Just today my boss came to me and asked if it would be a good idea to create a private zone in our new office for developers so that they can be properly shielded from chatter and noise all around the office and work happily, productively and creatively. “YES” I said without a second thought. But the question I am thinking in my mind is far from having a room or some sort of sound absorbing materials placed around the zone developer’s working in.
Is a dedicated room for developers matters?
Or the way we let developers doing their job matters?
I say the latter. We want to be in a room because we are getting most of our job done happily and productively when we work alone.
WE ARE BEST AT WORK WHEN BEING ALONE.
A room is only one of the factors that makes this happen.
This might sounds like a statement in the favor of people who have the excellent capability and interest sitting in front of a computer all day long without speaking a word. But one one is an exception. All right, you are not a lonely guy. You might be socially active. You may be welcome by everyone. You love making new friends. You love talking to the others . You love helping the others out. You just love everybody (/hug). But the work-alone-is-the-best principle would still applies to you. Why?
Multi-tasking makes people slow and stupid, as suggested by Walter Kirn in his article “The Autumn of Multi-tasker“. It is not necessary any physical tasks to be assigned to one to cause the problem. Just anything such as chatter, phone calls, emails and instant messages that derails people’s mind can do the harm. They blow away your new ideas and short term memories, keeping you start over and over again the thinking process in order to finish the works at hand.
Experiments executed by authors of the famous book Peopleware have proven the negative relationship between productivity and office noise level. Guys at 37Signals have even suggested that you should setup a rule requiring every one in your team to work alone for a certain period of time everyday. So that every one can get his work done happily and effectively while still keeping the communication between team members.
So locking up your developers in a room will probably do good to your company. You keep these mind workers concentrated on their creation works at least with a physical mean. The bottom line is, however, you have to honor the rule of silence. If the room is nothing more than a room and developers are still getting interrupted in numerous different ways other than nearby chatter and calls, you might have been send the developers into prisons.
Believe it or not, if you lock a team of developers up in a room with computers and leave them for a sufficient long time, they will either give you a master piece of software, or a completed work of Shakespeare 
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