Of course, the elephant in the room is that people need to stop having so many meetings. Those of us who have been working remotely for a decade or more never had this problem - we use async communications, quick one-off calls when needed, and really never spent all our time in meetings. But when everyone moved to remote work a few years ago, this culture of meetings all day came up... and it still confuses me. It isn't effective.
Agreed it is the weirdest thing ever to me that people don't email anymore. Just send an email. In an email it's written down and I can search for it. In an email I can think at my own pace and respond without worrying about trampling others. In an email people can't ramble on and on and if they do you can just not read the email. And if it's work to be done, just make a ticket.
The amount of meeting time waste baffles me. And then you try to make them productive and include information in the invite and you show up and nobody read it. So now you have to waste more time when you could have just gone directly into brainstorming.
At this point I kind of just give up. I make my suggestions to make things more efficient and try to remember that even if the work gets done sooner I won't be working any less.
OK, which pipeline, what errors are you receiving, when did it last work, any changes since then, etc.? A lot of people aren't good at communication, period. It's like pulling teeth sometimes.
Slightly off-topic but using coworking spaces pre-Covid was also a different experience. They seem to have turned into call centres nowadays. I find it pretty hard to find a silent spot to work without having someone borderline scream at their screen next to me.
Same as the "you still use a desktop computer?" people. Yes, my dual 4k screens, ergonomic desk, wired Ethernet connection and powerful CPU do in fact make my life easier and my work faster than hunching over a butterfly keyboard and squinting at a 13" screen in a noisy coffee house.
Except it doesn't work like that. There is the expectation that you wake up and go and read all the messages in a Slack channel from when you stopped working yesterday until this morning.
And because it's Slack it's not organized in any way shape or form. You don't know what's important and what not.
I don’t use email at work anymore because it is siloed to the original participants. Someone on the inside needs to know to forward the whole thread to anyone who needs the information after the fact. This info is lost forever when participants leave the company. With Slack I can search through conversations where the participants are long gone. It is not the end all be all of communication, but the auto-documentation aspect is way improved over email.
> I don’t use email at work anymore because it is siloed to the original participants.
For many people that's a selling point. I practically beg my teammates to ask questions in the team slack channel instead of DMing me, but they never do. I think it's stage fright and wanting to reveal ignorance to as few people as possible amplified by various higher up people joining the channel. Also compounded by tons of people from other teams joining our channel and no one pushing back because "we want to have an inclusive conversation" or similar platitude.
> I practically beg my teammates to ask questions in the team slack channel instead of DMing me, but they never do.
I would probably be one of them (although I'd be more likely to email you if that's an option).
If I have to ask my stupid question in public, I'm more likely to simply not ask it at all -- especially if management or people who are not on my immediate team are in the Slack channel.
Some of the people who want constant meetings are poor communicators whose messages won't be read (or won't communicate effectively) without a captive audience.
Email means there's a paper trail. I've had conversations drastically change tone when the medium changed (eg, from text messages to phone call, or from video meeting to email thread).
Some people don't want to be held accountable for what they say.
This, thank you. I recently quit my corporate job and we started our own company with my wife... never been so productive. Meetings are truly productivity killers. Why hire smart people for a lot of money to then have them sit around in groups of 10+, half listening, half braindead?
> Why hire smart people for a lot of money to then have them sit around in groups of 10+, half listening, half braindead?
Fear Of Missing Out. People don't want to be told what to do, but rather invest in an idea from its birth to its execution. That means there are going to be a lot of meetings like "which feature requests should we do in Q3". People want to justify, negotiate, compromise, and bounce ideas off of each other. Presumably some refinement and understanding comes from this process, beyond what one person spending a day to write a design doc would accomplish. (Do people like writing design docs for things that never get prioritized? You want to spend your time on things that are going to be shipped, minimizing the time spent on proposals that don't go anywhere because they don't have wide agreement.)
HN's way of avoiding these issues tends to center around not involving any sort of multi-player action in their work. One person can do a lot in tech, so that can be a viable approach, but it's not the sort of business that people are hiring for. To do big things, you need a big team. It's always been that way. We didn't land on the moon through one individual contributor making a rocket and riding it there. Rather, thousands of individual contributors were coordinated through, gasp, managers, and collectively they accomplished something no one person could do on their own. If you want to go to space, you probably need to have a couple meetings. If you want to rewrite `cat` in Rust, you can probably skip them.
In the coming years, it will be interesting to see how AI organizes coordination. If AI 1 has 2 A100s attached to a robot arm and AI 2 has 2 A100s attached to Amazon Prime, it will be interesting to see if one of them says "hey what if we combined our resources and made X..." I also look forward to the first AI agent chilling in a $3000/month rack complaining about having to go to sprint planning meetings. So like us!
I think the problem is further compounded by team size and insistence on 40 hour work weeks. As soon as you have people on “manager schedule” that feel the need to look busy the number of meetings starts growing exponentially. I’m all for having enabling people on the team, just don’t expect them or anyone else to meet an arbitrary amount of hours per week quota.
Exactly. Parkinson's Law states it best: work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. A manager whose main function is to hold meetings will fill their 40 hours with meetings.
I fully agree and had a snide comment to add. However, I had a bit of a brainwave. Is it possible that this is being driven more by anxious employees? “How can I show that I am doing something when no one is watching over my shoulder? I know, dial into meetings all day so I can be watched again”. It is of course even worse for managers as they aren’t expected to do a lot of concrete work. However, I can empirically state that simply being in meetings all day does not guarantee employment (not me, fortunately).
Yes, I was working remotely for a decade, we were hyper-effective, and I'd only met 2 of the people in person once. Most communication was email, and there was the occasional phone call. So productive.
At another place, we used a text chat SaaS to be super-effective, and usually the only internal routine videoconf was for whole-company sync-up and personalizing. Text chat for effective async/real-time (in addition to docs), and occasional videoconf as needed. So productive.
I've also seen places where people did meetings because they didn't know how to collaborate effectively, and there were barriers to learning that. One of the places, it seemed meetings were approached much like they approached coding or documenting: being able to say you performed that proof-of-work was the end goal itself, rather than the meeting being costs invested smartly towards some actual shared goal.
Thanks for saying this. I’m strongly considering leaving a job primarily due to the meeting culture. It’s just incredibly wasteful. We can spend weeks talking about things I would have knocked out in days in a previous role.
Robustly challenge what you think are unwarranted meetings. Preface your input in meetings that are silly but still exist with "Hi, I'll keep this concise because I know everyone has a lot of work to do ...", make a habit of reconfirming the value and purpose of the remaining meetings. Make it normal for meetings to whither quickly when not vital.
I go further and simply don't attend meetings that lack an agenda or at the very least point out when there isn't one when the meeting starts.
I was complaining about this to my manager, he said attending meetings doesn't affect my perf and I just shouldn't go if I think it's pointless. So I stopped going to a couple. No one has made a peep. I need to start voicing for the smaller meetings tho. I've starting asking the groups "any agenda for today?" A couple hours before but I feel like the meeting organizer should really be on top of this.
But when everyone moved to remote work a few years ago, this culture of meetings all day came up... and it still confuses me.
My pet theory (that in all likelihood isn’t unique to me, but derived from things I’ve read in many other places) is that this is due to an existential crisis among the management class. Many managers who were previously used to managing people very directly, by looking over shoulders and such, realized that their jobs are unnecessary when they saw how productive people became during the pandemic’s forced remote work regime.
As a way of coping with the cognitive dissonance they began to schedule huge numbers of online meetings so that they could continue to feel engaged and “useful.” This has turned into a very large “emperor’s new clothes” situation, played out across thousands of companies. Hence the desperate moves by many companies to try to force workers to come back into the office.
> Many managers...realized that their jobs are unnecessary
I hear this a lot in forums, but to me it rings out as something that perhaps-disgruntled workers want to be true about managers, but isn't really grounded in measurable fact. It's true that as a manager I don't produce a lot of code, but at the end of the day my job is to know who the experts on different topics are and to know what the zeitgeist (and maybe even plan of record) of the org is so I can get the right people in a room together to solve problems. If we left that up to each individual contributor, especially the more junior ones, we'd never be able to achieve a large scale goal. Imagine if you were trying to build the Golden Gate bridge but you eliminated management and just turned a bunch of workers out on the site to do whatever their skills and experience led them to.
I said many managers, not all managers. There are some highly skilled managers (likely promoted engineers) who know exactly what their teams need to be successful and also understand the big picture and where their team’s project fits in. These are not the managers I was referring to.
The ones I’m talking about are from “the management class”, likely went to business school, and have no technical background at all, and occupy most of their days “walking a beat” around the office to look over people’s shoulders and make sure they’re busy. These are the Michael Scotts of the world, and they are the ones in crisis, not the skilled managers.
> And now maybe the "original remote workers" are affected, too.
I think there’s a lot to this. Those of us who worked remote for many years before COVID probably developed more efficient ways of working over time. Then the pandemic hit and we were suddenly vastly outnumbered by newly remote folks who didn’t actually know how to work remotely.
agreed. dont know who needs to hear this but if you're having more than 1 scrum a week its not devops, its micromanagement, and if youve got more than 2-3 meetings a week youre effectively doing your managers work.
if it can be summarized in 2-3 lines in an email, dont accept the meeting.
Worse are meeting with just a vague title and not a well defined agenda. So many times I have to ask the organizer to add bullet points of the items to cover so I can at least join already prepared, can tell the organizer if I am not really the right person to join for the meeting and/or if someone from another team would be necessary.
So many time is wasted on meeting because of off topic stuff or because the rights persons haven't been invited.
Sadly a lot of people don’t produce directly but do so indirectly. When they could been seen sitting at their desk clicking on something by everyone, everyone knew they were doing “something,” even though it was immeasurable (because it was often nothing). Without that ability to signal productivity they need to be seen in meetings on zoom. This isn’t fair of course, most jobs probably don’t legitimately have 8 hours of busy work attached but yet we expect them to work 8 hours. The jobs still important for the hours of actual work they put in. That’s not their fault, but they’re still left with figuring out how to seem like they’re working 8 hours when they are not and never were. The buying of their body in a chair was a proxy for that, and now they need to figure out how to make people see them sitting in a chair.
One thing I found worked, and Zoom has apparently added as a real feature, was to have a standing meeting room that was just always open. We had a conference room in the office signed in. People could just hang there. Usually you just heard typing and occasional questions. People usually had their camera off but not always. But it seemed to appease the need to be seen without inducing anxiety provoked meeting proliferation.
Problem emerges when there is at least one influential team/individual which is allergic to written communication. I work with one such team that avoids a written paper trail in order to avoid difficult questions. Once one such team exists, people start losing the time to thoughtfully perform async communication.
Funny, just read an article on WSJ complaining how people take breaks during working time and then it is hard to schedule even more meetings on short notice ("is why so many managers hate hybrid work"):
there are synchronized and non-synchronized tasks.
if its something where we need to synchronize with other team members, then schedule it ahead of time, or else let me know asap / hit my cell / etc.
One of the givens of remote work is that you have "synchronous hours" where the expectation is that you're within 5-15 min of your computer, and that you put status messages if you're away / out.
e.g. "OUT LUNCH" at 12:41pm means I can reasonably guess where you are (lunch) and roughly when you're going to be back (1-130ish).
non-synchronized or non-time-sensitive tasks can be done whenever so long as deadlines are met
The culture at our company is Slack + meetings. Slack drives me crazy because there's SO MUCH in there that it's hard to navigate and search. I'm probably a member of 250 channels. Meetings are ephemeral; I prefer written communication for future reference.
Im not sure it came up in 2020. I’ve been at work since the late 90s and the same complaints were made then. The difference now is that everybody is also responding on Slack throughout, so it’s like having double-density meetings.
I turn my camera off on big calls and it helps a bunch, there's a process running in the back of my mind when it's on that is constantly screening what I am doing just incase it looks stupid on camera. It feels like being in a panopticon. You never know if someone is looking. It's very tiring.
I don't have the same issue in person because you know when people are looking at you in person and there's heaps of context for everyone.
I want you and everyone else to know that sometimes on large zoom calls I will "pin" one person in the call and stare at them for multiple minutes in a row on fullscreen. I do this all the time.
I do this too. I usually cycle through a few people if multiple people have their camera on. I also take snips and draw mustaches/glasses/graffiti on them in paint during really boring meetings.
Something like this recently happened in one of my university classes. We had a remote class in the evening on Teams.
One of my buddies felt very tired so he thought he'll zone out for a bit and mute the call.
After he proceeded to mute the call he realized that he'd actually muted the teacher for the whole class. It was hilarious, especially when he told me after. :)
I'm in a regular large zoom call and I'm pretty sure a few participants get pinned more than the rest combined. The day Zoom accidentally reveals they've been building these stats should be entertaining.
Hah. I wouldn't say that it is creepy but I get a bit uneasy thinking about it. Ok so I judge people on what they have in their basket in the store. I am not a greater person.
I am so happy my team, and most of my company as a whole, has an unstated "camera off" custom. There are a few project/product managers and higher-ups that like to be seen, I guess, but there's never been anyone announcing "Please everyone turn on your cameras".
It's interesting when we have meetings with external partners that appear to have a "camera on" policy, and they are the only people with their cameras on.
I've gotten myself fired for doing this. I kid you not, but they took it as a sign of disinterest and somejow never thought to bring up "yo Martin, what's up with that?" 100% ridiculous childish twattery, but just sayin' ... you can end up in trouble. This was literally the only thing they brought up as "evidence" for my alleged "attitude problem".
(I can foresee "dodged a bullet" responses, so just to pre-empt that: I didn't. I actually enjoyed working there, and being fired led to significant financial troubles, and even greater mental health problems. I got hit by a bullet and didn't dodge anything.)
My contract wasn't renewed; technically it's not really "getting fired", although it doesn't really make that much of a difference in reality. Even if there was a wrongful dismissal case here, I wouldn't want to pursue it – the headache and stress just isn't worth it.
I always keep my camera off unless it's a handful of situations, like meeting someone for the first time, or making a big presentation and introducing myself. Turning the camera on is more the rare thing.
On technical calls with two or three people where we all know each other we rarely turn the cameras on. For big meetings, the bosses prefer to have cameras on the whole time, but at least require that we start meetings that way, then we can turn them off after the meeting really gets going.
Agreed for big calls.
For smaller calls, I try to turn on my camera if someone of equal or lower rank has their camera on, and for anyone who has theirs on in a one-on-one.
Sometimes on a call where I'm familiar with everyone, I'll pretend my internet connection is being flaky and ask everyone to turn cameras off. I'm well aware I can just turn incoming video off, but most people aren't.
> I'm well aware I can just turn incoming video off, but most people aren't
I don't have a flaky connection, but I hate having my laptop turn into a jet engine just so I can see tiny thumbnails moving around. On Teams I can easily turn off incoming video, but on webex (web client) I haven't found a way to do that.
I do it very often because I often walk around my office or play with toys in my hands when I am collecting my thoughts or focusing on listening to people. Also help not feeling the urge to multitask and do other things on the computer.
One other thing not mentioned is latency. Zoom does a good job with this, but there are fundamental limits.
This makes it more cognitively demanding to find the right moment to jump in, and if two people jump in at the same time, they have to resolve the conflict, which is slower than in-person.
This also tends to lead to a style of conversation where one person talks longer. It's a little like email vs. slack. The conversation is more synchronous.
I'm in the same boat. Turn-taking in meatspace (i.e., what every person has experience with since learning language as a child) is totally ineffective in Zoom-land.
My view is Zoom cannot be a true substitute for in-person meetings until there's low enough audio lag that geographically distant musicians can perform live with one another on the platform.
I already usually have a difficult time jumping in on discussions in person. Zoom is SO much worse. This week I had wanted to point out that I already added a link with examples on something two folks were talking about on a doc, and after 5 minutes, I used the 'raise hand' feature, waited another 5, then just interrupted them because there was just no break to jump in, and no one noticed the raise-hand
The only benefit is that cutting people off and jumping in at the wrong time is so normalized in our zoom culture, that people just let it happen and even expect it to happen, on both sides of the conversation between the speaker and the person who got steamrolled into silence.
>low enough audio lag that geographically distant musicians can perform live with one another on the platform.
This seems like a pipe dream I think, since for low cost audio interfaces people can actually feel the few ms latency with those rigs going straight into their hardware. Anything going over the network has to go through an audio interface first, either with one of these dedicated rigs or the internal audio interface your computer uses for its built in microphone, then deal with network latency which will be significant in comparison I expect.
Fuck Zoom and the never-ending array of torture devices the executive class uses to keep people loathing and afraid. Your Slack indicator must be green 24/7. You must be living permanently in the Zoom uncanny valley. And it turns out that's not enough, so back to the office!
By the way, since the beginning of time, open source was happening asynchronously on email and IRC. Linux, one of the most complex and most useful pieces of software that exists, was done over asynchronous text. There are innumerable examples of builder success when working async. The synchronization obsession comes from managers and execs.
We have plenty of proof that you can build successful large-scale software without synchronization or zoom or in-person meetings.
A successful project that makes use of synchronization doesn't prove that synchronization itself is successful. At best it proves that synchronization may not destroy the craft entirely.
I admit that synchronization may add something to the development of business software, but we have plenty of business software that doesn't use synchronization, like Gitlab, Tailscale, etc.
We must stop constantly lowering the bar. Let them learn to write, or don't hire them in the first place. Communication skill is a good hiring criterion.
That’s much easier said if you work for a startup.
But if you work for either a large organization or a company that’s been around for decades, you influencing that kind of change (across departments you don’t own) is virtually impossible unless you’re the CEO. And even then, extremely difficult.
If a company as big as Amazon can pull off mandating writing standards so can yours. I understand that many companies just don't care. They tend to be run by steward CEOs and mercenary managers. I simply avoid them.
Bezos pulled it off by starting that practice from immediate onset of founding his company (hence my startup comment).
It’s not like 20-years into Amazon, he then decide to implement that practice.
Also, people misconstrue Amazon as being an async culture.
That’s incorrect.
Amazon is actually an anti-PowerPoint culture. So when meetings need to happen, you need to convey your info in long form writing since PPT isn’t allowed. That doesn’t mean the culture is async.
I did not say it was async, I said they were expected to write well. I don't think it matters when the practice is introduced. If the CEO mandates it that is all it takes.
At least in my experience, people who are bad at written communication are bad at communicating, period. The saving grace of spoken communication is that you can quickly see the lacking information and immediately ask for details, instead of going back and forth via email or other async medium.
While most people are terrible at written communication, I think there are even fewer people that can have a nice efficient meeting. I've been in so many meetings that amount to "so whats new?" What a complete waste of time. Those meetings by definition have no agenda. I update what is new, and inevitably there are all these follow up questions, and time spent sitting around not speaking and merely thinking silently about the situation. Meetings like these can be anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours. I'm not getting anything from this process that I wouldn't have gotten from emailing my update out in some bullet points, and responding to follow up emails on specifics where I perhaps have more time to come up with good responses that doesn't come at the cost of everyone else sitting there in the meeting.
Yeah the answer is actually MORE meetings which are shorter and have 5 or fewer participants. I can’t tell you how many 1 hour meetings I’ve sat through with 20 people, only 2 of whom are talking.
I’ve personally opted to simply turn off my video in all calls and force them to be audio-only. I do this for the reasons in the OP but also to subtly encourage others to opt for audio-only and to make the space more equitable for all.
Sometimes I’m the only one without a video but it doesn’t seem to bother those I work with so I keep doing it. I find this to be best, tbh.
What kills me is the problems with audio and its effects on conversational engagement. Online calls are laggy, and participants aren't all on the same volume level. It's incredibly frustrating when I speak and someone says that my volume is low, so I should repeat myself. And the lag makes turn-taking very unnatural---in meatspace conversations, people interrupt each other and cede the floor all the time. You can't do that in a Zoom call.
Taken together, Zoom is a deeply frustrating experience because the limitations of the technology get in the way of having normal human conversations. It looks like it should work, but it doesn't.
I got used to platforms like TeamSpeak where everybody had individual volume sliders. It was excellent. Whatever Zoom does to automatically adjust everyone's volume is a poor replacement and it leads to exactly the issue you describe. Sure it's cheaper than sending out a bunch of individual audio streams or doing multiple transcodes server-side, but we've lost a lot of flexibility. I'd quite like P2P systems like Jitsi to bridge the gap.
One thing I also noticed is that good audio quality really improves things. Even if the current audio quality doesn't consciously register as bad, low quality leads to much more exhaustion over a longer period of time. This can be observed when someone switches from a bad internal laptop mic to a high quality headset. The voice is so much more easy to listen to.
It's much more important to just ban Bluetooth. And also wired Jabra headsets that inexplicably still sound like Bluetooth. No more tin can sound, no more dropped words when someone starts talking. Yes, even an internal mic is better in this regard, though it will have problems with echo cancellation.
In addition to audio quality, people have _constant_ problems with their audio setup across all platforms when using Bluetooth. I've gotten to the point where I will just outright buy someone a plain USB mic just so I can consistently get them on a call without 10 minutes of fumbling audio interfaces.
Unfortunately, even after buying them a USB mic + explicitly banning Bluetooth on calls I still catch devs trying to use their fancy Bluetooth gaming headset (or whatever) which can easily push meeting start times back by 5-10 minutes.
Some conference apps just suck at audio. Teams will always pick the wrong mic / headphones, even though I don't have any bluetooth headset connected. And even after I've managed to convince it to use the right one during a call, for the very next call it forgets everything.
But yeah, to your mic point, some people just don't seem to care. I have a weekly conference with someone who takes it from his open office. I can hear his colleague way better than I can hear him.
I guess I was doing some these things already and didnt know it. Standing desk locked in the up position for zoom marathon days. Stepping back from the screens and camera when there isnt any reason to have hands on kb/m.
I'm a usual pacer when on the phone so I'm not sure if that's instinct or habit but it certainly helps.
Scheduling is also not mentioned surprisingly, but leaving 5-15m buffer gaps between back to back meetings I run is huge. When I dont do that I pay for it.
I've tried leaving 15 minute buffers in between meetings. All that happens is that my colleagues schedule 15 minute long meetings in the gaps. It's exhausting.
There’s a concept called defensive calendaring I would encourage you to look up.
I regularly schedule focus time or project time on my calendar and when I had days of stacked meetings, I’ll fill in the gaps with focus time to ensure I’m not overbooked.
I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s plugins or tools to help, though I do it fairly manually.
You say no to them. I have a standing time reserved for school run. People regularly book stuff over it. I reject the meeting automatically. If I have 'busy' in my calendar because I don't want to be disturbed I first take a look what this new invite is and then decide on the spot with no or yes (no being the dominant response). Slowly over time people learn to email or Slack you with a few dates and times and life is good.
if you have time booked on your calendar, no matter what it is, it's safe to assume anything else put on top is going to be declined, because you already have something scheduled.
You can add a regular meeting for yourself too, instead of focus time, also set your calendar not to share meetings' details with other folks, so they will only see 'busy'
Did they mention general meeting fatigue? Just before covid I was doing some contract for org with many developers. Amount of meetings they had was staggering. I am an independent vendor and organize my time however I see fit but if I was forced to participate in the insanity I've observed I would go insane.
> Take notes: Taking notes can help you remember important points and reduce cognitive load.
I often do this in online meetings, but have two not-entirely-solved problems with it:
1. People might think I'm not paying attention when I am, especially in 2-person meetings. (They might hear the typing, and my gaze might shift at times. When I do need a sec to type an action item or something that takes longer than a pause in a 2-person meeting, I can say that. People also don't know that I'm only typing notes for the meeting, not, say, processing other things, until they know me well enough to know that I'd say if I had to respond to an urgent Slack message or something.)
2. People don't always want everything recorded/documented. Say, a concern about personnel, or how some dependency is going, morale, or a personal challenge affecting someone's work. In an in-person meeting, if I've been taking notes and want to signal that something is more off-the-record, I could put down my pen, take hands off the keyboard, or close notepad portfolio. In videoconf, when they can't see my typing hands, there aren't as good subtle signals, and I might have to verbalize somehow that I'm not taking notes.
Hey regarding the first “problem” I’m the exact same.
If it’s someone new to me who doesn’t know me I’ll often slip it into conversation that I’m taking notes;
“So you’re saying that the xyz project is going to need abc? Ok cool, I’m just gonna add that to my notes here real quick” - I’ll do that early on a call.
Or I’ll read back the important points I took in a real obvious way.
I think I do this because it bothers the shit out of me if someone is obviously typing away on slack or whatever and not properly engaging in the meeting and I don’t wanna be seen as that guy
Maybe it's obvious, but I find resizing the window much smaller helps a lot with the close eye contact thing. Slack's huddles are good for this — their UI seems to be designed to be a small thing in the corner while you're doing other stuff.
I also used to find it disconcerting watching some YouTubers film themselves with their face taking up the entire screen. I must have got used to that though as I've not noticed it in a while.
A huge contributor they missed: technical faults. Between glitchy connections and people's inadequate microphone setups, everyone is constantly asking each other to repeat themselves. This is exhausting to me.
The perspective mismatch between desktop and laptop users can be a bit funny, laptop users tend to be close to the screen, so they take up their cameras’ full field of view. Blown up on a big desktop screen it is like they are right in your face. It really can feel uncomfortably intimate, as silly as that sounds!
Luckily my monitor was on an arm, so I could do one setup for Zoom, one for meetings.
I want to figure out a better way to do this. (The worst was when my extreme closeup was combined with some remote conference room that put videoconf people up on large wall displays. So, besides the larger-than-life HD pore inspection, it might've seemed I was glowering down upon them from above.)
I use a laptop on a "lectern" standing desk that gets wheeled around for natural light, etc.
I already use a corded USB camera, but if I put it on an arm rather than on top of laptop, there's even more eye contact disconnect from the laptop display.
I probably have to get a big external monitor, so that I can be looking at it from greater distance. Which I'd guess means either a fixed location for videoconf (the monitor is in a fixed location, whether or not my standing desk is), or a much larger standing desk to wheel around.
IMO if you are working from home it is worthwhile to invest in a nice setup. You’ll want that big screen for coding anyway, right?
I got one of those silly ring lights (so I wouldn’t have to worry about natural lighting) and managed to mount my webcam inside it, it worked pretty well. I don’t think people expect a pro twitch setup, but you can get pretty close with basic consumer gear!
The whole mirror fatique thing is really interesting. I get enormous social anxiety on virtual calls and am constantly checking my mirror. I hate teams for that reason, i can't properly see what I am transmitting while Google meet is showing me Exactly what I'm sending in HD. I think I'll have to experiment with removing that and see if it reduces my anxiety
I feel like a halfway is needed. Maybe a virtual silhouette that shows my err blocking within the shot, while obscuring more detailed mirroring. Wonder if that would help.
I’m a big advocate of reducing Zoom/screen fatigue by doing manual labor after the work day. Do a home maintenance project, throw a ball with the kids in the backyard, etc.
When it’s not blisteringly hot out we actually will take a 30-45 minute walk around midday. Helps a ton and has a side effect of allowing my subconscious to solve the problems I’ve been stuck on.
Oh man the struggle in the real. I quit zoom at exactly 5pm and run downstairs and out the door for daycare. I’m at daycare around 5:20 and to pick up the little one to come home, cook, eat, bath and bed time.
The lack of time to decompress after the day (like commutes used to help with before I went fully remote) can be gruelling at times
I read over the pandemic that dogs are hyper-sensitive to space [1], and I believe that humans are too. Much more than we're aware.
And while bad internet connections, mics, webcams, etc all contribute to a less enjoyable time collaborating with colleagues, I believe they are all trumped by the fact that video conference absolutely shatters the evolutionary understanding we have of space, and how to navigate it to interact with others.
This is why audio-only calls feel so much better. It's basically just like talking to your friends at a sleepover with the lights out. It's not quite the same because you can't get closer or further from specific individuals, but for smaller groups it works pretty well.
But when we turn video feeds on, things get very strange. Zoom puts everyone into the same exact chair, staring at a mirror where they can see everyone else in the reflection.
This makes it seem like everyone is staring directly at you. And they are very close, sometimes even in your lap.
Keith Johnstone's book Impro says a whole lot about space, including:
> If I stand two students face to face and about a foot apart they're likely to feel a strong desire to change their body position. If they don't move they'll begin to feel love or hate as their 'space' streams into each other. To prevent these feelings they'll modify their positions until their space flows out relatively unhindered, or they'll move back so that the force isn't so powerful. High-status players (like high-status seagulls) will allow their space to flow into other people. Low-status players will avoid letting their space flow into other people. Kneeling, bowing and prostrating one-self are all ritualized low-status ways of shutting off your space. If we wish to humiliate and degrade a low-status person we attack him while refusing to let him switch his space off. A sergeant-major will stand a recruit to attention and then scream at his face from about an inch away. Crucifixion exploits this effect, which is why it's such a powerful symbol as compared to, say, boiling someone in oil.
All this is to say that I believe that the Vision Pro has a lot of potential to be a game-changer for remote conferencing. It's focus on "spatial computing" makes it so that we can flex those evolutionary muscles around space again.
[1] Let Dogs be Dogs by the Monks of New Skete. Great book
I don't have video of me broadcasting because I simply can't, and nobody ever questions it because they don't really care as it's a non-essential component.
I do make heavy use of visual aids & other screen sharing, so that people can look at what we are discussing, not me.
I don't get fatigue at all, but always keep my video off and do other things if the content of the meeting isn't directly relevant to me.
The idea that we shouldn't differentiate based on appearances doesn't jive with a world where we need video calling on. Either people produce or they don't. Nobody needs to be staring at the screen and considering their appearance for the duration of a meeting.
And yes the majority of meetings tend not to be relevant for the majority of attendees most of the time. Responsible people know how to differentiate the two
I think this is because some jobs translate better to remote than others. We have the trope in popular culture of a bunch of people at work, sitting in a meeting; where being face-to-face is the norm for most of the day.
This translates really poorly to full-time remote.
But there's a more sinister aspect: I've gotten a vibe from some "bosses" that they like big meetings because it makes them feel important. The "perpetual Zoom" helps feed that ego.
Is it possible to organize productive work conversations in the format of HN threads? Not Zoom meetings, not Slack, not emails. Why would this work? Why would it not?
Being back in the office has helped...but my company has satellite offices and teams (created before the satellites were established) scattered all over the region. I don't think any teams are complete in a single office. So we still have a lot of zooming.
