I saw an interesting situation at Google many years ago. There was a "bullpen" in which 8-10 people sat. That was for my team, a bunch of pager monkeys with a

I saw an interesting situation at Google many years ago. There was a "bullpen" in which 8-10 people sat. That was for my team, a bunch of pager monkeys with a rotating on call rotation. We were operation-oriented as you would expect. Not too far away, the developers for one of our services had their desks. At least one of the ops people on my team and at least one of the devs on the other team were, well, loud. I don't know if they had hearing issues or what, but they were significantly louder than most people. You know the type. That's just how they are. Immediately over the cube-wall from us on the other side was a bunch of technical writers. They couldn't get any work done because of the racket from us. We got complaints. My boss used to keep a tally on one of his whiteboards. This is the thing where you go |||| and then put a slash across for the fifth for those who aren't familiar (is this a local culture thing?). I think they ultimately tried to get moved to another building, away from the people they supported. On a third side, there was a bunch of project managers. This was back in 2007, so OpenSocial was the "big thing" then. So we had to deal with the blathering coming out of them most afternoons: "what if this person is friends with this person on this service, but isn't friends with this person on this other service, and then this third person shares this thing to the second person, does the first person get to see it?" I'm surprised ANYTHING got done there. Come to think of it, that might explain a few things. Another team up in that same space was the Lively group, and everyone knows what happened with that project.