Working conditions at Opera; noise equivalent to nightclub
9 CommentsPublished August 17th, 2007 2:41 PM EDT By Daniel Goldman
Think you have tough working conditions at your job’s workplace?
Extreme noise from a nearby construction site is causing the nearly 300 hundred Opera employees working at the headquarters headaches and nausea. Measuring 101 decibels, the noise in the office is equivalent to that at a nightclub, wrote a local newspaper. To combat this tremendous noise, many employees are using ear protectors.
I hope the noise will be gone by the time I visit Opera headquarters later this month or early September (I work in the US).
And with all the noise, our developers and QA people are still working to bring you the best browser out there, Opera 9.5. Kudos. 
(Opera’s office manager with ear protectors – Photo credit: Aftenposten)
(Opera’s CEO with ear protectors on his desk – Photo credit: Aftenposten)
(An Opera employee getting the job done with ear protectors – Photo credit: Aftenposten)
(Construction outside of Opera’s headquarters building – Photo credit: Aftenposten)
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Terrible. I hate noise. I do hope conditions will improve soon for the harassed Opera employees. It’s not nice when you can’t even hear yourself think.
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Perhaps this is why we’re still waiting for the first Kestrel builds
Sounds terrible, I hope this will get better soon.
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Aren’t there noise ordinances in Norway, like in the US. That is way too loud.
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what I wonder is why Opera employees have super new Dell computers but the CEO doesn’t even have WLAN on his laptop.
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what I wonder is why Opera employees have super new Dell computers but the CEO doesn’t even have WLAN on his laptop
WLAN is a potential security issue. As long as there’s wires available those are to be prefered as they are faster and more secure.
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We have in work the same problem. And this green hydraulic machine is monstrum!!
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Here are noise regulations.. then here are delays in processing complaints, too. And, of course, delays in processing the constructors appliance for being allowed to produce very high noise for a time. Meanwhile, they were allowed to continue, and the worst would soon be over anyways, and it was because of some unexpectedly hard ground so there wasnt really any way to reduce the noise no matter what. And city development must continue, right?
Bah. Opera needs to create a campaign for the increasing use of their browser by state and officials. Or better, to become desktopteam blog junkies!
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Wohoo, I got Opera Mini 9.50!
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opera wants to know how to improve marketing?
hint – regular users couldnt care less about opera working conditions. they absolutely dont care. if you want to post such informations for opera geeks, be sure to include infos for regular users, who come here to read about interesting stuff – shedules, work in progress, new features (or lack of them lately).
since that Kestrel blog post on desktop team, opera didnt say anything new about kestrel. meanwhile users can test ff3 daily. any undecided users are going to simply autoUptade to ff3 (because ff3 has autoupdate, opera doesnt) and stay with it. opera users cant be involved into the ‘approaching’ opera 9.5 because thez simplz know nothing. so thez loose interest. no tension, no fuzz, no buzz in the blogosphere. nothing. these days you need to build these things up by relasing information that public see interesting. not some geeky/press photos of nameless employees.
do you think that there are not-opera-fanboys that are interested in opera offices? if you want attract NEW users to opera, show them something interesting/cool – screenshot of feature in development, give them some hints on kestrel/peregrine. but let it be something new, and not too general.
dont worry about firefox ’stealing’ new opera ideas, they’ll do it anyway via extensions in few days time, so dont bother to be secretive
Firefox speedDial extension doesnt even mention opera in its description. and you cant really do anything about that. for the public, they were first. because all opera told us, was how noisy their offices are.
maybe it is offtopic to this blogpost, but is relevant to general marketing discussion that started lately in opera [hope not too late]