
Ask HN: How quiet is your startup office? - pdenya
We&#x27;re 10 people or so and it&#x27;s incredibly quiet here a lot of the time, just traffic sounds from outside, keyboard tapping and mouse clicking.
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sbarg
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.

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cprncus
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).

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pasbesoin
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.

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thenerdfiles
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.

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AtTheLast
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.

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chourobin
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.

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meerita
I'm a big ad agency. Silence is impossible to find, unless you start working
at 7PM. Everyone here uses headphones.

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simplyy
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.

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mattrock23
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.

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mattewilliams
I work on a 10 person team. We're in a coworking space that is incredibly loud

Nothing some noise-cancelling headphones and white noise can't fix :)

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aiurtourist
Pretty quiet in the mornings, but past 4pm or so we (10 of us) usually put on
the speakers and start listening to Pandora.

