> 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.
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!