As a boss of several system administrators, I have employees who do wear headphones and those who do not. What I seen is that my younger employees wear the headphones, while the more seasoned veterans do not. I actually prefer that the younger staff wear their headphones, if they cannot hear the chatter around them they are far less likely to participate in it and thus be distracted from doing work. My staff which has been around in IT for many years seem to handle tuning out of other conversations better. I personally do not wear headphones as I have far too many people who are in and out of my office all day long, but trust me that more days than not I wish I could.
Our IT department on a whole is pretty well split on those who do wear headphones, and those who do not, both on the development side and the infrastructure side.
My suggestion would be to approach the boss with your reasoning on why you where headphones. Lead this towards the need for having a more quiet work environment in order to concentrate on your work. Make suggestions that the job of those around you lend towards a more vocal occupation, where your work requires a less distracting atmosphere. Ask the boss how you can work together to achieve a quieter work environment so that your headphones are not necessary. Let he\she try to come up with the idea themselves that they also need to address the issue of noise with the other workers around you. Hopefully letting the boss see that the reasoning for headphones and music is to drown out the noise and not necessarily for the enjoyment of listening to music.
If this all fails, and probably not the betst "boss" thing to suggest, I might approach the boss and suggest that you are not listening to music, but to technical podcasts on new programming methods, security, whatever, and that by listening to you are actually gaining invaluable experience that is costing the company nothing additional. They can think of it as free training. If you don't have any of this on your ipod now, I might download something as to have as "proof". I actually have one guy who works for me that is not into music, but does listen to security podcasts as his "music" of choice. Us boss types always like it when an employee is gainging knowledge to benefit the company and it is not costing us money out of pocket to do so.
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As a boss of several system administrators, I have employees who do wear headphones and those who do not. What I seen is that my younger employees wear the headphones, while the more seasoned veterans do not. I actually prefer that the younger staff wear their headphones, if they cannot hear the chatter around them they are far less likely to participate in it and thus be distracted from doing work. My staff which has been around in IT for many years seem to handle tuning out of other conversations better. I personally do not wear headphones as I have far too many people who are in and out of my office all day long, but trust me that more days than not I wish I could. Our IT department on a whole is pretty well split on those who do wear headphones, and those who do not, both on the development side and the infrastructure side. My suggestion would be to approach the boss with your reasoning on why you where headphones. Lead this towards the need for having a more quiet work environment in order to concentrate on your work. Make suggestions that the job of those around you lend towards a more vocal occupation, where your work requires a less distracting atmosphere. Ask the boss how you can work together to achieve a quieter work environment so that your headphones are not necessary. Let he\she try to come up with the idea themselves that they also need to address the issue of noise with the other workers around you. Hopefully letting the boss see that the reasoning for headphones and music is to drown out the noise and not necessarily for the enjoyment of listening to music. If this all fails, and probably not the betst "boss" thing to suggest, I might approach the boss and suggest that you are not listening to music, but to technical podcasts on new programming methods, security, whatever, and that by listening to you are actually gaining invaluable experience that is costing the company nothing additional. They can think of it as free training. If you don't have any of this on your ipod now, I might download something as to have as "proof". I actually have one guy who works for me that is not into music, but does listen to security podcasts as his "music" of choice. Us boss types always like it when an employee is gainging knowledge to benefit the company and it is not costing us money out of pocket to do so.