A lot of people are of the opinion that isolating yourself at work, as a developer, is a bad thing to do. Communication with your teammates is highly important, and thus, isolating yourself from your surroundings by sitting in a different or separate office or listening to your iPod is often spoken of as an inherently bad thing to do. But is it really? The way i see it, this can be a good thing, and this can be a bad thing. It pretty much depends on the type of person you are, what kind of people you work with, or what kind of environment you’re working in.
I can only speak from my own experience, but i frequently isolate myself from my coworkers and my surroundings by turning on my iPod and listening to some music while i work. I don’t do it all the time, and it definitely depends on what i’m working on, or who i’m working with. Obviously, if you’re doing pair programming then listening to your iPod is pretty much out of the question. But if you’re all sitting together, do we really need to avoid any kind of isolation? When i’m working on something complex, and i don’t really need to communicate with my teammates at that time, then there really isn’t anything wrong with listening to some music and getting some work done. In fact, it often helps me focus on my work without getting easily distracted, helps me get into a good zone, and it would certainly surprise me if i were the only one who thought that way. If you or some of your teammembers actually produce better results while they tune into their music, then this can’t really be an inherently bad thing, no?
But obviously, there will be many situations where you actually want to avoid listening to music. Sometimes you might be working on something that requires you to consult with teammates frequently, whether it is about design decisions or to ask some feedback on implications of certain implementation details. In those cases, you can end up pausing and resuming your iPod way too frequently so it might just be better to refrain from turning it on altogether. Or when you notice that teammates are discussing something and it’s taking them a bit too long. It’s hard to tell when a discussion is too long if you’re not hearing what they’re saying but when i notice 2 developers talking for more then a couple of minutes, i’ll often pause the iPod to check out what they’re talking about. Maybe you can help by offering a different perspective or maybe you know an immediate answer to the question that they’re discussing. If you can’t help, go ahead and press Play again.
The thing is… even if you do tune into some music at work, it’s important not to tune out of your coworkers completely. Go ahead and listen to your music, but keep looking around occasionally. Turn it off when you notice your teammates are talking and follow the discussion to see if it’s interesting to you or if you can help them. Conversely, if you’re participating in a discussion and you notice that one or more of your teammates is listening to music while they should probably be involved or at least hear what the conclusion or decision was, go ahead and notify them of what’s been discussed/decided/concluded. Also don’t be afraid to involve people who weren’t involved yet if you think that it might be important to them. If it turns out that it wasn’t important to them, then all you’ve lost is a few minutes. But if it was important to them, you might have saved a lot more than a few minutes by pulling them into the discussion.
As for sitting in a separate office… i’m not a fan of that. I’ve always noticed the best results are achieved when all of the developers are sitting together in the same office. In some organizations, senior developers, lead developers or ‘architects’ might be sitting in different offices from the people they’re supposed to be working with. I don’t know about you, but i’ve never actually seen that work properly. The typical on-the-floor communication that is so vital to successful teamwork is just reduced a lot of if some people are sitting in a different office. Obviously, when working with remote coworkers, this problem only increases but that’s something i haven’t really found an efficient solution for either. In some cases, communication through IM works great. And sometimes it doesn’t. It depends on how effectively you can communicate through IM, and how effectively the others can.
But anyway, when you hear people talk about how developers that isolate themselves at work is a bad thing, don’t necessarily buy into it. Like i said, it can be good or it can be bad. As with anything in our business, it all depends.