You Should Code in Silence🤫

Why Music is a Developer’s Worst Friend

Many of the developers I work with listen to music. It turns out they’re not alone, and around three-quarters of software developers listen to music while coding.

I’m not one of them. I often have headphones on in the rare occasions that I go to the office — and they just have the noise cancellation but I’m not listening to music. That’s despite evidence that preferred background music can enhance task-focused attentional states. Music is for exercise only.

Let me explain.

The Great Myth of Music and Coding

There’s a prevailing myth in the developer world that music somehow elevates your coding game. You’ve probably seen it yourself — the quiet coder lost in deep concentration, headphones on, music blasting, as they power through complex algorithms like a productivity god.

That’s nonsense.

Studies that show a link between concentration and music have so many conditions attached. You would need to have music that isn’t too high in intensity because that would be distracting.

That’s a world away from my colleagues, and I can tell you they’re listening to intense music because you can hear those block rockin’ beats leaking from their headphones across the office. I can hear them, because I embraced the calm of silence and concentration to aid my programming skills.

Silence Should Be Your Friend

Once I ditched the music, I noticed an immediate difference. I could focus on what is going around me.

It’s more than that. When a colleague wants to mention something, I hear them. When someone (my editor) creeps up behind me I hear them coming.

To gain most of these benefits you don’t need complete silence. You do need something that doesn’t self-sabotage your performance and actually helps you to create those clean pull requests. 

Don’t take my word for it. Read the evidence that shows silence is golden, and actually causes the brain to produce new neurons. 

Silence is never going to be sexy, but delivering code riddled with bugs and logical errors isn’t either. When you’re fully focused on a task it’s easier to get things done. When your work environment is silent you’re more likely to enter a flow state than in a world full of including distractions such as music. Focus, concentrate and your productivity will skyrocket.

The Evidence

You might have noticed that I gave a link at the beginning of the article. This one. I noted that preferred background music can enhance task-focused attentional states. This is true, but I left out the most important part of the study, and the part I left out explains why I don’t use music at work.

“preferred background music can enhance task-focused attentional states on a low-demanding sustained-attention task”

When I’m at work (at least when I’m doing a good job) I’m working on high-demand work. That means music is an unwelcome distraction.

Conclusion

Next time you sit down to code, resist the urge to hit play on that favorite playlist. 

Try working in silence, or at the very least, with some calming, non-distracting background noise. Your future code reviews (and your teammates) will thank you.