It isn't just loudness that affects hearing loss. A large amount of the damage coming from headphones comes from the fact that they increase the temperature of your ear canals. That temperature increases the amount of bacteria which cause significant hearing loss.

Oh for fuck's sakes. I wear headphones 90% of my day WITH NOTHING PLAYING IN THEM.

We need to stop treating developers like precious children. You do not need ABSOLUTE SILENCE to be able to do your work. 99% of us are not writing the next PageRank or inventing the next Djkstra's Algorithm. And even when we are 99% of the time is spent on build environments and configuration and plumbing.

This does not require absolute uninterrupted focus surrounded by silence. Making a mistake does not cause a bomb to go off or a plane to fall out of the sky.

Put on a pair of comfortable headphones and do not plug them into anything and 75% of the noise around you is gone. Turn on some white noise or some gentle ambient music of dozens of lyrics-free genres and it goes up to 95%. If the only way you can work is if you can't hear any other noise outside of your own head, you have failed as a human being because no other profession requires that.

It would appear that empathy is not your strong point.

No, most people don't need to work in an anechoic chamber.

But any distracting noise adds to cognitive load, and since you're being paid to use your cognitive abilities, productivity suffers.

If you're paying people to do something and then making it harder for them to do it, the problem is not with the people.

Everything is a tradeoff. Cognitive load decreases productivity. Open communication and easy collaboration increases it. The argument is that it makes up for it. The current popular opinion on HN is it doesn't.

I'm sorry I don't have empathy for bullshit rare disorders like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia

Rationally, it doesn't matter whether you have empathy or not. But you need to demonstrate rational understanding of the issues, and I don't think you've done that here.

There's a lot of evidence that open offices destroy productivity, and almost no evidence that they increase it.

So whatever your reasoning hiring people, paying them a lot of money, and then making it harder for them to do their jobs is an irrational position.

While its true that headphones are associated with hearing loss, there are lots of headphones out there that have noise-canceling capabilities without being excessively loud.

Noise cancelling works great with cyclic sounds, such as an airplane engine. With acyclic sounds, such as conversations? They're rubish. No headphone in the market today can cancel out[1] a conversation with a method other than playing another sound high enough to cancel it.

[1] By cancel out, I mean make it impossible to understand the conversation, while the headphones are silent or playing in low volume.

I've got a pair of [1] in currently, no music, and they're doing a pretty good job of drowning out people talking at normal volume 6ft away. I'll admit they're doing a less good job of the strident conversation 10ft away and the plague of ringing phones but without music, I'm ok with that.

(NB. This reply entirely useless if you can't tolerate in-ear buds.)

[1] http://www.etymotic.com/consumer/earphones/ek5.html

In ear monitors are often a combination of ear plugs and headphones. Mine are rated at -30Db rather evenly across the spectrum. I have to take them off to effectively engage in conversation below shouting level even when the audio input is silent. On the other hand, they also are quite expensive. At any rate, if you do have effective noise cancellation it can be quite alarming when someone tries to interact with you by tapping your shoulder and such.

I was not totally clear. My comment was about active noise cancellation. Passive cancellation, such as what you get with protective gear or, as you say, studio monitors, has a nasty side effect I can't tolerate: suddenly, sounds transmitted through bone transmission are much louder (breathing and heartbeat mainly).

Not all noise-canceling headphones are built alike. Its my understanding that it really depends on which ones you buy:

http://productivity.stackexchange.com/questions/7213/do-nois...

Sounds like a LOT of complaining, making engineers here look like a bunch of divas who are never happy. Stop whining and do your job instead of making up excuses why you can't.