I was bracing for downvotes on that comment for shilling. It appears the QC35s are loved by many, myself included.

Honestly if you regularly write code in an open office like I suspect many here do; a serious, professional pair of headphones are one of the best things you can get. Wireless with active noise cancelling that are comfortable and have a robust battery life. The Sony model mentioned by another poster appear to be quite nice as well.

Smart management would make sure these things are available to their employees no questions asked.

> Smart management would make sure these things are available to their employees no questions asked.

My experience with this made me laugh. I had a company that had the right idea when they moved everyone to open floor plans; buy them "premium" headphones. The headphones they bought were expensive (valued around $150 new), but were utter garbage. I can't tell the difference audio between $5 earbuds, and $100 earbuds ... but I can tell when these beats headphones have the sizing for children. Nearly everyone ended up selling theirs and letting them collect dust.

Yea, unfortunately HR or accounting is going to be lurking around waiting to torpedo any incarnation of this; but the best option is to set a reasonable dollar amount for gear and let your engineers allocate it as part of the onboarding process. Desktop/laptop, phone, headphones, monitors, keyboard etc. If engineers want to go above the amount you set, support that as well and reimburse up to that maximum.

I worked at a company and our team was the first to move to the open floor plan.

I convinced my manager to get us all Bose headphones.

Several people from other teams (all of which had private offices) raised a stink to the CEO, who refused to approve the purchase, leaving my boss to foot the bill by himself.

I tried to love them, ears would hurt after a few hours of wear. Airpods are so comfortable I forget they are in.