| > If you're in a loud environment and need quiet, then communicate that to your boss. I did, on many occasions. > If they don't, then they're probably not worth wasting your skills on anyway (plenty of fish in the sea). I agree, I quit that job :) There were many reasons of course, but the distracting environment and the lack of response to honest employee feedback didn't help their case. > If I was the one developer out of 8 I think we're coming from different perspectives. If you're working with a small number of people, I totally agree that the group should be able to come to a sensible agreement (I would never demand that my 7 other co-workers act like they're in a library just to please me). My previous post was from the perspective of someone in a larger office (say... 20+ people to pick an arbitrary number) with the typical office layout (cubes, some private offices, conference rooms, break rooms). In such a situation, you're going to have more than a few people who prefer quiet when they're working. Those people are assigned a desk with little choice in the matter, and there's no viable alternative workspace for them to escape to. In this type of situation I think it's rude to intrude on a person's one and only workspace with noise, and silence (or at least low volume) should be the default. If things were perfect, everyone would get to choose how they work. But things are rarely perfect :) |