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> Don’t mute No, please, do mute. I don't want to hear a baby crying in the background while the SO tries to calm them down, nor do I want to hear someone doin

> Don’t mute No, please, do mute. I don't want to hear a baby crying in the background while the SO tries to calm them down, nor do I want to hear someone doing the dishes, or the police siren that seems to have stopped in a congested area. We have work to do. Please, let's get it done and stop the meeting. Also, thank you Google for enabling people to mute other participants who do not realize how loud their environment is. This article seems to come from a place where people live in big, spacious places (possibly rural North America? I could see Canada). The reality for me is that most of my coworkers work from a 1- or 2-bedroom studios crammed with kids and/or their significant others.

falcolas 6y ago
Highly personal opinion, there's no need to mute in those scenarios either (at least in low participant count videos). It makes the speaker able to adapt to things that are impacting their listener's attention. Even if they're muted, a child crying is going to take their attention, and its better that the speaker is aware of it. A simple noise canceling microphone takes care of distant, and thus unimportant sounds. EDIT: Please take note of the "in low participant count videos" caveat above before lambasting me about how this doesn't work in 40 person meetings. I'm talking about meetings with 3-4 people.
- stingraycharles 6y ago
  This simply doesn’t work in the long run, and/or at scale. For me someone who doesn’t mute while they’re not talking is a dead giveaway they haven’t been doing remote work for very long. It’s simply rude to broadcast your noise to the entire group of people, let alone dozens of people doing so at the same time. If your child is crying, it’s fine, I understand how things are, and of course I’ll understand you’re distracted. However, I’m not fine with your child distracting all 20 people on the call.
- pen2l 6y ago
  My opinion: no, do mute, as just another adhd kiddo, man those police sirens will bring me down in no time. I get what you're saying though, and I recognize there's value in folks getting to know a little bit of each other's situation -- but I think we can just let each other know of our situations verbally when an event rises to the level of a certain importance, and minimize the unimportant sounds as much as possible.
- GhostVII 6y ago
  Hearing a child crying doesn't just make me aware that someone is distracted, it also distracts me and makes it much harder to communicate. I would much rather have one person on the call be distracted while on mute than have the entire call be distracted. Also depending on what video conferencing software you use, background noise like crying continually interrupts the speaker and makes it really hard to hear. Nothing annoys me more than people having background noise and not muting themselves, no one should be pushing crying babies and barking dogs to my headphones without a reason it completely ruins the call for me. If I really need to know if they are distracted, I can just look at their video.
  - saurik 6y ago
    I think a big difference is the assumption of the kind of meeting you are in; for most of the business meetings I consider valuable, if there is someone distracted by a transient issue the meeting should stop and wait, and if it doesn't they are just going to have to stop everything themselves to request things be repeated for them. If you are in a meeting and it doesn't matter if you are distracted you aren't really participating, are you? ;P So like, definitely mute the call as you are just an observer.
- juliansimioni 6y ago
  The answer probably depends on if it's a big or small meeting. For a 1-on-1, you absolutely want to know if the other person on the call is going to be distracted, or you're wasting your time. For a 40 person all hands, the meeting could probably never proceed if it waited for everyone to be completely distraction free.
pwinnski 6y ago
The TL;DR has as point 1: don't work in a place where babies crying or dish-washing or police sirens are an issue, and then as part of point 4: therefore, don't mute. If you have a baby crying or police sirens, then yes, for the sake of everybody's sanity, mute yourself. For sure.
- kazinator 6y ago
  > don't work in a place where babies crying or dish-washing or police sirens are an issue I.e. don't work in the middle of a global pandemic. A headset mic will pick up your loud typing, sniffling, clearing your throat, and whatever. Even if you are working out of a sound-proofed office, and in a group call, mute your mic when not speaking.
  - camgunz 6y ago
    I take your point—these are weird times. But one, hopefully they won’t last forever and remote work will be here to stay. Two, I’ve maybe never had a workplace that wasn’t full of distractions, including police sirens and dishwashing (but let’s toss in random political conversations, free lunch food, ping pong, doors slamming, etc etc). I’m on team Spolsky where everyone gets an office, but I’m also aware it’ll never, ever happen.
  - falcolas 6y ago
    > A headset mic will pick up your loud typing, ... and whatever. Not necessarily. A cheap one will, since it acts as an omnidirectional microphone. A good one, however, will have a hypercardoid microphone and an externally directed second omnidirectional microphone hooked up to a noise canceling circuit that renders external sounds effectively inaudible. I can type on my keyboard with my Antlion mic on, and it's not audible to others (even though it's fairly loud to my ears). And yes, I tested this with a local recording first. That said, I agree that coughing, clearing your throat, and such are definitely mute moments.
    - LukeShu 6y ago
      I had a headset mic that worked fine as long as I plugged it directly in to my laptop. Then one day I plugged it in to the port on my laptop's dock, instead of the plug on the laptop itself. In the dock's port it was suddenly so sensitive that it was picking up the slightest sound out of the headphones (and immediately feeding back)! And a conversation going on in the neighboring conference room, that I couldn't even hear on my own! Unless you really focused on something it was just insane loud background noise. But, it was fine once I turned the mic volume down to like 2%. But also, my words could be made out even with the insane sensitivity--I guess that's pretty impressive dynamic range. So: 1. If you're picking up things on the mic you think you shouldn't, try turning down the mic's volume, it might be that your voice stays loud enough, but everything else drops off. 2. If you're getting background noise now, it might not be your new setting, it might be your computer hardware. If you're using different computing hardware maybe you need to fuss with the volume even though it's the same headset as before.
deleted 6y ago
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spullara 6y ago
Highly recommend NVIDIA Broadcast which will silence almost all background noise.
chrismorgan 6y ago
You seem to have skipped the entire context of the article and that point, which is having good acoustics, including “get away from other people” and “get a better microphone”. If you don’t have both of those, then the advice is manifestly inapplicable.

falcolas 6y ago

Highly personal opinion, there's no need to mute in those scenarios either (at least in low participant count videos). It makes the speaker able to adapt to things that are impacting their listener's attention. Even if they're muted, a child crying is going to take their attention, and its better that the speaker is aware of it. A simple noise canceling microphone takes care of distant, and thus unimportant sounds. EDIT: Please take note of the "in low participant count videos" caveat above before lambasting me about how this doesn't work in 40 person meetings. I'm talking about meetings with 3-4 people.

stingraycharles 6y ago
This simply doesn’t work in the long run, and/or at scale. For me someone who doesn’t mute while they’re not talking is a dead giveaway they haven’t been doing remote work for very long. It’s simply rude to broadcast your noise to the entire group of people, let alone dozens of people doing so at the same time. If your child is crying, it’s fine, I understand how things are, and of course I’ll understand you’re distracted. However, I’m not fine with your child distracting all 20 people on the call.
pen2l 6y ago
My opinion: no, do mute, as just another adhd kiddo, man those police sirens will bring me down in no time. I get what you're saying though, and I recognize there's value in folks getting to know a little bit of each other's situation -- but I think we can just let each other know of our situations verbally when an event rises to the level of a certain importance, and minimize the unimportant sounds as much as possible.
GhostVII 6y ago
Hearing a child crying doesn't just make me aware that someone is distracted, it also distracts me and makes it much harder to communicate. I would much rather have one person on the call be distracted while on mute than have the entire call be distracted. Also depending on what video conferencing software you use, background noise like crying continually interrupts the speaker and makes it really hard to hear. Nothing annoys me more than people having background noise and not muting themselves, no one should be pushing crying babies and barking dogs to my headphones without a reason it completely ruins the call for me. If I really need to know if they are distracted, I can just look at their video.
- saurik 6y ago
  I think a big difference is the assumption of the kind of meeting you are in; for most of the business meetings I consider valuable, if there is someone distracted by a transient issue the meeting should stop and wait, and if it doesn't they are just going to have to stop everything themselves to request things be repeated for them. If you are in a meeting and it doesn't matter if you are distracted you aren't really participating, are you? ;P So like, definitely mute the call as you are just an observer.
juliansimioni 6y ago
The answer probably depends on if it's a big or small meeting. For a 1-on-1, you absolutely want to know if the other person on the call is going to be distracted, or you're wasting your time. For a 40 person all hands, the meeting could probably never proceed if it waited for everyone to be completely distraction free.

pwinnski 6y ago

The TL;DR has as point 1: don't work in a place where babies crying or dish-washing or police sirens are an issue, and then as part of point 4: therefore, don't mute. If you have a baby crying or police sirens, then yes, for the sake of everybody's sanity, mute yourself. For sure.

kazinator 6y ago
> don't work in a place where babies crying or dish-washing or police sirens are an issue I.e. don't work in the middle of a global pandemic. A headset mic will pick up your loud typing, sniffling, clearing your throat, and whatever. Even if you are working out of a sound-proofed office, and in a group call, mute your mic when not speaking.
- camgunz 6y ago
  I take your point—these are weird times. But one, hopefully they won’t last forever and remote work will be here to stay. Two, I’ve maybe never had a workplace that wasn’t full of distractions, including police sirens and dishwashing (but let’s toss in random political conversations, free lunch food, ping pong, doors slamming, etc etc). I’m on team Spolsky where everyone gets an office, but I’m also aware it’ll never, ever happen.
- falcolas 6y ago
  > A headset mic will pick up your loud typing, ... and whatever. Not necessarily. A cheap one will, since it acts as an omnidirectional microphone. A good one, however, will have a hypercardoid microphone and an externally directed second omnidirectional microphone hooked up to a noise canceling circuit that renders external sounds effectively inaudible. I can type on my keyboard with my Antlion mic on, and it's not audible to others (even though it's fairly loud to my ears). And yes, I tested this with a local recording first. That said, I agree that coughing, clearing your throat, and such are definitely mute moments.
  - LukeShu 6y ago
    I had a headset mic that worked fine as long as I plugged it directly in to my laptop. Then one day I plugged it in to the port on my laptop's dock, instead of the plug on the laptop itself. In the dock's port it was suddenly so sensitive that it was picking up the slightest sound out of the headphones (and immediately feeding back)! And a conversation going on in the neighboring conference room, that I couldn't even hear on my own! Unless you really focused on something it was just insane loud background noise. But, it was fine once I turned the mic volume down to like 2%. But also, my words could be made out even with the insane sensitivity--I guess that's pretty impressive dynamic range. So: 1. If you're picking up things on the mic you think you shouldn't, try turning down the mic's volume, it might be that your voice stays loud enough, but everything else drops off. 2. If you're getting background noise now, it might not be your new setting, it might be your computer hardware. If you're using different computing hardware maybe you need to fuss with the volume even though it's the same headset as before.

deleted 6y ago

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spullara 6y ago

Highly recommend NVIDIA Broadcast which will silence almost all background noise.

chrismorgan 6y ago

You seem to have skipped the entire context of the article and that point, which is having good acoustics, including “get away from other people” and “get a better microphone”. If you don’t have both of those, then the advice is manifestly inapplicable.