Music for the programmer
Tags: msuci
Published: 2022-03-10 15:37:15

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I walk into the office, go up to the third floor, and walk up to Zhenya, who looks like a bunny. To hear me, he pulls an earpiece out of his ear, and I hear some wild bellowing and bone-crushing screaming coming out of the little speaker! Oh, looks can be deceiving.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">If you look around, you can see that most of the people here are wearing headphones. I wondered what our developers were listening to and why, and whether it was interfering with their work.</span></p>
<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">My Vietnamese flashbacks about music at work</span></h2>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In one of my former jobs, we almost went so far as to ban music in the workplace.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The main indicator of the quality of our work was error-free data entry into the system: numbers, letters, personal data. In short, we were tellers: one monitor had a scan of a document, the other monitor had SAP, where you entered the data. Mistakes were fraught with incorrect accruals of wages, vacations, business trips, and so on.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As it happens nowadays, we were in a gigantic open space, where a mouse farted at one end of the floor, but an echo could reach the other. There were a lot of mistakes in my work. Bosses were actively thinking of ways to level out the bugs. The decision did not take long: to eliminate all sources of noise. The noise was recognized as the main terrorist, and all noise subspecies (conversations, knocking heels, loudly clicking on the keyboard, etc.) its faithful associates.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">A couple of months passed, the appointed event was not successful - people continued to make mistakes while performing their work tasks. Then the steely guiding hand took a swing at the sacred thing: music, which the employees listened to in their individual headphones.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We had several meetings where fate was decided.</span><a href="https://inaudio.org/"> <span style="font-weight: 400;">no copyright music</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">:</span></p>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">prohibit or keep;</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">and if you leave it, do you create a list of music you can listen to?</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Is it allowed to listen to music with words;</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Is it allowed to listen to american music, where all the words are clear.</span></li>
</ul>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">I'm not kidding and I'm not exaggerating. At about this point in the discussion, my nervous tic had reached such proportions that it was no longer possible to ignore the obvious - it was time to get out of this office. So I left.</span></p>
<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">Music and dopamine</span></h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It's a fact that music is irritating. When we listen to music, the brain irritates the nucleus accumbens (adjoining nucleus). This part of the brain is responsible for the formation of pleasure, laughter, addiction, aggression, fear, and the placebo effect.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">What happens next? Next, dopamine is produced in this nucleus. Dopamine is thought to be a joy hormone, but that's not entirely true. Dopamine is a mood hormone. Its level in the body determines whether we are happy or sad.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">If listening to music raises your dopamine levels, your mood will go up as well. The pleasure you get can make you happier and more relaxed, which is detrimental to your productivity.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">If listening to music lowers your blood dopamine levels, you will be knocked out of your work state through the other pole - a sudden rush of sleep.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">Three truths about listening to music while working</span></h2>
<ol>
<li><span style="font-weight: 400;">An enterprising group of British developers listened to millions of hours of music, tested it on their subject programmers, and drew conclusions.</span></li>
</ol>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Music for productive work should contain noise, noise, vibrations. And it should not contain rhythm, words, and drums.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Such music will put you in a working trance and hypnotize parts of your brain that might start sabotaging with attempts to distract you from your work.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">You can listen to the resulting playlists</span><a href="http://musicforprogramming.net/"> <span style="font-weight: 400;">here.</span></a></p>
<ol start="2">
<li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/10-minute-trick-to-boost-your-productivity-2016-1"><span style="font-weight: 400;">A number of studies</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> suggest that the best music for concentration is</span><a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/acp.1731"> <span style="font-weight: 400;">the absence of music</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Because consciousness (read "attention") is one resource, and by dividing it between music and work, we will inevitably lose out on the latter.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-weight: 400;"> &nbsp; </span><a href="https://blog.rescuetime.com/open-plan-office-changes/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Recent articles</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> assert that music is the only savior for productive work in the office. The brain is trying to process all the separate pieces of data in the office noise: the scattered conversations of co-workers, the slamming of doors, the sounds coming from the street.</span></li>
</ol>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">All this processing requires energy that you could use to focus on your work. The stress hormone cortisol increases and dopamine decreases. These hormonal changes negatively affect the prefrontal cortex, interfering with executive function. Performance decreases.</span></p>
<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">Alternative silence and driver work</span></h2>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Now at&nbsp;our company</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">, I see that almost everyone listens to music. After talking to many developers, I've come to the conclusion that everything is individual (&macr;\_(ツ)_/&macr;). But there are two trends</span></p>
<ol>
<li><span style="font-weight: 400;"> &nbsp; </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Music as an alternative silence.</span></li>
</ol>
<p>&nbsp;<span style="font-weight: 400;">In this case, the thesis that silence is necessary for work is confirmed. Due to the specifics of each of us nervous system + peculiarities of perception of the world today, people tend to be distracted by the rustle of a wrapper on the next table, the slamming door on the next floor, the stomp of a mouse in the next building.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;<span style="font-weight: 400;">The person is in a state of heightened sensitivity, and any sound is distracting/annoying. In such cases, music acts as an alternative silence that the person can control, unlike the sounds of the office.</span></p>
<ol start="2">
<li><span style="font-weight: 400;">Music as a driver for work: it helps to tune in, keep yourself in tone, helps to linger in the right state and just have fun during the work day.</span></li>
</ol>
<p>&nbsp;<span style="font-weight: 400;">In this case, a person needs the pace to keep up the rhythm of work. True, everyone's pace is different.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We recorded a survey among our developers and found that they work great with a variety of rhythmic shit, metal, electronica, drum &amp; bass, as well as the hits of the pop 70s.</span></p>