Just shut up and let your devs concentrate, advises Joel Spolsky
Just as a different counter point, I have coded in lots of environments including factory floors full of thundering industrial equipment and in the Gobi desert using a noisy smelly diesel generator as a power source etc.I think I did some of my best work when assigned a desk essentially in a corridor. A constant stream of people behind me, no privacy, noise etc. There was no half-concentration which privacy can encourage e.g. flicking to email/web every 5 mins. It was either get 100% wired in or don't bother trying. Concentration is partly a learned skill and being an environment of disruption is a training ground. Concentration begets concentration - if you have deep focus on a piece of work and made great progress, its much easier to get back to that state than if you have been farting around at the surface. If you have allowed yourself to indulge in "semi-work" then you are not like a rested athlete but an unfit one - you will have to train yourself back up to high-productivity.The really tough environments have been temperature extremes (your mind/body just stops functioning), noise at the truly headache inducing level (sitting 10m away from a drive-train rig the size of an Olympic swimming pool) but the worst of all for me is emotional noise e.g. people bickering. Trapped in a small office with unpleasant people is where I say "never again".