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This seems like a personality thing and reflects the type of culture company leaders want to create. Every other comment in this thread is "I don't like video,

This seems like a personality thing and reflects the type of culture company leaders want to create. Every other comment in this thread is "I don't like video, not conducive to how I think/work" or "I like video, makes me feel engaged and part of a team". My bet is this is not a better/worse thing but more of a mars/venus thing (I'm definitely, as someone on a remote team myself, in the video camp). The other strange thing you hear a lot is that any attempt to get people to be on-site or on-video (basically anything other than fully async, text only) is attributed to control-freak tendencies by terrible managers. Again going back to my above point and the fact that so many people here agree that video is better for them, I wish we could dispense with speculatively attributing motives so negatively and give people the benefit of the doubt that, right or wrong, they hold their POV because it is what they actually believe is best.

k__ 7y ago
Yes, probably. Guess, I'm seeing it like that, because I worked with control freaks.
ghaff 7y ago
Yes. I don't think a team leader should be regarded as a control freak for wanting to encourage team cohesion and collaboration even if (or especially if) team members spend a lot of their days working independently. I get that some people--perhaps especially engineers--would rather just be left in their cave to communicate asynchronously if and when they want to. But I don't blame managers/leaders for considering that a suboptimal practice taken to an extreme. Personally, I mostly work fairly independently on a day-to-day basis but I also work with both formal and informal broader teams and it definitely helps to know the people I work with as something other than a nickname on chat.