you get used to it so not that distracting.

 

[SkyTerran]

There was a study some time ago showing that listening to music makes programmers loose the big picture in the code they are working on. I guess people hiring developers are scared of employes spending their work time browsing, hence the popularity of open offices.

 

[Rroff]

I would actually agree with that, when I'm coding I like to either have some music on or something I've often done is have a TV show running on the other monitor* - I make a lot more progress on what I'm coding but also do get more focused on what I'm specifically working on and can lose sight of the bigger picture. Its great tho when I need to get right down into a problematic bit of code or something thats not that difficult but requires quite a lot of work to implement.



* I find mediocre US TV shows great for this, the kind of stuff thats interesting but I'm not so pulled into it I can't wait to watch the next episode i.e. arrested development.

 

[TheAlex]

I work in an open plan office and listen to music. Sometimes I'll just have the earphones in with no music to block out the noise. I used to be able to work and block anything out but that doesn't seem possible these days. I worked in a quiet room with just the other web designers/developers for 2 weeks last year and it was BLISS. I felt so much more productive, and only listened to music when I wanted to, rather than most of the time to block everything else out.