> - Control of equipment. Need a 4k monitor? Need a trackball? No approvals needed.
No approvals, but you have to pay for it.
Prior to COVID, I used vacation time every summer to work at an academic summer camp for three weeks. Most of the other staff members—largely college students—had to go through this dumb supply request system whenever they wanted materials for an activity. I just ordered whatever I wanted off Amazon, which was expensive, but I figured I was technically on a sort of weird vacation, so screw it.
My point being, you can make this trade-off in many workplaces. Working from home just normalizes it—and sometimes removes the choice.
In open office or hot desking environments, you really might not have the choice. My last office from 2015 on Market Street was all hot desk. You could not have any personal items left on the desk at the end of the day. The only way to get a standing desk was to get a doctor's recommendation and have an ergonomic consultant approve it. You could use whatever peripherals you could fit in a backpack.
I now have an electric standing desk with memory settings, a cushioned standing mat, a great office chair that fits my back perfectly, a kneeling chair, a yoga ball, a stool, plants, original artwork, fidget toys, cozy lamps, excercise equipment, ergonomic keyboard and mouse, a large external display, the best video conferencing headset I could find, laptop and monitor height adjustable stands and probably a few other things as well. I changed jobs recently and didn't have to do anything but swap out the laptop.
Jabra Evolve 40. I chose wired so I didn't have to deal with Bluetooth audio issues. I wanted something with a professional appearance and strong mic and headphone performance for voice frequencies, plus a mute button. Very happy with it.
I'll heartily agree with this recommendation, though I have the Jabra Evolve 75. As best as I can tell it's exactly the same as the 40 with the addition of Bluetooth. I happened to pick it up in February of 2020 and it's been fantastic for my hours of daily calls.
They don't put much pressure on the head, certainly not enough to describe it as crushing anything. A characteristic of this type of headset is light weight, so the clamp pressure does not need to be strong to keep them in place.
As a result they're significantly smaller than over-ear cans, and able to be stuffed in a laptop bag easily.
The style can become fatiguing with extended wear, that is probably their biggest flaw along with limitations on how much sound isolation they can achieve.
I'm not OP and it's not a headset, but I have to say—nothing beats the Blue Yeti for microphone audio quality, and there's a headphone jack on the bottom you can just use with any pair of headphones.
It's a bit of an investment, and very slightly cumbersome at times versus a wireless headset, but I think it's worthwhile in order to sound good.
(Well, okay, a truly professional microphones would presumably make you sound even better, but you're very much past the point of diminishing returns.)
Sidetone. The essential hardware feature that Blue Yeti and few others get right. I've had one on my wish list for a while.
On the main topic, as a boomer who suffered through office work for decades (the dictation system in my first job was a DictaBelt, and electronic forms were what the secretaries stored on their IBM Selectrics), going 100% remote 12 years ago was the greatest productivity boost I've experienced since my first work PC (which I built from parts sourced at Jameco Electronics... in 1988).
There is _no_ way I'll ever return to an office, with all the distractions (we used to call them "drive-bys") and already mentioned ergonomic barriers. My manager is a genx who is fully behind remote work, but there are lots of late boomer and genx execs who are really uncomfortable with it for a load if reasons -- including that it denies them opportunities to intimidate through physical presence (never a problem I experienced personally, mostly because those same sorts of managers tend to be intimidated by age, experience and credentials).
I find it ironic that so many execs who now lament the loss of "collaboration" weren't voicing those concerns a couple of decades ago during the massive push to outsource and offshore. I know from personal experience that collaborating remotely is not only possible, but often superior to in-office -- as I think dozens of my colleagues across a couple of oceans who I worked some pretty difficult technical issues with would attest.
I’d get something like the AT2005USB or similar instead.
Besides being half the price, it’s a dynamic mic instead of condenser.
True, a good condenser will sound marginally better, but it will also pick up a lot more background noise more readily. Better off to pick up cleaner audio to start with rather than try and filter it out after.
And to your point about diminishing returns, I think especially over the generally iffy quality conferencing software we’re all using something like a Blue Yeti is already well into the diminishing returns.
How does the yeti perform on echo cancelation and background noise isolation? In my experience, the Evolve 40 is good enough that I can turn off Zoom's software filters and get a further quality boost.
That is basically because it is near you and far from anything else. So it doesn't have to do anything to not pick up background noise. You can do that with any mic, headsets just have a bit of an advantage in having a fixed placement right near you however you move. I have a mic on a boom over the monitor so it ends up close to me and I wear headphones so that has much the same effect. But its all about placement.
No approvals, but you have to pay for it.
Prior to COVID, I used vacation time every summer to work at an academic summer camp for three weeks. Most of the other staff members—largely college students—had to go through this dumb supply request system whenever they wanted materials for an activity. I just ordered whatever I wanted off Amazon, which was expensive, but I figured I was technically on a sort of weird vacation, so screw it.
My point being, you can make this trade-off in many workplaces. Working from home just normalizes it—and sometimes removes the choice.