13 ms·

What we lost

165 points by tylerchr 5y ago

ekianjo 5y ago
There are good points to be made as to how fake CGI looks in movies, but the parallel with an actual video feed is lacking.
- jay_kyburz 5y ago
  What we lost - CGI Carry Fisher is a bit wonky. What we gained - a young Carry Fisher again and some more Star Wars. Meh. But don't get me wrong, I think there is a huge value in sitting in a room with people working on the same code base as you. There is huge value in being able to just turn around and ask somebody about something that's got you stumped. Or to get feedback. Or even just to talk shop. This just happens a lot less when remote where I work. But also, I don't care that I can't smell my colleagues in meetings.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    > There is huge value in being able to just turn around and ask somebody about something that's got you stumped. Or to get feedback That's called interruptions. When I am coding this is the last thing I want, to have someone next to me bugging me with their random thoughts, or asking for a coffee.
- drewcoo 5y ago
  Well Zoom meetings are with fake CGI Princess Leia. And back in the office we actually have Carrie Fisher. She's been dead for a while now, so the office is really even more unpleasant than before this experiment. Clearer analogy?
mikewarot 5y ago
My computer club, APCU, just had the best zoom meeting ever....after almost 2 years of less than stellar results. we had flipped to the new mode that only shows the speaker in a big window, so you could see their face, and we all respected the silence. Letting things go quiet while everyone was thinking felt awesome. It was a slow, thoughtful exchange. I can't imagine trying to use Zoom for work. If you aren't able to let the pause happen, and slow the pace of discussion to allow for interruption without talking over people, it's just going to be a waste of time. Can people slow down on work calls and let this happen? I don't know.
mr_tristan 5y ago
> A video conference is a sterile dehumanizing experience. A good in-person meeting is pure jazz. Its elegant sparring between those who care deeply about the things they are building, and watching and participating in this banter is one of the joys of my professional career. This gave me a chuckle. After 20+ years in the business, the "pure jazz" in-person meetings vs "complete waste of time" in-person meeting ratio was, I don't know, 1:100. I can think of maybe 2 or 3 out of the last several years before the pandemic that were really consequential. There are great reasons to meet and hash things out, but honestly, if everyone's in the office, I've found that it's a green light for lazy managers to work out communication and team build by... having more meetings. Not running them well, not writing any actual decision down, just having a meeting and thinking it's progress. My main hope is that people use this remote-first time to really learn how to write and share writing. But, if I end up just getting people to learn how to start a Slack DM with a question instead of just "Hi! Are you there?", well, that will also be progress.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  > There are great reasons to meet and hash things out, but honestly, if everyone's in the office, I've found that it's a green light for lazy managers to work out communication and team build by... having more meetings. Not running them well, not writing any actual decision down, just having a meeting and thinking it's progress. In my office, this has gotten significantly worse during the pandemic. Death by a million zoom calls, we have far more meetings now than when we worked in the same space. Sure, we had plenty of dumb meetings then, but it has escalated to new heights in the last couple years.
  - droidist2 5y ago
    Agree, and at least in-person meetings give you human contact. Zoom meetings are like giving yourself a sunburn but also not getting any Vitamin D in the process.
  - mr_tristan 5y ago
    To be honest, I think this is a sign that the company really isn't experimenting, and probably won't figure out how to stay fully remote post-pandemic. The best thing my company did was host a single "async week". Absolutely no video calls, only async. A lot of communication shifted after that week. For example, my group has eradicated "round robin" calls, where individuals share their status or whatever. Instead, you create a card on a doc that's mostly a kanban board. That card just links to notes in another doc. So... we basically have an agenda system that: a.) keeps regular meetings on point quickly, and b.) keeps notes of what's been decided. We wouldn't have figured this out without ripping off the band-aid and forcing everyone to do it differently for a week.
wpietri 5y ago
To me this conflates "I am not used to X" and "X is worse". I've been working remote for the duration of the pandemic. Is Zoom kinda terrible? Sure. But in-person meetings were often a different kind of terrible. Open office plans were a definitively worse kind of terrible for me. I was previously used to the various bad things of working in the same space. I'm now reasonably used to the various bad things of remote work, and I keep getting more comfortable with it. I expect that if I end up going back to in-person work, I'll be able to write an article exactly like this one about what we've lost by going back to the office. That is less about the relative merits, and more about my ability to find a cloud for every silver lining.
- compiler-guy 5y ago
  He explained exactly why he believes it is worse: the lack of information to be collected by the various senses. You may disagree that it is worse, but he doesn’t confuse “I’m not used to this” with it being worse. He has specific reasons for saying so, and all the time in the world getting used to it won’t suddenly give the additional information he believes is important in communication.
  - nickelpro 5y ago
    He says that but doesn't provide any argument why those other senses are beneficial to a work meeting. Bringing them up is effectively a non-sequitur, and the argument is isomorphic to "this is new and I don't like it". The later list of concrete complaints made about video conferencing almost entirely boils down to "I do not know video conference etiquette and do not wish to learn". Hop in a call with a bunch of college students and you'll instantly realize the people who grew up with this stuff have no problem adapting to the new way of doing things and if anything work the new style far better than the in-person conferences of yore. Nothing is lost in video conferencing for me personally, and a bit is gained in that it's not considered rude for me to tune out and work on other things during all the time wasting bits.
    - dilyevsky 5y ago
      How do you read the room when trying to pitch something or speak persuasively in a more than 1on1 setting over zoom? The real answer is “you can’t“. For me personally after two years of doing this it’s still pretty much impossible to have an effective design discussion on contentious topic with a group over 2. What used to take 1 hour now takes xN where N is number of people on the call. I see it with other people too for example when someone keeps rambling on and on much more often than used to be acceptable in person. You can certainly adjust to not be irritated by it but still doesn’t make it fluent and natural conversation
js2 5y ago
> That’s more familiar. Humans staring in random directions. Many clearly not listening. Camera off for one participant. Here’s the question, how many humans are on this call? > Zero. Now show us 14 people in a room together and tell me that all 14 are engaged. This was also a fiction. I’ve been working remotely since 2007. I spent the first ten years of my career in pointless meeting after pointless meeting. Part of what motivated me to work from home was all the time lost in the office shuffling between meetings, engaging in chit chat I was socially obligated to do but didn’t care about. Friday-afternoon beer bashes when I just wanted to be home with my wife. Ridiculous off-site team-building exercises. I have a life outside work. I want my colleagues to be competent professionals. I’ll have a collegial relationship with a few I work closely with. But do I care what everyone did over the weekend? I do not. In a meeting of 14 people, how many people really had to be there? I’m not saying that teamwork isn’t sometimes a lot easier in person. Some things are. Some things aren’t. And I understand that many people enjoy the company of their coworkers as friends. Fine. I didn’t, except for a few. I’m engaged on Google Meet just as much as I ever was in person when the meeting calls for it. I understand some people can’t work this way. But Rands is projecting here. He clearly values being physically around his team. I get that. But it isn’t for all of us. I hope this pandemic ends and that those who want to return to the office can do so. But I also hope companies remember that some of us really prefer to work from home, and we’re more productive in doing so. FWIW, I’ve worked for companies as big as HP and Verizon, and startups as small as a dozen people, and mid-size companies in between. I’ve worked for and with college and post-college friends. I have over 25 years of professional experience. We’re not all the same. Different strokes, man. Oh and about that screenshot of Leia… I obviously knew Fisher had passed away before Rogue One was made, but didn’t realize it was computer generated. I thought it was somehow pieces together from old footage. It fooled me.
- babyshake 5y ago
  > Now show us 14 people in a room together and tell me that all 14 are engaged. Has anyone tried to deal with meeting attendance inflation with some actual economic scheme? I'm thinking where tokens are distributed and used as payment for someone to attend a meeting. This would force you to think in terms of a budget for how many people-hours of time you are requesting in meetings. Of course management and especially middle management would likely hate this idea but I'm curious if anyone tried it and what the results were.
smitty1e 5y ago
"Lost" is too heavy. We "traded" some aspects of reality in favor of distributed communications and the capacity to "resurrect" characters. It's not as though Star Wars, itself, is any more "real" than a CGI Carrie Fisher. What's concerning, and what is in danger of becoming lost, is the certainty that misleading others is immoral. It's one thing to create some entertainment and suspend disbelief about characters and plots. It's another thing to abuse such tools and pass the results off as historical facts.
taylorhughes 5y ago
Am I the only one who thinks the Carrie Fisher CGI looks pretty good? I appreciate the metaphor but my brain has no problem with the deepfake version of Leia.
- eatonphil 5y ago
  Yup, I can't actually tell the difference either. Or at least I don't feel like I know her face well enough to know it's not her. That said, when I saw the movie and she was in motion it did seem less realistic.
- danjac 5y ago
  Peter Cushing on the other hand...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- themadturk 5y ago
  I can definitely tell the difference, but it doesn’t bother me. Carrie Fischer approved the CGI version of herself before her death, so who am I to complain?
sircastor 5y ago
I wonder how much of the Princess Leia evaluation is coming from a place of “my brain knows the background of this situation, that one is a promo shot of Carrie Fisher and the other is from Rogue One”
HarryHirsch 5y ago
Meanwhile Linux has been successful beyond description, despite its development being entirely remotely. So - what's going on?
- slotrans 5y ago
  Linux isn't a business.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  I think coding, in particular, is probably the best possible scenario for remote work. Your job is interfacing with a computer, people are just a distraction. But a business is a lot more than just coders.
  - legerdemain 5y ago
    > Your job is interfacing with a computer, people are just a distraction. The job of a software engineer is building useful products. Products are useful to people. Computers are just a distraction.
    - anonymoushn 5y ago
      I would like to use software written by people who do not think computers are just a distraction. If one thinks that it's a software engineer's job to shovel features, then it can be difficult to make software that has the same features but is more performant and correct, or to make software that has fewer features because some features were only needed to compensate for the incredibly awful performance.
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      > The job of a software engineer That's why I specified 'coder'. Software engineering is a spectrum, at the lowest level it's just coding. At the top level it transitions to being all about the people. For the folks who are coding, their life is about taking already defined stories and turning them into reality. If the story isn't super clear, they may interface with the team lead or the PO, but when things are working right they just go heads-down and work. This is pretty close to an ideal candidate for remote work.
karlmdavis 5y ago
This is all true, but incomplete in some important ways, I think. The losses can be somewhat mitigated. As mikewarot’s comment here hints, you can slow down the meetings and take care to encourage everyone’s thoughtful participation. It requires a lot of intentional awkwardness, but I actually hope I carry this skill back to in-person meetings. “Let’s give folks a minute to think about that before we move on,” and “what are your thoughts Sally and Bob?” are useful phrases. There are many important positives to virtual meetings. I work with a couple of new parents whose lives are greatly improved by being able to attend meetings while keeping an eye on their littles. Meetings can be much more casual and that can help us open up to each other. Meetings are often taken outside when the weather is accommodating, which is just incredibly refreshing. Folks are less able to randomly interrupt my workday just by walking by. Most importantly, time lost to commutes is returned to us and our families. There are also negatives he left out. The biggest, by far, is just how many more meetings everyone is scheduling. Without the added back pressure of commutes, conference room availability, and real lunch breaks… everyone has gone meeting-crazy. It’s really hurting my office’s productivity. On balance, though? Remote wins. By a mile.
- gammarator 5y ago
  This (pre-pandemic!) blog post highlights exactly what you describe--that active moderation is needed to make remote meetings successful, and that there are lessons for in-person meetings also: https://chelseatroy.com/2018/03/29/why-do-remote-meetings-suck-so-much/ https://chelseatroy.com/2018/03/29/why-do-remote-meetings-su...
Haegin 5y ago
I know I miss out on some things with video meetings instead of in person meetings, but I consider that a small price to pay to live in a more rural community that I love, and where I can afford to buy a house and yet still work with an absolutely kick-ass bunch of humans spread across the US and Canada. Yeah I miss some of the watercooler chat, but I'll lose that to save 90 minutes of commute every day. Sure, it'd be great to just grab the key people I need for something, dive into a meeting room and hash things out on a whiteboard for 30 minutes, but at the weekend I can enjoy spending time in the workshop that I definitely wouldn't have if I lived in the nearest big city where the tech jobs are. Sure, remote means some things are worse. So what? So much else is so much better.
ghiculescu 5y ago
My company has been back in the office for 18 months. We followed all the rules but we were also clear that as a company this is how we prefer to work. We hired and retained “office people” who like to work with smart people in real life. I think this pool of people is growing. It still takes discipline to turn away great candidates who insist on remote first, but it’s worth it to keep this culture that works for us. Since we are in Chicago, we all went remote for January. Work from home or from anywhere you like. Then we all got together in Austin for the last weekend of the month. I’ve never seen people so excited to see colleagues, and never heard tech workers so adamantly tell me they don’t want to work from home. (We’ll still do it again next year, because Chicago winter. But I want to make it easier for people to co-work if they are in the same place as a colleague.) I find articles like this where people casually say they have been at home for 2 years so depressingly dehumanizing. Of course if you truly want remote, that’s great, and I’m truly happy for you. But if you don’t, you shouldn’t feel like no alternatives exist and that maybe one day if you’re lucky things will change. (We are hiring if you are in Chicago, London, or Brisbane. Email in profile.)
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  > It still takes discipline to turn away great candidates who insist on remote first I think this is very good. Hybrid teams are worse than fully on- or off-site teams. The remote employees always end up as second-class. I think that each team should be one or the other, all the way.
  - cm2012 5y ago
    Yep, I love remote and am fully on board with it, since before covid. Hybrid is the worst of all worlds.
- wildrhythms 5y ago
  - legerdemain 5y ago
    > inane, self ejaculatory I fear asking what kind of "ejaculatory" there exists, other than "self-ejaculatory."
jrm4 5y ago
I quite literally have trouble believing that any of this article is particularly accurate with specific regard to work and workspaces, and mostly represents wishful thinking by manager-types who believe that the interpersonal bits are the most important bits? (which of course, might be, but perhaps not frequently?) I don't know, anecdotally, my faculty meetings seem pretty much the same, and my other freelance IT work has been all Discord all the time (and is significantly more efficient AND has more cameraderie?) You can probably assume a bunch of other factors here of course...
troutwine 5y ago
I'm struggling to write this in a way that doesn't sound nit-picky, but I think what Loop isn't saying is that his career is, uh, running meetings. His blog is chock-a-block with high-level coordination managerial material. And I guess in that context I can feel sympathetic to the notion that something has been lost _for that kind of worker_. It's not my job to keep tens or hundreds of humans coordinated so the loss of in-person has also meant the, beneficial, loss of commuting, open office interrupt driven working conditions and has meant the ability to expand my timezone working cohort +/- 9 hours, since stuff is async by default. Loop's kind of work is important for large organizations but, having shied away from the kind of work he's gravitated toward, I really can't tell if Loop is just _used_ to a certain way of organizing method and can't adapt as the world shifts or if being in the same room as other people managers is actually more effective for high-level coordination work. The argument here sure does feel shallow.
rootusrootus 5y ago
Zoom calls are awful, but we really do make it worse than it needs to be. First by having too many, thinking that more of them will make up for the terrible quality. Instead, have as few as possible, keep them on topic, short, and try to limit the participant count so people can actually converse without all the awkward interruptions. Then, companies should send all employees really high quality microphones, monitors, real office chairs, etc, and pay for the highest quality internet connection available. They're going to save all this money on real estate for office space, they can damn well afford to appoint employees' home office with good hardware. I'm especially sold on the microphone part. Much of what makes zoom calls tiring is the constant effort you spend trying to decipher what someone just said when their audio is cutting in and out, and even in the best case they're using the earpods that came with their phone. A low latency connection and a basic $100 podcast microphone would be a big improvement for most people.
mark_l_watson 5y ago
For personal life, I agree that in person time is better: I spent five hours of 1:1 time today with two friends and watched streaming media with my wife tonight, more 1:1 time. That is personal life. For work life, I think zoom is fine. Information is shared, business gets done. Zoom is good enough for work.
- redisman 5y ago
  Yeah zoom is totally fine for work. I really don’t get why it’s for some so dramatically worse. At least on my team everyone has bought a real microphone and know how to share a screen. Cameras are on for <10 people meetings unless you’re taking a dump. 70% of the time someone is sharing the screen so everyone is paying attention to the same thing and they run fairly smoothly. We don’t have that many meetings - usually a standup for 15min and sometimes the more BS-y company or business unit meetings that are more awkward and waste of time. But that’s not that different from how it was in person. For social stuff, yeah it’s soul killing.
hunterb123 5y ago
What does it matter what the video represents? The point of meeting is to communicate thoughts. As long as the idea gets across, who cares if they have video enabled or what the video looks like compared to real life?
- spoonjim 5y ago
  The thesis of the post is that the communication bandwidth over Zoom is far less than in-person, which I can overall agree with.
  - odonnellryan 5y ago
    What can be done in an in person meeting that cannot be done over even email?
    - drewcoo 5y ago
      Rooms can fill with CO2 and become truly smelly. And I don't just mean having to smell everyone else's lunch.
smsm42 5y ago
Pretty sure whoever wrote this is an extrovert. I am much less sure whether he actually knows introverts exist. We do.
tolmasky 5y ago
I don't buy it. I remember real meetings. They were far more exhausting than any zoom call. Completely draining. I guess the novelty of shuffling rooms every 45 minutes is enough to keep some people feeling "active". Or perhaps some people find it "exciting" to frantically have everyone check if there are any other nearby conference rooms with space since we're getting kicked out of this one because, unlike with a video call, the fact that everyone was "running 5 minutes late" cut into an actually scarce physical resource. But here's my hot take: that feeling you have in video calls? It's you realizing for the first time what a meeting actually is: a waste of time. Without the chit chat and running across the hall, or the sky-high concentrated CO2 clouding your judgement, the meeting is distilled to its purest form. Since you're at home, "going to the meeting" isn't an excuse to escape your current surroundings. And since you're not walking there, the calories being burned aren't there to make you feel artificially productive when nothing meaningful took place. You're just finally seeing those 45 minutes slotted haphazardly into the middle of your day for what they really are. A waste of time.
- jeremy_carroll 5y ago
  - mdoms 5y ago
    This isn't Reddit.
- na85 5y ago
  >I remember real meetings. They were far more exhausting than any zoom call. Completely draining. Some were and some weren't. Bad leaders hold bad meetings. Good leaders hold meetings that are short, to-the-point, stick to the agenda, and involve only the people who actually need to be involved. To wit: if you don't hold sufficient authority to make decisions related to the meeting or if you aren't there to weigh in as a subject matter expert, then you don't get invited.
  - rererr 5y ago
    Not to defend meetings, which are mostly pointless, but there is also a third reason to attend: education. It is often low signal, but you can occasionally learn something about the topic or at least learn the communication norms of your team/company.
GiorgioG 5y ago
Real meetings, zoom meetings, most of them are a waste of time and resources. I’d rather have my time wasted in the comfort of my home.
- redisman 5y ago
  I think what the author is missing is that they don’t have a captive audience to spout off on since now it’s very very easy to tune out a meeting that’s a waste of time.
commandlinefan 5y ago
So… what we “lost” was meetings and commuting? What will we lose next, world hunger?
inerte 5y ago
I usually love rands but first 2 paragraphs were pretty bad, and sadly the "ceci n'est pas une pipe" vibe kept going back to the first image. This IS Leia, and not Carrie Fisher - Leia is a character, and it could be animated afaik. Also, I mean, "How does our brain know its CGI? It doesn’t." - then it proceeds to list the ways our brain knows it's not a real human. Point remains, rands is way smarter than I am, but this sounds like a stream of consciousness turned into an article to hit a quota. I also prefer meeting humans IRL than over zoom. Somehow trying to turn a critical comment into a positive, do watch "VFX Artists React" from Corridor Digital in YouTube (and their own website) where they list the specific oddities of a scene and why our brain can't quite parse CGI as human yet.
- mproud 5y ago
  I agree. The actor and the character ought to be differentiated. If you want to argue the CG isn’t good enough, fine, but the actor isn’t the character. Sometimes actors are replaced, but other times, maybe their accent slipped in an episode, or their makeup wasn’t good in season 2, etc. So where do you draw the line?
Clubber 5y ago
>That’s more familiar. Humans staring in random directions. Many clearly not listening. They are all starting at their screens. You can tell because of the reflection and glow. That in no way means they are "clearly not listening." >Here’s the question, how many humans are on this call? >Zero. >There are no humans on this call. Yes, there are 14 participants with their video on, one with their video off, and someone dialing in. And they are all human. >You have five base senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Bonus fact: you actually have seven. There are a lot more, like a sense of danger, a sense of being manipulated, etc. >Every single of these senses, yeah, even vestibular and proprioception, are limited in a video conference call. You do not see the entire person; you see them from the chest up. Unless you are crawling around or peeking under the conference table, you can only see people from the waste up in a regular meeting. Please don't peek under the conference table. >when someone attempts to insert a vital fact only stomped by the current speaker who hasn’t heard the interruption yet. People interrupt other people all the time in face to face meetings. It's not great there either. At least on a conference call, I can mute someone if they get overly obnoxious. >I’ve been looking for cracks. I’ve been looking for leading indicators of future doom. The Great Resignation seems like a proper crack, right? But are people quitting their jobs because they can’t work together or because their current job sucks and all this terror in the area has given them a new appreciation of what really matters? From what I can tell many people are quitting shit jobs that require people to be at a location (like a restaurant) with shit pay and no benefits. I suspect they are sick of paying for childcare and commuting too. They aren't just quitting to sit around in their underwear, they're going to better jobs with better benefits like healthcare, and the ability to work remote, which doesn't require childcare. Childcare is friggin expensive too and probably not great for their upbringing either. >A video conference is a sterile dehumanizing experience. So is going to meetings and commuting to an office every day. I'd pick a conference call 7 days a week and twice on Monday. This is obviously an emotional sell to get people back into the office. It's pretty weak on actual reason other than the author likes to smell people and look under desks perhaps.
jhatemyjob 5y ago
100% agreed with OP. I learned to turn off my camera and not look at the screen during these meetings. Live video is simply not there yet. Live audio however has existed ever since the early days of AT&T. I treat it as a group phone call. If I am forced to turn on my camera the same thing applies, I don't look at the screen at all, unless if I need to quickly look something up. All my notes go on physical paper. Ever since I made this adjustment (along with exclusively using email and refusing to use slack unless absolutely necessary) my workday has become much more pleasant. Also, wow, this comment section is a trashfire.
DanHulton 5y ago
There is a great opportunity for a good essayist to write a counter-essay titled "What we gained." It's not nearly so doom and gloom as he describes, not even with his chosen CGI example.
munin 5y ago
> I suspect this is a staged Zoom call for marketing purposes. How do I know this? Everyone is smiling. Oh come on, everyone is smiling because there's an infant in the leftmost 2nd from top video. Or a picture of an infant. Someone did "hey look at my cute kid" and everyone loses it because that's what people do.
legerdemain 5y ago
Pointy-Haired Boss laments losing his ability to waste your time smugly in unnecessary, humiliating meetings, news at eleven.
cirgue 5y ago
Hot take: conference calls are superior to zoom meetings in every way, because they don’t give you the false sense of presence. Everyone else is a disembodied voice, and you don’t have any option of pretending otherwise so you have to figure out how to understand and be understood without the benefit of your other senses. Also, longwindedness is, in my experience, much more difficult because people that like to talk a little too much don’t get the feedback of head nods and smiles, so they tend to get to the point.
d3nj4l 5y ago
It lost me in the first paragraph, because I honestly couldn't tell it was CG, even after looking at it closely.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mwcampbell 5y ago
> You are quite literally built to sense an infinite amount of subtle bits of signal from your fellow humans. Some of us are less able to do this, and remote work levels the playing field for us. In theory, it would be even more level if we went all-text.
- jka 5y ago
  All-text working environments, basic guaranteed income, universal healthcare, generous holiday/vacation time, zero/near-zero delivery time pressure, and perhaps asynchronous work structures where people don't feel they have to sit at their desk all day to "show attendance" -- but instead are notified well-in-advance about contributions they can make (and what is expected in terms of work output) because the project tasks have been well-planned and designed. (that's not to say there won't be discussions and clarifications required as work progresses -- and those could involve replanning and nearer-synchronous realtime conversation -- but those can often be handled using text as well)
- shukantpal 5y ago
  It doesn’t level the playing field. All it really does it cut off the limbs of the better ones.
getup8 5y ago
I’ve just started going back to the office and for 1:1s especially, being in person is wayyyyy better. Most are usually taken as a walk around the block and you come back energized and connected to the person. The random run-ins and lunches and coffee chats make work fun and not just feel like a job. It’s hard to say that about a Zoom call.
gammarator 5y ago
> Yes, I spend an excessive amount of time looking at myself. It’s ridiculous. One of the best things I've started doing in Zoom calls is hiding my "self-view" when I have my camera on. It feels so much more natural to converse with others without seeing and monitoring my own face--I find it helps reduce Zoom fatigue.
irishloop 5y ago
I find both sides of the "remote vs in-person" argument rather exhausting and ridiculous. Of course, both formats have issues. Personally, I like a hybrid remote/local work life. I thought I wanted fully remote, but it was simply too isolating for me. I like being able to shoot the shit at work with some semi-friends. I think it connects us and adds some value to the whole operation that makes it more than about work, but caring about the people you work with. That being said, that's just my personal experience. What is good for me might not be good for you. I too often see people say, "Oh the only people who like in-person work are managers who want to schedule pointless meetings" like hey maybe some people actually just have different needs than you and you shouldn't insult people who may have different experiences.
mise_en_place 5y ago
To the author I would ask: what did we gain? Freedom is the answer. To set your own schedule and focus on getting real work done. I would argue that videoconferencing provides way more information than just the written medium. Like email, or postmark before it. This is a natural form of doing business. An East India trading output way out in Siam is not going to travel all the way to London for a meeting with the leadership.
j7ake 5y ago
I much prefer attending a talk in person versus through zoom. The interaction is better, you can interrupt the speaker more politely, and the speaker can look at audiences reactions and adjust or pause.
lamontcg 5y ago
> A good in-person meeting is pure jazz. I've never had this meeting once.
Animats 5y ago
"A good in-person meeting is pure jazz. Its elegant sparring between those who care deeply about the things they are building, and watching and participating in this banter is one of the joys of my professional career." This is a manager's view of meetings. There's a lot of "we have to get people back to the office" right now. Some of it is fueled by the commercial real estate industry, which is terrified that business will discover they don't really need much office space. There are a lot of office leases not being renewed. Some of it is fueled by managers who are terrified that people will discover they really aren't doing much. Some of it is just power-tripping. There is a real concern, though. There's a comment that working alone gets more done in a day but less done in a decade. Lack of irrelevant input may have long-term consequences for both individual careers and organizations. Too much focus on internal goals.
higeorge13 5y ago
Some people lost human interaction, some people gained working in remote companies for x times larger salary and potential to work on something big. I don’t know what is the sentiment in the US snd SV specifically, but Europe-based talent won’t return to offices or work in local companies or apply for work visas and migrate to US any time soon. If companies want to reach all these talented engineers they will have to operate remote-only, even if they hate zoom meetings.
LightG 5y ago
Really frustrating to read articles like this having been through 2 years of making remote working super productive. I think some people just have an aversion to making it work, or a power trip, or need for bums on seats. For example, our team amazingly left our business in a much stronger position "post"-pandemic than pre-pandemic. But as soon as there was the chance, our boss pulled us all back in. Given the sacrifices made, 80% of the core team that achieved these results were gone within 3 months, and the last 20% will be gone by the next 2 months, including me. I really believe in remote, however I/we weren't even asking for that. Just the flexibility and trust to choose what worked best at any given time. Sometimes that meant hooking up and meeting in person; or, for focused work, staying at home using all the commute energy on a great piece of work, then having dinner with your spouse. Articles like this are a joke. Yes, I'm very frustrated about it as these kind of views directly led to the break-up of our great team, and has left me looking for another job.
nottorp 5y ago
He may have good ideas - or at least presented well - about management. But he's totally inexperienced in working remotely.
nathias 5y ago
maybe the managers can go to the offices alone and have meetings between each other to feel more productive
thrower123 5y ago
The idea that not looking directly at your webcam means you aren't paying attention is deeply ignorant, but probably understandable for a laptop-class manager. I've been kind of impressed by the inability of the verbal-only types to adjust to remote working. They refuse to read, they refuse to write, and in the absence of meetings, they just sort of wilt and pine away.
jdrc 5y ago
Yeah , people have been lamenting the end of horses for a while, too.
aembleton 5y ago
Screen sharing is much easier over zoom. Others can add annotations too.
notacoward 5y ago
People who had more positive feelings about in-person meetings think that video meetings are a poor substitute. People who had more negative feelings about in-person meetings think that video meetings are a fine substitute (though usually still stop short of actually liking them). Introvert vs. extrovert or engineer vs. manager are too simplistic, but there are definitely different types of people when it comes to meetings. Maybe Michael Lopp (a.k.a. Rands) needs to learn that not everyone is like him and that's OK.
benreesman 5y ago
Meetings, while sometimes necessary, are a tax on productivity. They are the worst kind: they feel like real work but often aren’t, and they often generate visibility for the organizer in a way unrelated to how useful they they are. Anything that can be a task (or diff, or Figma, or CAD artifact, or deck, or whatever) should be: tasks have a chain of custody, they have a clear owner/POC, they can change hands, the can have artifacts attached, they are searchable and durable, leaders can consult them asynchronously so that 1-on-1 meetings are: “how can I solve or help you solve this thing that seems to be in the way?” and not “so, whatcha working on? how’s that novel coming Bryan?” A focused voice or video chat with the minimum number of participants, decent audio gear, a clear agenda with clear resulting action items, and everyone deeply contextualized via durable, discoverable subject matter media is a net win. Personal charisma loses some of its effect, being prepared becomes the name of the game: this is a good thing. Yes it’s higher friction, yes it raises the stakes on getting the agenda, participant list, and actions items really tight. Yes it forces leaders to read diffs (or whatever work product artifacts) and understand them. in order to be part of the process or run a sane performance cycle. Yes it cranks up the volume on the question: “do we really need a meeting here?”. As a manager who ruthlessly suppressed fluffy meetings by running a tight ship on tasks and diffs and knowing the subject matter deeply: forced remote work is the best thing that ever happened to knowledge work. Sucks to be a manager who can’t code, but we’re better off without them.
themadturk 5y ago
My workplace is returning to the office, but at the same time our headquarters is being split into suburban satellite offices. Teams are being spit strictly by geography, where pre-pandemic we were all in the central office. Satellite offices will be great for many commuters, but it means that even though we’re “in the office,” we’ll eventually be in three or four different offices, and every meeting will be a Zoom meeting (except for one-on-ones, if your supervisor happens to be located in your office). It’s too early yet to see if this will be any better than working entirely remote (except that my chair at the office is much better than my chair at home).
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165 points by tylerchr 5y ago

There are good points to be made as to how fake CGI looks in movies, but the parallel with an actual video feed is lacking.

jay_kyburz 5y ago
What we lost - CGI Carry Fisher is a bit wonky. What we gained - a young Carry Fisher again and some more Star Wars. Meh. But don't get me wrong, I think there is a huge value in sitting in a room with people working on the same code base as you. There is huge value in being able to just turn around and ask somebody about something that's got you stumped. Or to get feedback. Or even just to talk shop. This just happens a lot less when remote where I work. But also, I don't care that I can't smell my colleagues in meetings.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  > There is huge value in being able to just turn around and ask somebody about something that's got you stumped. Or to get feedback That's called interruptions. When I am coding this is the last thing I want, to have someone next to me bugging me with their random thoughts, or asking for a coffee.
drewcoo 5y ago
Well Zoom meetings are with fake CGI Princess Leia. And back in the office we actually have Carrie Fisher. She's been dead for a while now, so the office is really even more unpleasant than before this experiment. Clearer analogy?

mikewarot 5y ago

My computer club, APCU, just had the best zoom meeting ever....after almost 2 years of less than stellar results. we had flipped to the new mode that only shows the speaker in a big window, so you could see their face, and we all respected the silence. Letting things go quiet while everyone was thinking felt awesome. It was a slow, thoughtful exchange. I can't imagine trying to use Zoom for work. If you aren't able to let the pause happen, and slow the pace of discussion to allow for interruption without talking over people, it's just going to be a waste of time. Can people slow down on work calls and let this happen? I don't know.

mr_tristan 5y ago

> A video conference is a sterile dehumanizing experience. A good in-person meeting is pure jazz. Its elegant sparring between those who care deeply about the things they are building, and watching and participating in this banter is one of the joys of my professional career. This gave me a chuckle. After 20+ years in the business, the "pure jazz" in-person meetings vs "complete waste of time" in-person meeting ratio was, I don't know, 1:100. I can think of maybe 2 or 3 out of the last several years before the pandemic that were really consequential. There are great reasons to meet and hash things out, but honestly, if everyone's in the office, I've found that it's a green light for lazy managers to work out communication and team build by... having more meetings. Not running them well, not writing any actual decision down, just having a meeting and thinking it's progress. My main hope is that people use this remote-first time to really learn how to write and share writing. But, if I end up just getting people to learn how to start a Slack DM with a question instead of just "Hi! Are you there?", well, that will also be progress.

rootusrootus 5y ago
> There are great reasons to meet and hash things out, but honestly, if everyone's in the office, I've found that it's a green light for lazy managers to work out communication and team build by... having more meetings. Not running them well, not writing any actual decision down, just having a meeting and thinking it's progress. In my office, this has gotten significantly worse during the pandemic. Death by a million zoom calls, we have far more meetings now than when we worked in the same space. Sure, we had plenty of dumb meetings then, but it has escalated to new heights in the last couple years.
- droidist2 5y ago
  Agree, and at least in-person meetings give you human contact. Zoom meetings are like giving yourself a sunburn but also not getting any Vitamin D in the process.
- mr_tristan 5y ago
  To be honest, I think this is a sign that the company really isn't experimenting, and probably won't figure out how to stay fully remote post-pandemic. The best thing my company did was host a single "async week". Absolutely no video calls, only async. A lot of communication shifted after that week. For example, my group has eradicated "round robin" calls, where individuals share their status or whatever. Instead, you create a card on a doc that's mostly a kanban board. That card just links to notes in another doc. So... we basically have an agenda system that: a.) keeps regular meetings on point quickly, and b.) keeps notes of what's been decided. We wouldn't have figured this out without ripping off the band-aid and forcing everyone to do it differently for a week.

wpietri 5y ago

To me this conflates "I am not used to X" and "X is worse". I've been working remote for the duration of the pandemic. Is Zoom kinda terrible? Sure. But in-person meetings were often a different kind of terrible. Open office plans were a definitively worse kind of terrible for me. I was previously used to the various bad things of working in the same space. I'm now reasonably used to the various bad things of remote work, and I keep getting more comfortable with it. I expect that if I end up going back to in-person work, I'll be able to write an article exactly like this one about what we've lost by going back to the office. That is less about the relative merits, and more about my ability to find a cloud for every silver lining.

compiler-guy 5y ago
He explained exactly why he believes it is worse: the lack of information to be collected by the various senses. You may disagree that it is worse, but he doesn’t confuse “I’m not used to this” with it being worse. He has specific reasons for saying so, and all the time in the world getting used to it won’t suddenly give the additional information he believes is important in communication.
- nickelpro 5y ago
  He says that but doesn't provide any argument why those other senses are beneficial to a work meeting. Bringing them up is effectively a non-sequitur, and the argument is isomorphic to "this is new and I don't like it". The later list of concrete complaints made about video conferencing almost entirely boils down to "I do not know video conference etiquette and do not wish to learn". Hop in a call with a bunch of college students and you'll instantly realize the people who grew up with this stuff have no problem adapting to the new way of doing things and if anything work the new style far better than the in-person conferences of yore. Nothing is lost in video conferencing for me personally, and a bit is gained in that it's not considered rude for me to tune out and work on other things during all the time wasting bits.
  - dilyevsky 5y ago
    How do you read the room when trying to pitch something or speak persuasively in a more than 1on1 setting over zoom? The real answer is “you can’t“. For me personally after two years of doing this it’s still pretty much impossible to have an effective design discussion on contentious topic with a group over 2. What used to take 1 hour now takes xN where N is number of people on the call. I see it with other people too for example when someone keeps rambling on and on much more often than used to be acceptable in person. You can certainly adjust to not be irritated by it but still doesn’t make it fluent and natural conversation

js2 5y ago

> That’s more familiar. Humans staring in random directions. Many clearly not listening. Camera off for one participant. Here’s the question, how many humans are on this call? > Zero. Now show us 14 people in a room together and tell me that all 14 are engaged. This was also a fiction. I’ve been working remotely since 2007. I spent the first ten years of my career in pointless meeting after pointless meeting. Part of what motivated me to work from home was all the time lost in the office shuffling between meetings, engaging in chit chat I was socially obligated to do but didn’t care about. Friday-afternoon beer bashes when I just wanted to be home with my wife. Ridiculous off-site team-building exercises. I have a life outside work. I want my colleagues to be competent professionals. I’ll have a collegial relationship with a few I work closely with. But do I care what everyone did over the weekend? I do not. In a meeting of 14 people, how many people really had to be there? I’m not saying that teamwork isn’t sometimes a lot easier in person. Some things are. Some things aren’t. And I understand that many people enjoy the company of their coworkers as friends. Fine. I didn’t, except for a few. I’m engaged on Google Meet just as much as I ever was in person when the meeting calls for it. I understand some people can’t work this way. But Rands is projecting here. He clearly values being physically around his team. I get that. But it isn’t for all of us. I hope this pandemic ends and that those who want to return to the office can do so. But I also hope companies remember that some of us really prefer to work from home, and we’re more productive in doing so. FWIW, I’ve worked for companies as big as HP and Verizon, and startups as small as a dozen people, and mid-size companies in between. I’ve worked for and with college and post-college friends. I have over 25 years of professional experience. We’re not all the same. Different strokes, man. Oh and about that screenshot of Leia… I obviously knew Fisher had passed away before Rogue One was made, but didn’t realize it was computer generated. I thought it was somehow pieces together from old footage. It fooled me.

babyshake 5y ago
> Now show us 14 people in a room together and tell me that all 14 are engaged. Has anyone tried to deal with meeting attendance inflation with some actual economic scheme? I'm thinking where tokens are distributed and used as payment for someone to attend a meeting. This would force you to think in terms of a budget for how many people-hours of time you are requesting in meetings. Of course management and especially middle management would likely hate this idea but I'm curious if anyone tried it and what the results were.

smitty1e 5y ago

"Lost" is too heavy. We "traded" some aspects of reality in favor of distributed communications and the capacity to "resurrect" characters. It's not as though Star Wars, itself, is any more "real" than a CGI Carrie Fisher. What's concerning, and what is in danger of becoming lost, is the certainty that misleading others is immoral. It's one thing to create some entertainment and suspend disbelief about characters and plots. It's another thing to abuse such tools and pass the results off as historical facts.

taylorhughes 5y ago

Am I the only one who thinks the Carrie Fisher CGI looks pretty good? I appreciate the metaphor but my brain has no problem with the deepfake version of Leia.

eatonphil 5y ago
Yup, I can't actually tell the difference either. Or at least I don't feel like I know her face well enough to know it's not her. That said, when I saw the movie and she was in motion it did seem less realistic.
danjac 5y ago
Peter Cushing on the other hand...
deleted 5y ago
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themadturk 5y ago
I can definitely tell the difference, but it doesn’t bother me. Carrie Fischer approved the CGI version of herself before her death, so who am I to complain?

sircastor 5y ago

I wonder how much of the Princess Leia evaluation is coming from a place of “my brain knows the background of this situation, that one is a promo shot of Carrie Fisher and the other is from Rogue One”

HarryHirsch 5y ago

Meanwhile Linux has been successful beyond description, despite its development being entirely remotely. So - what's going on?

slotrans 5y ago
Linux isn't a business.
rootusrootus 5y ago
I think coding, in particular, is probably the best possible scenario for remote work. Your job is interfacing with a computer, people are just a distraction. But a business is a lot more than just coders.
- legerdemain 5y ago
  > Your job is interfacing with a computer, people are just a distraction. The job of a software engineer is building useful products. Products are useful to people. Computers are just a distraction.
  - anonymoushn 5y ago
    I would like to use software written by people who do not think computers are just a distraction. If one thinks that it's a software engineer's job to shovel features, then it can be difficult to make software that has the same features but is more performant and correct, or to make software that has fewer features because some features were only needed to compensate for the incredibly awful performance.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    > The job of a software engineer That's why I specified 'coder'. Software engineering is a spectrum, at the lowest level it's just coding. At the top level it transitions to being all about the people. For the folks who are coding, their life is about taking already defined stories and turning them into reality. If the story isn't super clear, they may interface with the team lead or the PO, but when things are working right they just go heads-down and work. This is pretty close to an ideal candidate for remote work.

karlmdavis 5y ago

This is all true, but incomplete in some important ways, I think. The losses can be somewhat mitigated. As mikewarot’s comment here hints, you can slow down the meetings and take care to encourage everyone’s thoughtful participation. It requires a lot of intentional awkwardness, but I actually hope I carry this skill back to in-person meetings. “Let’s give folks a minute to think about that before we move on,” and “what are your thoughts Sally and Bob?” are useful phrases. There are many important positives to virtual meetings. I work with a couple of new parents whose lives are greatly improved by being able to attend meetings while keeping an eye on their littles. Meetings can be much more casual and that can help us open up to each other. Meetings are often taken outside when the weather is accommodating, which is just incredibly refreshing. Folks are less able to randomly interrupt my workday just by walking by. Most importantly, time lost to commutes is returned to us and our families. There are also negatives he left out. The biggest, by far, is just how many more meetings everyone is scheduling. Without the added back pressure of commutes, conference room availability, and real lunch breaks… everyone has gone meeting-crazy. It’s really hurting my office’s productivity. On balance, though? Remote wins. By a mile.

gammarator 5y ago
This (pre-pandemic!) blog post highlights exactly what you describe--that active moderation is needed to make remote meetings successful, and that there are lessons for in-person meetings also: https://chelseatroy.com/2018/03/29/why-do-remote-meetings-suck-so-much/ https://chelseatroy.com/2018/03/29/why-do-remote-meetings-su...

Haegin 5y ago

I know I miss out on some things with video meetings instead of in person meetings, but I consider that a small price to pay to live in a more rural community that I love, and where I can afford to buy a house and yet still work with an absolutely kick-ass bunch of humans spread across the US and Canada. Yeah I miss some of the watercooler chat, but I'll lose that to save 90 minutes of commute every day. Sure, it'd be great to just grab the key people I need for something, dive into a meeting room and hash things out on a whiteboard for 30 minutes, but at the weekend I can enjoy spending time in the workshop that I definitely wouldn't have if I lived in the nearest big city where the tech jobs are. Sure, remote means some things are worse. So what? So much else is so much better.

ghiculescu 5y ago

My company has been back in the office for 18 months. We followed all the rules but we were also clear that as a company this is how we prefer to work. We hired and retained “office people” who like to work with smart people in real life. I think this pool of people is growing. It still takes discipline to turn away great candidates who insist on remote first, but it’s worth it to keep this culture that works for us. Since we are in Chicago, we all went remote for January. Work from home or from anywhere you like. Then we all got together in Austin for the last weekend of the month. I’ve never seen people so excited to see colleagues, and never heard tech workers so adamantly tell me they don’t want to work from home. (We’ll still do it again next year, because Chicago winter. But I want to make it easier for people to co-work if they are in the same place as a colleague.) I find articles like this where people casually say they have been at home for 2 years so depressingly dehumanizing. Of course if you truly want remote, that’s great, and I’m truly happy for you. But if you don’t, you shouldn’t feel like no alternatives exist and that maybe one day if you’re lucky things will change. (We are hiring if you are in Chicago, London, or Brisbane. Email in profile.)

rootusrootus 5y ago
> It still takes discipline to turn away great candidates who insist on remote first I think this is very good. Hybrid teams are worse than fully on- or off-site teams. The remote employees always end up as second-class. I think that each team should be one or the other, all the way.
- cm2012 5y ago
  Yep, I love remote and am fully on board with it, since before covid. Hybrid is the worst of all worlds.
wildrhythms 5y ago
- legerdemain 5y ago
  > inane, self ejaculatory I fear asking what kind of "ejaculatory" there exists, other than "self-ejaculatory."

jrm4 5y ago

I quite literally have trouble believing that any of this article is particularly accurate with specific regard to work and workspaces, and mostly represents wishful thinking by manager-types who believe that the interpersonal bits are the most important bits? (which of course, might be, but perhaps not frequently?) I don't know, anecdotally, my faculty meetings seem pretty much the same, and my other freelance IT work has been all Discord all the time (and is significantly more efficient AND has more cameraderie?) You can probably assume a bunch of other factors here of course...

troutwine 5y ago

I'm struggling to write this in a way that doesn't sound nit-picky, but I think what Loop isn't saying is that his career is, uh, running meetings. His blog is chock-a-block with high-level coordination managerial material. And I guess in that context I can feel sympathetic to the notion that something has been lost _for that kind of worker_. It's not my job to keep tens or hundreds of humans coordinated so the loss of in-person has also meant the, beneficial, loss of commuting, open office interrupt driven working conditions and has meant the ability to expand my timezone working cohort +/- 9 hours, since stuff is async by default. Loop's kind of work is important for large organizations but, having shied away from the kind of work he's gravitated toward, I really can't tell if Loop is just _used_ to a certain way of organizing method and can't adapt as the world shifts or if being in the same room as other people managers is actually more effective for high-level coordination work. The argument here sure does feel shallow.

rootusrootus 5y ago

Zoom calls are awful, but we really do make it worse than it needs to be. First by having too many, thinking that more of them will make up for the terrible quality. Instead, have as few as possible, keep them on topic, short, and try to limit the participant count so people can actually converse without all the awkward interruptions. Then, companies should send all employees really high quality microphones, monitors, real office chairs, etc, and pay for the highest quality internet connection available. They're going to save all this money on real estate for office space, they can damn well afford to appoint employees' home office with good hardware. I'm especially sold on the microphone part. Much of what makes zoom calls tiring is the constant effort you spend trying to decipher what someone just said when their audio is cutting in and out, and even in the best case they're using the earpods that came with their phone. A low latency connection and a basic $100 podcast microphone would be a big improvement for most people.

mark_l_watson 5y ago

For personal life, I agree that in person time is better: I spent five hours of 1:1 time today with two friends and watched streaming media with my wife tonight, more 1:1 time. That is personal life. For work life, I think zoom is fine. Information is shared, business gets done. Zoom is good enough for work.

redisman 5y ago
Yeah zoom is totally fine for work. I really don’t get why it’s for some so dramatically worse. At least on my team everyone has bought a real microphone and know how to share a screen. Cameras are on for <10 people meetings unless you’re taking a dump. 70% of the time someone is sharing the screen so everyone is paying attention to the same thing and they run fairly smoothly. We don’t have that many meetings - usually a standup for 15min and sometimes the more BS-y company or business unit meetings that are more awkward and waste of time. But that’s not that different from how it was in person. For social stuff, yeah it’s soul killing.

hunterb123 5y ago

What does it matter what the video represents? The point of meeting is to communicate thoughts. As long as the idea gets across, who cares if they have video enabled or what the video looks like compared to real life?

spoonjim 5y ago
The thesis of the post is that the communication bandwidth over Zoom is far less than in-person, which I can overall agree with.
- odonnellryan 5y ago
  What can be done in an in person meeting that cannot be done over even email?
  - drewcoo 5y ago
    Rooms can fill with CO2 and become truly smelly. And I don't just mean having to smell everyone else's lunch.

smsm42 5y ago

Pretty sure whoever wrote this is an extrovert. I am much less sure whether he actually knows introverts exist. We do.

tolmasky 5y ago

I don't buy it. I remember real meetings. They were far more exhausting than any zoom call. Completely draining. I guess the novelty of shuffling rooms every 45 minutes is enough to keep some people feeling "active". Or perhaps some people find it "exciting" to frantically have everyone check if there are any other nearby conference rooms with space since we're getting kicked out of this one because, unlike with a video call, the fact that everyone was "running 5 minutes late" cut into an actually scarce physical resource. But here's my hot take: that feeling you have in video calls? It's you realizing for the first time what a meeting actually is: a waste of time. Without the chit chat and running across the hall, or the sky-high concentrated CO2 clouding your judgement, the meeting is distilled to its purest form. Since you're at home, "going to the meeting" isn't an excuse to escape your current surroundings. And since you're not walking there, the calories being burned aren't there to make you feel artificially productive when nothing meaningful took place. You're just finally seeing those 45 minutes slotted haphazardly into the middle of your day for what they really are. A waste of time.

jeremy_carroll 5y ago
- mdoms 5y ago
  This isn't Reddit.
na85 5y ago
>I remember real meetings. They were far more exhausting than any zoom call. Completely draining. Some were and some weren't. Bad leaders hold bad meetings. Good leaders hold meetings that are short, to-the-point, stick to the agenda, and involve only the people who actually need to be involved. To wit: if you don't hold sufficient authority to make decisions related to the meeting or if you aren't there to weigh in as a subject matter expert, then you don't get invited.
- rererr 5y ago
  Not to defend meetings, which are mostly pointless, but there is also a third reason to attend: education. It is often low signal, but you can occasionally learn something about the topic or at least learn the communication norms of your team/company.

GiorgioG 5y ago

Real meetings, zoom meetings, most of them are a waste of time and resources. I’d rather have my time wasted in the comfort of my home.

redisman 5y ago
I think what the author is missing is that they don’t have a captive audience to spout off on since now it’s very very easy to tune out a meeting that’s a waste of time.

commandlinefan 5y ago

So… what we “lost” was meetings and commuting? What will we lose next, world hunger?

inerte 5y ago

I usually love rands but first 2 paragraphs were pretty bad, and sadly the "ceci n'est pas une pipe" vibe kept going back to the first image. This IS Leia, and not Carrie Fisher - Leia is a character, and it could be animated afaik. Also, I mean, "How does our brain know its CGI? It doesn’t." - then it proceeds to list the ways our brain knows it's not a real human. Point remains, rands is way smarter than I am, but this sounds like a stream of consciousness turned into an article to hit a quota. I also prefer meeting humans IRL than over zoom. Somehow trying to turn a critical comment into a positive, do watch "VFX Artists React" from Corridor Digital in YouTube (and their own website) where they list the specific oddities of a scene and why our brain can't quite parse CGI as human yet.

mproud 5y ago
I agree. The actor and the character ought to be differentiated. If you want to argue the CG isn’t good enough, fine, but the actor isn’t the character. Sometimes actors are replaced, but other times, maybe their accent slipped in an episode, or their makeup wasn’t good in season 2, etc. So where do you draw the line?

Clubber 5y ago

>That’s more familiar. Humans staring in random directions. Many clearly not listening. They are all starting at their screens. You can tell because of the reflection and glow. That in no way means they are "clearly not listening." >Here’s the question, how many humans are on this call? >Zero. >There are no humans on this call. Yes, there are 14 participants with their video on, one with their video off, and someone dialing in. And they are all human. >You have five base senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Bonus fact: you actually have seven. There are a lot more, like a sense of danger, a sense of being manipulated, etc. >Every single of these senses, yeah, even vestibular and proprioception, are limited in a video conference call. You do not see the entire person; you see them from the chest up. Unless you are crawling around or peeking under the conference table, you can only see people from the waste up in a regular meeting. Please don't peek under the conference table. >when someone attempts to insert a vital fact only stomped by the current speaker who hasn’t heard the interruption yet. People interrupt other people all the time in face to face meetings. It's not great there either. At least on a conference call, I can mute someone if they get overly obnoxious. >I’ve been looking for cracks. I’ve been looking for leading indicators of future doom. The Great Resignation seems like a proper crack, right? But are people quitting their jobs because they can’t work together or because their current job sucks and all this terror in the area has given them a new appreciation of what really matters? From what I can tell many people are quitting shit jobs that require people to be at a location (like a restaurant) with shit pay and no benefits. I suspect they are sick of paying for childcare and commuting too. They aren't just quitting to sit around in their underwear, they're going to better jobs with better benefits like healthcare, and the ability to work remote, which doesn't require childcare. Childcare is friggin expensive too and probably not great for their upbringing either. >A video conference is a sterile dehumanizing experience. So is going to meetings and commuting to an office every day. I'd pick a conference call 7 days a week and twice on Monday. This is obviously an emotional sell to get people back into the office. It's pretty weak on actual reason other than the author likes to smell people and look under desks perhaps.

jhatemyjob 5y ago

100% agreed with OP. I learned to turn off my camera and not look at the screen during these meetings. Live video is simply not there yet. Live audio however has existed ever since the early days of AT&T. I treat it as a group phone call. If I am forced to turn on my camera the same thing applies, I don't look at the screen at all, unless if I need to quickly look something up. All my notes go on physical paper. Ever since I made this adjustment (along with exclusively using email and refusing to use slack unless absolutely necessary) my workday has become much more pleasant. Also, wow, this comment section is a trashfire.

DanHulton 5y ago

There is a great opportunity for a good essayist to write a counter-essay titled "What we gained." It's not nearly so doom and gloom as he describes, not even with his chosen CGI example.

munin 5y ago

> I suspect this is a staged Zoom call for marketing purposes. How do I know this? Everyone is smiling. Oh come on, everyone is smiling because there's an infant in the leftmost 2nd from top video. Or a picture of an infant. Someone did "hey look at my cute kid" and everyone loses it because that's what people do.

legerdemain 5y ago

Pointy-Haired Boss laments losing his ability to waste your time smugly in unnecessary, humiliating meetings, news at eleven.

cirgue 5y ago

Hot take: conference calls are superior to zoom meetings in every way, because they don’t give you the false sense of presence. Everyone else is a disembodied voice, and you don’t have any option of pretending otherwise so you have to figure out how to understand and be understood without the benefit of your other senses. Also, longwindedness is, in my experience, much more difficult because people that like to talk a little too much don’t get the feedback of head nods and smiles, so they tend to get to the point.

d3nj4l 5y ago

It lost me in the first paragraph, because I honestly couldn't tell it was CG, even after looking at it closely.

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mwcampbell 5y ago

> You are quite literally built to sense an infinite amount of subtle bits of signal from your fellow humans. Some of us are less able to do this, and remote work levels the playing field for us. In theory, it would be even more level if we went all-text.

jka 5y ago
All-text working environments, basic guaranteed income, universal healthcare, generous holiday/vacation time, zero/near-zero delivery time pressure, and perhaps asynchronous work structures where people don't feel they have to sit at their desk all day to "show attendance" -- but instead are notified well-in-advance about contributions they can make (and what is expected in terms of work output) because the project tasks have been well-planned and designed. (that's not to say there won't be discussions and clarifications required as work progresses -- and those could involve replanning and nearer-synchronous realtime conversation -- but those can often be handled using text as well)
shukantpal 5y ago
It doesn’t level the playing field. All it really does it cut off the limbs of the better ones.

getup8 5y ago

I’ve just started going back to the office and for 1:1s especially, being in person is wayyyyy better. Most are usually taken as a walk around the block and you come back energized and connected to the person. The random run-ins and lunches and coffee chats make work fun and not just feel like a job. It’s hard to say that about a Zoom call.

gammarator 5y ago

> Yes, I spend an excessive amount of time looking at myself. It’s ridiculous. One of the best things I've started doing in Zoom calls is hiding my "self-view" when I have my camera on. It feels so much more natural to converse with others without seeing and monitoring my own face--I find it helps reduce Zoom fatigue.

irishloop 5y ago

I find both sides of the "remote vs in-person" argument rather exhausting and ridiculous. Of course, both formats have issues. Personally, I like a hybrid remote/local work life. I thought I wanted fully remote, but it was simply too isolating for me. I like being able to shoot the shit at work with some semi-friends. I think it connects us and adds some value to the whole operation that makes it more than about work, but caring about the people you work with. That being said, that's just my personal experience. What is good for me might not be good for you. I too often see people say, "Oh the only people who like in-person work are managers who want to schedule pointless meetings" like hey maybe some people actually just have different needs than you and you shouldn't insult people who may have different experiences.

mise_en_place 5y ago

To the author I would ask: what did we gain? Freedom is the answer. To set your own schedule and focus on getting real work done. I would argue that videoconferencing provides way more information than just the written medium. Like email, or postmark before it. This is a natural form of doing business. An East India trading output way out in Siam is not going to travel all the way to London for a meeting with the leadership.

j7ake 5y ago

I much prefer attending a talk in person versus through zoom. The interaction is better, you can interrupt the speaker more politely, and the speaker can look at audiences reactions and adjust or pause.

lamontcg 5y ago

> A good in-person meeting is pure jazz. I've never had this meeting once.

Animats 5y ago

"A good in-person meeting is pure jazz. Its elegant sparring between those who care deeply about the things they are building, and watching and participating in this banter is one of the joys of my professional career." This is a manager's view of meetings. There's a lot of "we have to get people back to the office" right now. Some of it is fueled by the commercial real estate industry, which is terrified that business will discover they don't really need much office space. There are a lot of office leases not being renewed. Some of it is fueled by managers who are terrified that people will discover they really aren't doing much. Some of it is just power-tripping. There is a real concern, though. There's a comment that working alone gets more done in a day but less done in a decade. Lack of irrelevant input may have long-term consequences for both individual careers and organizations. Too much focus on internal goals.

higeorge13 5y ago

Some people lost human interaction, some people gained working in remote companies for x times larger salary and potential to work on something big. I don’t know what is the sentiment in the US snd SV specifically, but Europe-based talent won’t return to offices or work in local companies or apply for work visas and migrate to US any time soon. If companies want to reach all these talented engineers they will have to operate remote-only, even if they hate zoom meetings.

LightG 5y ago

Really frustrating to read articles like this having been through 2 years of making remote working super productive. I think some people just have an aversion to making it work, or a power trip, or need for bums on seats. For example, our team amazingly left our business in a much stronger position "post"-pandemic than pre-pandemic. But as soon as there was the chance, our boss pulled us all back in. Given the sacrifices made, 80% of the core team that achieved these results were gone within 3 months, and the last 20% will be gone by the next 2 months, including me. I really believe in remote, however I/we weren't even asking for that. Just the flexibility and trust to choose what worked best at any given time. Sometimes that meant hooking up and meeting in person; or, for focused work, staying at home using all the commute energy on a great piece of work, then having dinner with your spouse. Articles like this are a joke. Yes, I'm very frustrated about it as these kind of views directly led to the break-up of our great team, and has left me looking for another job.

nottorp 5y ago

He may have good ideas - or at least presented well - about management. But he's totally inexperienced in working remotely.

nathias 5y ago

maybe the managers can go to the offices alone and have meetings between each other to feel more productive

thrower123 5y ago

The idea that not looking directly at your webcam means you aren't paying attention is deeply ignorant, but probably understandable for a laptop-class manager. I've been kind of impressed by the inability of the verbal-only types to adjust to remote working. They refuse to read, they refuse to write, and in the absence of meetings, they just sort of wilt and pine away.

jdrc 5y ago

Yeah , people have been lamenting the end of horses for a while, too.

aembleton 5y ago

Screen sharing is much easier over zoom. Others can add annotations too.

notacoward 5y ago

People who had more positive feelings about in-person meetings think that video meetings are a poor substitute. People who had more negative feelings about in-person meetings think that video meetings are a fine substitute (though usually still stop short of actually liking them). Introvert vs. extrovert or engineer vs. manager are too simplistic, but there are definitely different types of people when it comes to meetings. Maybe Michael Lopp (a.k.a. Rands) needs to learn that not everyone is like him and that's OK.

benreesman 5y ago

Meetings, while sometimes necessary, are a tax on productivity. They are the worst kind: they feel like real work but often aren’t, and they often generate visibility for the organizer in a way unrelated to how useful they they are. Anything that can be a task (or diff, or Figma, or CAD artifact, or deck, or whatever) should be: tasks have a chain of custody, they have a clear owner/POC, they can change hands, the can have artifacts attached, they are searchable and durable, leaders can consult them asynchronously so that 1-on-1 meetings are: “how can I solve or help you solve this thing that seems to be in the way?” and not “so, whatcha working on? how’s that novel coming Bryan?” A focused voice or video chat with the minimum number of participants, decent audio gear, a clear agenda with clear resulting action items, and everyone deeply contextualized via durable, discoverable subject matter media is a net win. Personal charisma loses some of its effect, being prepared becomes the name of the game: this is a good thing. Yes it’s higher friction, yes it raises the stakes on getting the agenda, participant list, and actions items really tight. Yes it forces leaders to read diffs (or whatever work product artifacts) and understand them. in order to be part of the process or run a sane performance cycle. Yes it cranks up the volume on the question: “do we really need a meeting here?”. As a manager who ruthlessly suppressed fluffy meetings by running a tight ship on tasks and diffs and knowing the subject matter deeply: forced remote work is the best thing that ever happened to knowledge work. Sucks to be a manager who can’t code, but we’re better off without them.

themadturk 5y ago

My workplace is returning to the office, but at the same time our headquarters is being split into suburban satellite offices. Teams are being spit strictly by geography, where pre-pandemic we were all in the central office. Satellite offices will be great for many commuters, but it means that even though we’re “in the office,” we’ll eventually be in three or four different offices, and every meeting will be a Zoom meeting (except for one-on-ones, if your supervisor happens to be located in your office). It’s too early yet to see if this will be any better than working entirely remote (except that my chair at the office is much better than my chair at home).

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