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.

That sits on top of the ear, crushing the ear cartilage against the skull, right? How can anyone choose that style of headphone?

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.