About to say the same thing! I'm sure there are some people who use a mechnical keyboard to "show off", but for me (and I assume the vast majority) the noise you endure is pollution while I enjoy the tactile & audio dopamine hit.
I have these, for an office. Yes they are silent if you slowly push and release a key, but thumping away at 50-60 wpm still makes a huge amount of noise, even with o-rings installed (although a lot quieter than blue switches which I used to have).
I have topre switches, so a bit different experience, but a friend of mine had "shown off" that indeed, you can type silently on them. It's the art of not bottoming out which is something like 90% of the noise.
There are some silent, tactile switches, but I think they're a bit more obscure.
I made my ergonomic, split keyboards from a kit[1], and chose Aliaz Silent switches [2]. It's around the same noisiness as everyone else's keyboard (Apple, cheap Dell one etc).
(There are almost certainly other options — the choice was a bit overwhelming when I decided to buy a DIY keyboard — but I'm not in the hobby of collecting many different keyboards. Various Reddit groups can advise.)
Linear switches are basically already silent compared to tactile or clicky switches. If Cherry starts making quiet blues or clears I'll start getting excited.
Honestly the biggest source of noise for basically all mechanical keys except buckling spring or cherry-blue style keys is the noise of the keycap or key stem hitting the bottom and subsequently the top of travel. Half of that is fixable with o-rings but that still leaves the noise at the top of travel which doesn't currently have any solutions as far as I know.
Install a triggered directed boombox emitting a loud 'BANG' on registering that spacebar sound. Make it trigger only 35% of the time and with a variable 0-5 sec delay. I bet he stops using that spacebar by the end of the first day.
I'm going to make the guess that you meant "True" in the "no true scotsman" way of passing off outsiders.
Personally I find this kind dismissive commentary a little bit aggravating.
In my mind you're a "true" geek if you unashamedly enjoy the technicalities of something.
from Dungeons and Dragons to Train design.
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The parent is also a little distasteful. If you don't like the noise of a mechanical keyboard consult your manager; the issue is with poor sound isolation not with mechanical keyboards. Typewriters were a thing for many decades and people managed.
Keyboards might be a preference but the fact is that we're all human and we have our "sound vices"; whether it be being too loud when chewing or yelling into a mic mere inches away from your face all the way to nervously clicking your tongue when lost in thought.
Don't excuse those who have designed offices to be very poor w.r.t. sound isolation by blaming those who dare make noise.
> Typewriters were a thing for many decades and people managed.
Perhaps you weren't there. When typewriters were commonly used they were typically in the typing pool or in the secretary's own office and the noise didn't impinge on the rest of us. Of course it was different in offices where the principal activity was typing such as newspapers.
From '78 to '82 I worked as an electronics engineer in an open plan office that was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. None of us typed, instead we scrawled our documentation longhand and the department secretary typed it on an IBM Selectric in her own office next to the department manager's office. It sounds inefficient but in fact was not because revising documents was so time consuming that more effort went into keeping things simple and as far as practicable right first time.
If someone had made a lot of noise it would have been pointless complaining about the design of the office, the only practical remedy would be for them to stop being noisy.
Did you really turn that offhand comment into a rant about geek gatekeeping?
I started working in an era when electric typewriters were still common. They certainly were not used in the common areas in any place I worked because of the noise.
Just to be clear, if you make a ton of noise in a common environment it’s your job to find a way to reduce your impact. If we have to go to the manager to make you change your ways ... well that answers the AITA.
Two of my work places did. Others just had a layout where the people who typed were kept away from other employees, like small set of typing cubicles in the open area surrounded by offices or cubicles at the far end of the open area with an open space between typists and others.
One of my workplaces was a mainframe shop, some of the older devs still programmed their cobol/fortran iv code on sheets and took it to the data entry pool in another wing for input.
I wouldn't call them distasteful, just low-effort humorous posts.
I recall a story about a developer who brought his mechanical keyboard to a job interview, to check if it is acceptable to other people in the office. That's quite considerable gesture.
Come on, relax a bit! A little bit of humor is important, especially in these times. It's all for fun, none of the parents really meant being dismissive etc. We all need to cheer up a bit otherwise we'll get crazy!
Geek is someone that has a special interest that goes up and beyond what is usual [1]. So a tree geek is someone that knows a lot about trees. Or there was a typo that was supposed to be "true" but I'm sure you know this already :-)
I had a coworker who insisted on mechanical keyboards and dvorak because it's more efficient (according to him). This guy was the most unproductive programmer I've ever known, you'd hardly hear his keyboard anyway.
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.
The presentation of this one is definitely more beautiful thant this one[0], that a friend of mine shared a days ago. The latter has more options and is more customizable tho.
I came in here to mention myNoise too. I use it all the time for noise masking. The office noise generator isn't my thing, but there are numerous other sounds to choose from--white/brown/grey noise, rain, ocean waves, a purring cat, space(ship) sounds, and all kinds of other stuff.
I don't know, the one you just posted is more "beautiful" to me. It's easy to control, the UI is intuitive (it took me a bit to understand the OP), and the sounds are both higher fidelity and more accurate. None of the noises in OP were ones that are regularly in my large (20-30 people) open office, while this link you've shared is significantly closer.
Upvote for mynoise.net. This is a more accurate representation, in my opinion. They have a lot of high quality sounds, and we play the baby shush sounds for our infant almost everyday.
I did the same thing, a week-ago. The interface may be more spartan; all the efforts have been put in the sounds themselves. These sounds have been carefully designed to put the listener in the focus zone, for those who associate the noise of their office with focus (everyone is different; most people actually want to block open office sounds... but a minority is actually missing them, when their environment is too quiet).
At my current workplace (we're 100% remote these days), we've instituted daily non-compulsory coffee meetings on Zoom, for the purpose of talking about something other than work and fostering random conversations.
I always work with noise cancelling headphones and got so used to them that I now have to wear them at home as well as they help me to concentrate. Even though it's silent in here.
https://www.ambient-mixer.com/ has a ton of these types of background noises. All the sounds can be individually leveled and you can easily create your own from their audio library.
Maybe it's a white noise generator? Several (maybe all?) of my past offices have had white noise generators. One never notices them, but when they are off then suddenly one notices their absence.
I seriously hate open plan. Which turkey came up with that idea?
I became one of the ahole's at one small office when I opened a brie and ate it at my desk. The guy next to me said that cheese made him vomit. Did he want me throw my brie away? I kept on eating but never brought in cheese again. That guy never said a word to me again :-(
Constantly having to be careful not to disturb others with little, normal things actually is one of the things I hate about open-plan offices. I think the stress and inconvenience of that is underrated compared with the being-annoyed aspect.