Remember Critical Thinking

For the past month-or-so I've been reading the Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (a must-read, up there along with The Mythical Man-Month), which I've enjoyed reading. The book's authors have backed up their thoughts, reasoning and advice with years of consulting experience and extensive empirical research and I admire the effort they have put into the material.

One of these advice they infer has to do with a series of tests in the 60's conducted at Cornell University, researching the effects of listening to music while doing a programming exercise in Fortran. Encouraging you to buy and read the book yourself, I'll just say that the exercise concluded that listening or not listening to music (with headphones) while programming resulted in the same speed and accuracy for the finished result. But, those who did not listen to music (in the "quiet room") noticed, more frequently than those who did listen to music, a certain deliberately hidden gotcha in the test, where the specs of the task listed some operations that canceled out the effect of others (e.g. X=A+B-C, where C=A+B). A few sentences later, the book states that listening to music might hinder the developer of having a heureka! -moment, which might save the company "months or years of work".

So, music while coding equals bad, right? Sounds fair and logical. While the analytical half of the brain does the programming, the creative side is occupied listening to music, so we shouldn't do that, then. Today, I had a small epiphany. I understood that this conclusion needs to put this into context. Before reading on, I suggest you read my description of the test once again, with thought, and then return to the next paragraph.

The company I work for lets any and all employees order reasonably priced headphones in the company's expense (a great policy, if you ask me!). After a quick browsing, I chose mine to be Sony MDR-EX85LP. They arrived earlier this week, and since I started to listening to music with them, I noticed that my productivity has shot through the roof; the project I'm working on has not been advancing all that much recently, but now I write code nearly as fast as I can type, debug other people's code in the process, write tickets and just tackle everything between me and my goal for the project.

This event lead to the aforementioned epiphany: The key factors to take notice of in the test descriptions are "same speed and accuracy" and "creativity" and that they, in fact, are separate from each other. The test assumes that you do everything while listening to music, thus the creative side takes a hit. So, what happens if you plan ahead, do some thinking about the solution while not listening to music and then pushing play on your iPod while implementing those plans? You get to listen to music and have a fair chance of finding those mutually-voiding operations.

But I mentioned that my creativity curve went vertical, and the test in the book noticed no difference. That's because I don't work in a clean-room experiment settings. The book explicitly uses the words "quiet room" for the group that didn't listen to music. A room that is quiet. How many job environments are quiet? How many coding houses have absolutely no-one in any given employee's vicinity peer-reviewing one thing, or asking the other? Well, my work place fills neither slot (which is a good thing, open communication is healthy, as long as it doesn't get overboard). Have you already checked out the earbuds I mentioned earlier? They are noise-insulating. I hear absolutely nothing of my environment when I wear the 'buds and play music, even at low volumes. I live in my own bubble, oblivious to the outside world, to the point where those who stop by to ask me a quick question think it's funny.

This is the time when I really got some work done. Our workplace is quiet, but it's too quiet. There's no droning background noise that would drown the occasional shuffle of papers, cough, sneeze, distant conversations or the tapping sound of the keyboards. While they are not disturbing , they do get me out of Zone due to their haphazardness and suddenness. These earbuds provide me a precious bubble.

Also, me not being a native English speaking person helps while listening to music containing vocals, as I don't concentrate on the words as much as other people might.

So, remember critical thinking. While something you read might have valid backups, and, in fact, does not have a single factual error, it doesn't need to reflect the practical truth. Don't believe anything at face value and question most what you read, including my writings.

Especially my writings.