I used to be an Operations Manager at a machine shop with 150 employees and a Program Manager at another places with 250 employees. Both had 5am starts. In my experience, the biggest factor was support for the billable staff. You have direct labor employees; these are the people who run machines and fabricate products. Then there are indirect employees that support the direct employees; like purchasing, planning/scheduling, management, customer service, quality, etc. Most manufacturers with a 5am start time are running multiple shifts of direct labor. The indirect employees usually don’t start until 7-8am and overlap both shifts to have some support for both day and night shift.
Manufacturers that run one shift(like my current job) usually start later. We start at 7am but allow people to flex their start time for kids, etc.
I’ve been using my Shokz OpenRun headset almost everyday for the past 6 months and I love them for lots of things but they dont replace earbuds/headphones completely.
I work in a machine shop and it’s important to be able to hear machines and things happening around you. Most shops don’t allow earbuds or headphones for that reason. Our machines aren’t too loud so it doesn’t drown out the sound but these definitely won’t work in a loud environment unless you wear earplugs but then that defeats the purpose.
Great for audiobooks, podcasts, and music that doesn’t have a lot of bass. I mostly listen to punk and metal and it’s fine for that. I can even listen to hip-hop and not expect some kicking bass.
I tried to use them for PC gaming and they just crackled during explosions and could not handle that. So I don’t use it for gaming.
Having hands free conversations with people is definitely a plus. I did some testing with my wife and she could not tell a difference in volume or on quality between using the headset and talking regularly on the phone.
Battery life and comfort are great. Sometimes I forget I’m wearing them if they are just idling on my head. With mixed use on and off all day, the charge lasts several days for me. If I was to listen to something constantly, I think I’d get more life out of a charge than I have waking hours in the day.
One thing that bothered me at first is at the highest volume, I can feel a tickle on the skin where it rests. I usually only have them up when that much when ambient noise is a bit high and then I dont notice it as much. But I’m also used to it now so it’s not as bad.
Be careful with cheap sets. My wife got a cheap pair on Amazon with “good ratings” and it was awful. It was basically earbud style speaker/drivers that were up against your skin and it was terrible.