For realism, it should integrate people making their calls in the open space, the guy right next to you chewing loudly with an open mouth, the heated design debate occuring 3 desks from you and the salespeople celebrating their bonus with a lot of volume.
> salespeople celebrating their bonus with a lot of volume
This.
The most (and least) challenging office I've ever worked in featured a large open plan that had the sales team adjacent to the engineering team. The sales team had a large ship's bell and not only would they ring it for every deal they closed, they would ring it once for every 10k of the deal! That plus they're general loudness drove the engineers crazy.
First they gave us all noise cancelling head phones but that didn't really help.
Finally they moved engineering to another office location down the street. Everything changed when we made the new space our own. Still an open plan but with plenty of cozy corners to sit with a laptop and a few well insulated meeting rooms for loud discussions. The big change tho was the atmosphere: nice and quiet!
What kind of tone-deaf person made the original suggestion to colocate sales and engineering?!?! I prefer cubicles myself (or individual offices, but let's be realistic). But I can survive in an open floorplan provided it's reasonably quiet.
Salespeople in my org have always been in a separate, though adjacent, building. I never knew that their noisy celebrations were a thing until I had to get on a same bus as some of them on 31st of a month.
The jubilation of those who had made the target... MY GOD!!
I had an internship in an investment company, the devs were in the same open space as the traders… At least it calmed down once the market were closed.
> integrate people making their calls in the open space
This could be done in a community/collaborative fashion, where the website allows people that are talking/having calls can connect to the website to share their noise with the people who need the noise in the background. Website would automatically adjust the volume based on the distance parameter you set.
How am I supposed to work without the guy next to me chewing the egg he just cracked with his mouth open, the guy behind me crunching chips and audibly burping, and the sales guy with a bluetooth earpiece and mechanical keyboard!?
Hey Dijit - are you sure? I've been to your "war room" a few times and it's like a crypt in there most of the time, you could hear a pin drop so to speak. Unless you mean some other area ;-)
Everyone has a mechanical keyboard, and often 4-5 people are on skype calls. Some people are very loud when talking through the mic and they speak louder the more people are talking. It leads to a really obscene amplification of volume pretty quickly and tends to last until the lunch or the end of the day. But yes, I think you've seen my war room then :D
I think that's insane, but I also don't have a space to do any kind of workout at the office. When most people are gone for the day I try and use one of the empty meeting rooms for a few stretches and push-ups.
Someone that I used to work with had a ringtone of a dog barking, he would leave the phone on his desk when doing stuff elsewhere in the building and his wife would call him several times a day.
I used to have the 56K dial up ringtone for a while. I just went back to muting my ringer since I used to get weird stares constantly.
I recently had to change my ringtone because every dev in our office has the standard iphone ringtone so anytime someone's phone rings, you can hear everybody go to pick their phones up.
You know if the person uses a traditional phone ringtone that they're of the older echelons
Edit: a (traditional rotary phone) ringtone, not a "basic" ringtone. Though I'm satisfied with the stock choices of the recent Android phones, they start slowly and are not overwhelming.
All these things resonate with me. Brings back near murderous rage when I remember the colleagues hammering their shitty chunky keyboards, slurping tea and slamming the cup down, talking with a mouth full of food, sneezing so loud I can't believe they aren't deliberately doing it for attention, laughing so loud it must be forced, at non funny stuff, presumably to show everyone how in on some joke they are... I could go on and on. But I always thought I was the only person in my office bothered by it, as no one else seemed to notice, whereas I would be visibly annoyed. Maybe others are just good at hiding their frustration. I don't miss the office at all either.
now all we need is the ability to generate smells on demand to experience the burnt popcorn and two pack a day smoker whose jacket has experience forty years of it
It does do that. Maybe it changed since the link was posted but if you click the shapes/people they make noise. And the constant hum in the background is partly computers, partly AC ducts.
I do not miss the office.