12 person startup, here. It's deadly quiet. Most people are in offices, they close their door for phone calls. Headphones for music is the norm. It makes me crazy, sometimes. I get a little break because I sit near the kitchen and there's a lot of chatter when people are preparing their lunches.
I've done at-home hobbyist development for five years with the neighbors from hell revving exhaust modded beater cars 20-50x/day. I'm drooling at the words "deadly quiet". (And yes I'm leaving here at some point in the next year).
Ugh. You have my sympathy. For one who "put up" with similar circumstances for far too long, I hope you won't mind my sincere advice: Get out! Staying is a downward spiral -- I know.
A coworker of mine at a previous job had an office (shared), but it was next to the break room on the floor. People would frequently walk by for coffee. I thought the microwaves (smell and beeping) would have been the most annoying in that office.
Not at a startup, but we're frontend devs in Texas who behave like Big Kids. We make our best arguments in our Little Kid Voices.
Our air is filled with whistling, idle death-threats (or our individual personalities toward hypothetical homicide of evil villains), argumentation over life-extension research, astrophysics and metaphysics, joystick/button-mashing, showtunes, random bouts of poetry, fake British/Russian/German/Australian accents, looney Tunes character revivalism, and sometimes we take our functions out back to beat them into doin' the Right Thing.
3 people in our office. We have a speaker system in the office and take turns running our personal pandora or spotify stations on it. Sometimes we crank it up and other times we have softer mellow music playing. Heck, we will even put on NPR. We all have headphones and can plug in and listen to our own music if we want.
I can't stand mouse clicking and keyboard tapping, so a little music for background noise is nice. I can also open my window and listen to the cars on the freeway.
4 person startup here. Our founders decided to bring 2 concert-sized speakers from their college days to our office. It's hooked up to an airport express and we use spotify/soundrop. At first, it didn't seem like a good idea but now I think every office should have speakers to lighten the mood.
We keep the volume pretty reasonable during work hours so you can still pop on headphones and listen to your own stuff if you wanted to.
We have about 50 people in our office. Desks are foldable tables. Seating groups are split between Product/Design, Devs, Sales and Content people. Constant chatter between product and content. Our CTO is very hands on and most people have meetings at their desks.
With that said, I have my headphones in much of the time.
6 people. Sales people are downstairs. Just me and one other developer up here. All I usually hear is the AC and the train. Come winter it'll probably get a lot quieter.
