Mute your fucking microphones if you have nothing to say. Nobody wants to hear you breathing, your dog, a police car or whatever.

Agree, plus that this also applies to hashtags on devRant. ^^

@Fast-Nop Thanks for the info. Didn't know that.

@HochdruckHummer You can separate tags by comma. Without comma, a tag can even contain several words with spaces.

Muting yourself when you're not talking should be common sense indeed. I'm glad that my colleagues and my current clients have that common sense.

My previous headsets never had a mute button. Now I don't think I could go without one. Only downside is I often try to talk while my mics muted.

@lkjhgf253 Software mute works, although it might be inconvenient to have to reach for a window to click on a button.

You don't mute yourself when calling on the phone - why should VoIP be different? If it doesn't prevent others from hearing everything clearly I don't mind. No one should. It's pretentious.

Personally I enjoy making the clicking noises from the infected from GTFO.

@cprn Well thing is, the phone audio quality is borderline shit from the getgo, so why bother.

@cprn because a phonecall usually is 1:1 whereas @Hochdruckhummer propably is talking about conference calls.

Some people mute themselves even when they're talking, as they should.

@lkjhgf253 I prefer software mute even though I have a physical button. I use the physical button only as a safety.

@cprn how often do you have group calls on the phone?

@cprn Like already mentioned, group calls. Plus, I sometimes would have coffee or snacks while I'm listening when I don't have to talk - it'd be impolite to make people listen to that.

@theuser People do use phones, tablets and laptops for those calls.

@dsteiner These usually *are* phone calls.

@electrineer Multiple times every single working day for last 12 years or so.

@kamen Obviously that's not what anybody meant, certainly not me, because you don't do this on the phone. Op is talking about normal behaviour - breathing and life in the background.

How pretentious do you have to be to get annoyed by people *breathing*? Just take few deep ones yourself and calm down. It's life. When you have enough conference calls under your belt you'll start appreciating the feedback of somebody on the other side. This rant could as easily be about people muting their mics and not answering promptly wasting 10% of each call. Good conference is the one where people exchange tons of informations quickly, everyone is engaged, contributes and no-one just sits down pretending to listen with their mic muted. You're having wrong kind of calls, that's what's going on.

@cprn I've never been on a group call by phone. How does that work? Isn't it quite difficult to make anything out when someone shares their screen?

@electrineer You can use the phone to call in with webex, and I usually do that because my phone headset is better than my laptop's mic and speaker, and I can type without having to mute.

Sometimes, webex doesn't work, so that it's phone only, and then I send shit around so that people open it locally on their cmputers. It's a bit of coordination to announce where exactly you are, but entirely doable. I've even had extensive review activities that way.

I'm glad there are ways now to mute all. Only sad thing is our USB headsets are easy to break. When forced to use earphones to talk the laptop microphone catches also the ambient noises.