8 ms·

> following a day of virtual meetings I've done full days of real meetings. Those were exhausting and very draining. I'm surprised that anybody would expect an

by lucumo 5y ago

> following a day of virtual meetings I've done full days of real meetings. Those were exhausting and very draining. I'm surprised that anybody would expect anything different from virtual meetings. I have noticed that it's harder to feel people as fully human when they're little 2D movies. Even moreso when they're disembodied voices. It's less so when I've met the people IRL. I'm guessing I can then link their image or voice to the human I know. In my experience, there's also far less participation when everybody has their camera off.

Gigachad 5y ago
Personally I have started leaving the camera on because it’s incredibly tempting to just use my phone and tune out with the camera off. I have also noticed that camera off people tend to speak a lot less than those with it on.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- b3morales 5y ago
  > I have also noticed that camera off people tend to speak a lot less than those with it on. I think you're implying causality from camera off to speaking less, but I'd bet that it's more likely the other way around. That is, people in meetings where they're pretty sure they have nothing to say don't feel they need to be seen if they're not going to be talking.
fartcannon 5y ago
Like those who can't touch type now, being exhausted by video calls may eventually be the exception. I expect to see a generational gap here. The twitch streaming, discord VC generation are not going to have the problems you're describing with video calls.
- BlargMcLarg 5y ago
  I'd argue against Twitch since these are more consumer-supplier. If anything, that'd prove the point of having only the primary speaker be visible while the remainder stays largely quiet or asks questions Q&A style. On the flipside I could argue the situation is more akin to playing a multiplayer game over VC, at least for meetings that aren't "let's stare at cameras for (half) an hour". Your virtual space is limited, so audio becomes a more favorable channel and cues on the visual side need to be a lot stronger than wishy-washy human cues to be effective (e.g. explosive sticker emotes, popup text). I'm sure anyone who has an idea can compare this scenario to your average "look at my screen" video call.
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    It is obnoxious that management wants video calls, when an incredible amount of business was happily done over the phone. And in person is definitely the least necessary, just a relic of an older time.
- rchaud 5y ago
  I'm sure people would pay more attention in sprint grooming meetings if 90% of the screen was showing video game footage instead of Jira.
kodah 5y ago
Some context: I'm a lead engineer on a team with six products. I keep my camera off in meetings. I'm in far more meetings than I can possibly be productive in. I'm also usually not the active speaker in meetings. Why stare into a camera when what my yearly bonuses are calculated on is work/team output? I've found most meetings I get into are either: - Developers who can't figure something out from documentation and are too impatient (or sometimes critical) to be helped over Slack. - Executives who would rather speak than send an email or create a Slack thread. It's not useful for me to pay attention the whole time when I'm also responsible for delivering code and 50-75% of my day is meetings. The exceptions I have for this are: - 1:1's - Interviews
- sz4kerto 5y ago
  > I'm in far more meetings than I can possibly be productive in. > I'm also responsible for delivering code and 50-75% of my day is meetings. There's an organisational issue here.
  - klodolph 5y ago
    Yes, that sounds like an organizational issue. It's a common organizational issue without easy solutions.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    Not necessarily. "delivering code" is not the same as "writing code" after all. It's very likely that half the meetings are with product, and higher ups, to discuss what the dev team can deliver, and the other half are with the dev team to discuss what they're going to deliver. The way to avoid those meetings is to write documents instead, but you'd still not be writing code.
  - ratww 5y ago
    For the first quote maybe. But for the second ("I'm also responsible for delivering code and 50-75% of my day is meetings"), not really. Technical Managers and Tech Leads need to participate in meetings but some also need/want to keep their coding skills and codebase knowledge sharp. A compromise is spending only 25%-50% of the time coding. Some people are good with both and prefer to keep doing it. There's no one-size-fits-all solution.
vosper 5y ago
Agreed on how draining a full day of face—to-face meetings is, our worse: a full-day conference meeting. I once went to one at the company that had acquired us. It was a literal airing-of-grievances meeting for the engineering managers, that they ran annually, so that people could get shit off their chests. It was by far the most dysfunctional and stupid meeting I’ve ever had to endure. We had to fly to Chicago for it. If it was virtual I’d have turned my camera off and chilled out, and come away a fraction as stressed. As it was my team went straight to the bar, and a week later one of my colleagues - foreseeing her future amongst these people - quit. I think there’s a lot of rose-tinting on how great in-person meetings actually used to be.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I just can't keep focus on online meetings, everything said just quickly washes over me. IRL meetings are a bit more engaging, but if they become more presentation-style, I just fall asleep (either in the sense of "I'm not paying attention" or "zzzz").
dkdk8283 5y ago
I turn off the camera and walk around- this leads to more energy and better engagement for me.
- gumby 5y ago
  This isn’t to knock it, just double clicking on your statement: I can well believe it leads to more engagement on your part, for the reasons you describe. I feel the same way. But do other people engage with your comments etc? Does your enthusiasm bring out other people.
  - dkdk8283 5y ago
    In response to my contributions? Yes
    - gumby 5y ago
      That’s very encouraging!
makeitdouble 5y ago
> In my experience, there's also far less participation when everybody has their camera off. I feel this is a blessing in most cases. Remembering in-person meetings, half of the “participation” was asking to get back one slide before to check a point that went too fast, questions on points that are dealt with two slides further, people getting asked questions as a punishment for being visibly bored to death, and facts that could be checked by a 10s document search but would seem rude to be looking for right now. Forcing people to share their documents, everyone free to get back and forth in the slides on their side, and just able to cut the camera/mic and look for whatever they feel they need to look for, do whatever they need to do just helps tremendously to cut down on unneeded back and forth, and improves a lot on efficiency.
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  > get back one slide This is all even worse if you try to carry over the same process to remote work. I feel like virtual meetings increase the emphasis on slides too much. In person, the presenter can be up front, gesturing, pointing, really bringing animation to the slides. In virtual meetings it's just the screen share of the slide and a talking head. It's a horribly unengaging experience.
  - pwr-electronics 5y ago
    The easy fix to this is sharing presentation files before the meeting so everyone can follow along however they want. Meetings should mostly be to discuss the information that you already have, not to be surprised with brand new information.
    - BobbyJo 5y ago
      Couldn't agree more with this, however it's hard to make happen in practice. A lot of times people are so caught up in their own tasks and responsibilities they don't set aside time to read up before a meeting, not to mention slides/docs are rarely laid out well enough for people to inform themselves completely.
raxxorrax 5y ago
In our company we do it exclusively without a camera since we mostly show the workspace of someone while talking about it or the document to be discussed. Exceptions are sometimes meetings with externals or job interviews, when it is nice to be able to see someone at least once. I really don't get the appeal otherwise, why not use the time to write something down at least? An exception is the sales department which prefers to use a camera for obvious reasons. But engineers vary rarely use cameras. I don't even have one right now in my office. I think if you know the people you are talking with, a camera isn't needed to "feel" people.
the_snooze 5y ago
>I have noticed that it's harder to feel people as fully human when they're little 2D movies. Even moreso when they're disembodied voices. This is exactly how see online meetings. It doesn't feel like I'm interacting with real people. I can't gauge people's level of attention. Conversational turn-taking feels like swimming through mud. And we don't even have the basic expectation that speaking more loudly (or softly) is perceived accurately by the listeners. Just a deeply frustrating experience all around.
ljf 5y ago
Across my roles in the past 10 years or more, I've probably spent more than the average amount of time in f2f meetings - and I am someone that enjoys a great f2f meeting or ideas generation/problem solving session. When we first moved to video due to covid I was exhausted every single day. I grew to hate video calls. But how much of this was my inexperience with the tech, my own lockdown tiredness and just the general funk of life at the time, I cannot say. 18 months later I LOVE video calls. I love the fact that I'm in my own comfy quite space, I love the fact that I can move from standing to sitting and back without distracting those on The calls. I love that I can turn my video and mic off and have a pace around or eat some food. It is great - and yes as you say the video helps hugely. Years ago I was working with an international team that my local team were struggling with. Each day we'd be in a phone call and I could feel the tension simmering. Then we got video going, saw we were all humans and got back in the problem, solved it and came out of the delivery good friends. I swear being able to see them and knowing they could see us changed everything about how we worked together and behaved.
Minor49er 5y ago
> I have noticed that it's harder to feel people as fully human when they're little 2D movies. Even moreso when they're disembodied voices. I've had the opposite feeling. With cameras on, everyone looks at each other's faces for cues on when to start speaking, but the lag leads to people speaking over each other. There are a bunch of "oops, sorry" moments followed by a lot of awkward pausing while we try to climb back out of the uncanny valley.
JohnFen 5y ago
> there's also far less participation when everybody has their camera off. In my experience, participation doesn't seem to be related to whether the camera is on or off. Participation is generally reduced because such meetings really only allow one person to speak at a time, and if you aren't extroverted then you have a hard time horning in to be able to speak. It also makes actual group conversation essentially impossible. Virtual meetings work best when there's a single presenter addressing an audience. They're really awful when everyone is expected to chime in.

by lucumo 5y ago

Gigachad 5y ago

Personally I have started leaving the camera on because it’s incredibly tempting to just use my phone and tune out with the camera off. I have also noticed that camera off people tend to speak a lot less than those with it on.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
b3morales 5y ago
> I have also noticed that camera off people tend to speak a lot less than those with it on. I think you're implying causality from camera off to speaking less, but I'd bet that it's more likely the other way around. That is, people in meetings where they're pretty sure they have nothing to say don't feel they need to be seen if they're not going to be talking.

fartcannon 5y ago

Like those who can't touch type now, being exhausted by video calls may eventually be the exception. I expect to see a generational gap here. The twitch streaming, discord VC generation are not going to have the problems you're describing with video calls.

BlargMcLarg 5y ago
I'd argue against Twitch since these are more consumer-supplier. If anything, that'd prove the point of having only the primary speaker be visible while the remainder stays largely quiet or asks questions Q&A style. On the flipside I could argue the situation is more akin to playing a multiplayer game over VC, at least for meetings that aren't "let's stare at cameras for (half) an hour". Your virtual space is limited, so audio becomes a more favorable channel and cues on the visual side need to be a lot stronger than wishy-washy human cues to be effective (e.g. explosive sticker emotes, popup text). I'm sure anyone who has an idea can compare this scenario to your average "look at my screen" video call.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  It is obnoxious that management wants video calls, when an incredible amount of business was happily done over the phone. And in person is definitely the least necessary, just a relic of an older time.
rchaud 5y ago
I'm sure people would pay more attention in sprint grooming meetings if 90% of the screen was showing video game footage instead of Jira.

kodah 5y ago

Some context: I'm a lead engineer on a team with six products. I keep my camera off in meetings. I'm in far more meetings than I can possibly be productive in. I'm also usually not the active speaker in meetings. Why stare into a camera when what my yearly bonuses are calculated on is work/team output? I've found most meetings I get into are either: - Developers who can't figure something out from documentation and are too impatient (or sometimes critical) to be helped over Slack. - Executives who would rather speak than send an email or create a Slack thread. It's not useful for me to pay attention the whole time when I'm also responsible for delivering code and 50-75% of my day is meetings. The exceptions I have for this are: - 1:1's - Interviews

sz4kerto 5y ago
> I'm in far more meetings than I can possibly be productive in. > I'm also responsible for delivering code and 50-75% of my day is meetings. There's an organisational issue here.
- klodolph 5y ago
  Yes, that sounds like an organizational issue. It's a common organizational issue without easy solutions.
- onion2k 5y ago
  Not necessarily. "delivering code" is not the same as "writing code" after all. It's very likely that half the meetings are with product, and higher ups, to discuss what the dev team can deliver, and the other half are with the dev team to discuss what they're going to deliver. The way to avoid those meetings is to write documents instead, but you'd still not be writing code.
- ratww 5y ago
  For the first quote maybe. But for the second ("I'm also responsible for delivering code and 50-75% of my day is meetings"), not really. Technical Managers and Tech Leads need to participate in meetings but some also need/want to keep their coding skills and codebase knowledge sharp. A compromise is spending only 25%-50% of the time coding. Some people are good with both and prefer to keep doing it. There's no one-size-fits-all solution.

vosper 5y ago

Agreed on how draining a full day of face—to-face meetings is, our worse: a full-day conference meeting. I once went to one at the company that had acquired us. It was a literal airing-of-grievances meeting for the engineering managers, that they ran annually, so that people could get shit off their chests. It was by far the most dysfunctional and stupid meeting I’ve ever had to endure. We had to fly to Chicago for it. If it was virtual I’d have turned my camera off and chilled out, and come away a fraction as stressed. As it was my team went straight to the bar, and a week later one of my colleagues - foreseeing her future amongst these people - quit. I think there’s a lot of rose-tinting on how great in-person meetings actually used to be.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

I just can't keep focus on online meetings, everything said just quickly washes over me. IRL meetings are a bit more engaging, but if they become more presentation-style, I just fall asleep (either in the sense of "I'm not paying attention" or "zzzz").

dkdk8283 5y ago

I turn off the camera and walk around- this leads to more energy and better engagement for me.

gumby 5y ago
This isn’t to knock it, just double clicking on your statement: I can well believe it leads to more engagement on your part, for the reasons you describe. I feel the same way. But do other people engage with your comments etc? Does your enthusiasm bring out other people.
- dkdk8283 5y ago
  In response to my contributions? Yes
  - gumby 5y ago
    That’s very encouraging!

makeitdouble 5y ago

> In my experience, there's also far less participation when everybody has their camera off. I feel this is a blessing in most cases. Remembering in-person meetings, half of the “participation” was asking to get back one slide before to check a point that went too fast, questions on points that are dealt with two slides further, people getting asked questions as a punishment for being visibly bored to death, and facts that could be checked by a 10s document search but would seem rude to be looking for right now. Forcing people to share their documents, everyone free to get back and forth in the slides on their side, and just able to cut the camera/mic and look for whatever they feel they need to look for, do whatever they need to do just helps tremendously to cut down on unneeded back and forth, and improves a lot on efficiency.

BobbyJo 5y ago
> get back one slide This is all even worse if you try to carry over the same process to remote work. I feel like virtual meetings increase the emphasis on slides too much. In person, the presenter can be up front, gesturing, pointing, really bringing animation to the slides. In virtual meetings it's just the screen share of the slide and a talking head. It's a horribly unengaging experience.
- pwr-electronics 5y ago
  The easy fix to this is sharing presentation files before the meeting so everyone can follow along however they want. Meetings should mostly be to discuss the information that you already have, not to be surprised with brand new information.
  - BobbyJo 5y ago
    Couldn't agree more with this, however it's hard to make happen in practice. A lot of times people are so caught up in their own tasks and responsibilities they don't set aside time to read up before a meeting, not to mention slides/docs are rarely laid out well enough for people to inform themselves completely.

raxxorrax 5y ago

In our company we do it exclusively without a camera since we mostly show the workspace of someone while talking about it or the document to be discussed. Exceptions are sometimes meetings with externals or job interviews, when it is nice to be able to see someone at least once. I really don't get the appeal otherwise, why not use the time to write something down at least? An exception is the sales department which prefers to use a camera for obvious reasons. But engineers vary rarely use cameras. I don't even have one right now in my office. I think if you know the people you are talking with, a camera isn't needed to "feel" people.

the_snooze 5y ago

>I have noticed that it's harder to feel people as fully human when they're little 2D movies. Even moreso when they're disembodied voices. This is exactly how see online meetings. It doesn't feel like I'm interacting with real people. I can't gauge people's level of attention. Conversational turn-taking feels like swimming through mud. And we don't even have the basic expectation that speaking more loudly (or softly) is perceived accurately by the listeners. Just a deeply frustrating experience all around.

ljf 5y ago

Across my roles in the past 10 years or more, I've probably spent more than the average amount of time in f2f meetings - and I am someone that enjoys a great f2f meeting or ideas generation/problem solving session. When we first moved to video due to covid I was exhausted every single day. I grew to hate video calls. But how much of this was my inexperience with the tech, my own lockdown tiredness and just the general funk of life at the time, I cannot say. 18 months later I LOVE video calls. I love the fact that I'm in my own comfy quite space, I love the fact that I can move from standing to sitting and back without distracting those on The calls. I love that I can turn my video and mic off and have a pace around or eat some food. It is great - and yes as you say the video helps hugely. Years ago I was working with an international team that my local team were struggling with. Each day we'd be in a phone call and I could feel the tension simmering. Then we got video going, saw we were all humans and got back in the problem, solved it and came out of the delivery good friends. I swear being able to see them and knowing they could see us changed everything about how we worked together and behaved.

Minor49er 5y ago

> I have noticed that it's harder to feel people as fully human when they're little 2D movies. Even moreso when they're disembodied voices. I've had the opposite feeling. With cameras on, everyone looks at each other's faces for cues on when to start speaking, but the lag leads to people speaking over each other. There are a bunch of "oops, sorry" moments followed by a lot of awkward pausing while we try to climb back out of the uncanny valley.

JohnFen 5y ago

> there's also far less participation when everybody has their camera off. In my experience, participation doesn't seem to be related to whether the camera is on or off. Participation is generally reduced because such meetings really only allow one person to speak at a time, and if you aren't extroverted then you have a hard time horning in to be able to speak. It also makes actual group conversation essentially impossible. Virtual meetings work best when there's a single presenter addressing an audience. They're really awful when everyone is expected to chime in.