I know it seems crazy, but I've been in several offices that had this. It most cases it worked well and I never noticed it until it would occasionally quit working.

The offices where it's worked best were not open, though. They had thin doors/walls and a small speaker (also doubled for the fire alarm/etc) in the ceiling of each office. The white noise was unnoticeable until it was off or you really looked for it.

The main advantage was that you no longer heard every conversation on the floor. You'd still overhear bits of things in the adjacent rooms, but that's hard to avoid. When the white noise stopped working (happened every few months), you could hear every voice on the floor and every phone call...

All in all, it sounds like torture, but done well, it's actually a really nice way of damping distracting ambient conversations/etc.

My partial hearing loss is such that I can understand conversations in an otherwise quiet room, but if someone turns on a fan, or intentionally plays white noise through overhead speakers, the conversation needs to be about twice as loud in order for me to understand it. Normal speaking volume isn't quite enough any more. That tiny bit of white noise overwhelms those frequencies that I can still hear to differentiate between similar speech sounds.

For me, blowing fans are unpleasant. Piped in white noise would be torture. Like gratuitously flashing strobe lights into the eyes of someone with night-blindness.

Maybe this could be used as the basis for ADA complaints against open offices? I can't understand why anyone would think that's a good idea, but then again, I don't understand open offices either.

(I also prefer 2-day email chains to face-to-face conversations, because I can both understand what I read much faster than I can understand listening to speech, and refer back to it later.)

Our ventilation system seems like it's purposely loud enough that you can't hear someone clipping their nails. I like it a lto. It's not white noise and easy to ignore.

I interviewed at a place with open offices and their ventilation system was so loud that it made it hard to hear myself think.

Everybody seemed to like me except the PM who was either a little Kruger Dunning or straight up Peter Principle. He wanted very much for me to know how smart he (thought he) was. Pessimism != smart (something I have to remind myself of regularly). In an interview I'm supposed to be convincing you how smart I am, not comparing dick sizes.

I have no doubts that particular brand of insecurity that looks an awful lot like ageism cost me that job. But dealing with a boss who is uncomfortable around anyone who has more experience than them, especially with that tin roof of an office space would have been torture. Bad fit all around.

But it's rare that I find a place whose business model is terribly engaging. The hazard of experience is that a lot of problems start to look similar, a lot of verticals sound more meaningful than they really are, and you won't devote the rest of your life to making up for how you got the money in the first place. If you even get the money (I've skipped step 1 and gone onto step 2), which statistically you will not.

I like the white (or pink?) noise. I expected to hate it and found the idea ridiculous, but it helped focus in an open space office.

Heh, painfully pinching your skin also helps at the dentist.

I prefer smacking myself in the head with a hammer.

In an open office, that is. The dentist is less painful.

Yeah, that sounds like actual torture.

Especially when they turn it on and off randomly. So weird...