What's tucked beneath those headphones?

USA: With all that noise buzzing inside open offices, it's not a rare sight to see a programmer wearing earphones to block some decibels away.

As many as 96 per cent of software engineers were found accepting that they listen to music while coding. In a research conducted by Qualtrics via online survey of 400 adult professional software engineers, it was observed that one in four coders prefer Bose headphones, followed by one in five who like Sony or Beats. As to the rest of them, they might be listening to music on a record player or something if they are hipsters. When compared to silence, music still tends to win.

About 78 per cent of software engineers prefer to listen to music rather than have silence or other entertainment while coding. Well, silence was preferred by only six per cent.

Age has its effect too. For Software engineers who are over age 35, the likelihood is three times more to listen to the radio while coding than engineers 35 or younger. About 71 per cent of engineers 35 or younger report listening to music very often or always while coding, and only 47 per cent of engineers over 35 do.

But what are they listening to?

Turned out that among software engineers, Pandora (29 per cent) is the most popular choice for streaming content. This was followed closely by YouTube (23 per cent) and Spotify (19 per cent).

Pop is also by far the most popular genre for software engineers to listen to (28 per cent), beating out the nearest competing genre, Electronic (12 per cent) by more than double. There is an 11 per cent lot that likes classical music with only  two per cent preferring reggae.

As many as 80 per cent of software engineers listen to music through headphones. As to who their favorite artists were, answers came in all over the place in the research but here were a few artists who gained some consensus: Like U2, Taylor Swift, Maroon 5, Linkin Park and yes, The Beatles.