Stap into any office? It’s full of random people, and it’s full of noise. I’ve not seen places where the knowledge work wasn’t set together with the noisemakers.

I feel a lot of the noise complaints are due to open plan offices.

I've worked at a cubicle farm before. Partitions were high enough to avoid being able to see people in a sitting position, but high enough that you can still stand up and ask your neighbor a question. The cubicles were spaceous, had ample desk space and didn't feel claustrophobic or "caged in" at all. If anything, it felt like I had my own little space that I was in control of.

The partitions had steel sheets in them to allow people to use magnets to hang up documents/whatever. My cubicle walls were covered in [documents and datasheets](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNzIxZmIzYjEtZGMyZi00...). Some of my colleagues had extensively decorated their cubicles with photos and tchotchkes. Others had their entire desk space littered with PCBs and tools.

Managers got cubicles on the sides of the building with windows, theirs were larger and had higher partitions, with a window filling in that extra height.

The extra desk space was great. I worked as an embedded SWE and I often needed the space for tools and the devices I was working on. The few times I needed an oscilloscope, I could easily find room for it, no need to move my setup to a lab.

Cubicles get a bad rep. It's actually quite a nice way to work, if executed properly, that is.

That said, I did have noise issues before. But that was always the same colleague. She luckily only came in on Wednesdays. She totally lacked the concept of an indoor voice while on the telephone.

I'm old enough to remember having an individual office (and, a bit later, two-person offices). Great for collaboration, because it had a whiteboard and enough space/furniture for a few people to huddle, and for focused individual work, and for meetings with remote people without disrupting anyone and without taking up a meeting room. Nowadays we have unforced poor conditions and outcomes, mostly for pretend savings on facilities.

And, of course, serendipitous collaboration rarely happens when everyone is sitting with noise cancelling headphones, focusing on hitting their ambitious individual goals for the quarter/half/year.

Booking.com had low-noise offices back in the late 2010s. Engineering, product, design. Nobody taking calls on their desk, that was rude. All meetings in well-isolated rooms, some well placed noise barriers. It was pretty quiet even in an open office floor with 400 people.

Yes!!! Before the pandemic we had an it floor that was quiet. Now we sit next to loudmouth sales goons barking into the phone all day. Ugh

Beens stepping into various offices most of the past 25 years and have not noticed that.

You sound like a parody of a librarian.