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Comment by overcast | Hacker News Reader

My office has white noise generators to drown out the open office layout conversations. So I wear noise cancelling headphones, to cancel the white noise generators. It's insane, but keeps my sanity. Otherwise, it's like you're on an airplane all day.

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I'm in the exact same boat as you in my office. Who the hell designs an office space that requires static noise blasted 24 hours a day to drown conversations out?

It's interesting how different people can fall on the noise spectrum. For contrast, I go out of my way to add more white noise to my environment when in an open office. The quite hum of my air conditioner's fan in my home office is something that helps me concentrate when working.

Can you please elaborate on the reasoning your company gave for such a wild idea? Have any of your coworkers commented on this? Is this some sort of trend to compensate for poor office planning? I thought the point of open plans was to reduce hardware costs, not introduce more equipment! You are right, that is absolutely insane

Yes, many have, unfortunately it's a matter of certain members of management wanting it. So therefore it is.

Not OP, but my office has it. And yes, it is insane and is a result of poor office planning. Unfortunately, I can't elaborate because they did not give any reasoning.

Sounds like it's trading the default form of open office plan insanity for another.

What????

Most commercial office spaces play white noise like this, called sound masking [1].

From HBR [2]:

> 3. Mask the sound by increasing background noise. It seems counter-intuitive, but adding more sound to an environment can actually make it seem quieter. Research suggests that noise itself isn’t distracting, but unwanted speech noise is. However, words that are incomprehensible are less likely to be distracting. By adding a continuous, low-level ambient sound to an environment (such as white noise, which sounds similar to the sound of airflow), sound masking can help make conversations for listeners that aren’t intended to hear them unintelligible, and therefore much easier to ignore.

It also raises the interesting point as to why I find it so easy to work at coffee shops in foreign countries.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_masking

[2]: https://hbr.org/2015/03/stop-noise-from-ruining-your-open-of...

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