11 ms·

Zoom fatigue unpacked

133 points by ochronus 3y ago

docheinestages 3y ago
[flagged]
grokas 3y ago
I guess I was doing some these things already and didnt know it. Standing desk locked in the up position for zoom marathon days. Stepping back from the screens and camera when there isnt any reason to have hands on kb/m. I'm a usual pacer when on the phone so I'm not sure if that's instinct or habit but it certainly helps. Scheduling is also not mentioned surprisingly, but leaving 5-15m buffer gaps between back to back meetings I run is huge. When I dont do that I pay for it.
- fader 3y ago
  I've tried leaving 15 minute buffers in between meetings. All that happens is that my colleagues schedule 15 minute long meetings in the gaps. It's exhausting.
  - croutonwagon 3y ago
    There’s a concept called defensive calendaring I would encourage you to look up. I regularly schedule focus time or project time on my calendar and when I had days of stacked meetings, I’ll fill in the gaps with focus time to ensure I’m not overbooked. I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s plugins or tools to help, though I do it fairly manually.
    - skirmish 3y ago
      What do you do when people just blindly schedule meetings on top of your focus time?
      - helij 3y ago
        You say no to them. I have a standing time reserved for school run. People regularly book stuff over it. I reject the meeting automatically. If I have 'busy' in my calendar because I don't want to be disturbed I first take a look what this new invite is and then decide on the spot with no or yes (no being the dominant response). Slowly over time people learn to email or Slack you with a few dates and times and life is good.
      - FalconSensei 3y ago
        if you have time booked on your calendar, no matter what it is, it's safe to assume anything else put on top is going to be declined, because you already have something scheduled. You can add a regular meeting for yourself too, instead of focus time, also set your calendar not to share meetings' details with other folks, so they will only see 'busy'
      - croutonwagon 3y ago
        Decline the meeting and say I have a scheduling conflict.
heywhatupboys 3y ago
GREAT article. Recommend to everyone to read it in its entirity
neap24 3y ago
I’m a big advocate of reducing Zoom/screen fatigue by doing manual labor after the work day. Do a home maintenance project, throw a ball with the kids in the backyard, etc.
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  The hard part is to start, but once you have done it, you feel better. Even a simple chore like cleaning will help. Going to the supermarket will not, since you can get quiet and focused on the physicality. Just walking outside will do it you have nothing to do.
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    I have a mini trampoline type swing hung under a tree. Long day = taking a break at lunch and after work to just lay on it, look up into the leaves, and listen to the wind in the tree
    - brnt 3y ago
      Ah, the joys of not having to pickup children from daycare :/
      - ethbr0 3y ago
        School lets out about midway through my work afternoon.
      - bazmattaz 3y ago
        Oh man the struggle in the real. I quit zoom at exactly 5pm and run downstairs and out the door for daycare. I’m at daycare around 5:20 and to pick up the little one to come home, cook, eat, bath and bed time. The lack of time to decompress after the day (like commutes used to help with before I went fully remote) can be gruelling at times
  - trillic 3y ago
    Kids have recess. Why not adults too?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dtx1 3y ago
The whole mirror fatique thing is really interesting. I get enormous social anxiety on virtual calls and am constantly checking my mirror. I hate teams for that reason, i can't properly see what I am transmitting while Google meet is showing me Exactly what I'm sending in HD. I think I'll have to experiment with removing that and see if it reduces my anxiety
- shortcake27 3y ago
  It’s a catch 22 for me. When it’s there, I can’t stop looking at it to ensure I look ok. When it’s not there, I’m stressing because I don’t know how I look.
  - evolve2k 3y ago
    I feel like a halfway is needed. Maybe a virtual silhouette that shows my err blocking within the shot, while obscuring more detailed mirroring. Wonder if that would help.
  - bazmattaz 3y ago
    Ha ha this is me. I tried to hide my face on the call before but then I’m nervous that I might have sauce on my beard or something
  - dtx1 3y ago
    So i just tried it out during a longer 1:1 Session and i noticed I was still worried about how I looked but overall less stressed.
ehnto 3y ago
I turn my camera off on big calls and it helps a bunch, there's a process running in the back of my mind when it's on that is constantly screening what I am doing just incase it looks stupid on camera. It feels like being in a panopticon. You never know if someone is looking. It's very tiring. I don't have the same issue in person because you know when people are looking at you in person and there's heaps of context for everyone.
- mcbuilder 3y ago
  I always keep my camera off unless it's a handful of situations, like meeting someone for the first time, or making a big presentation and introducing myself. Turning the camera on is more the rare thing.
  - themadturk 3y ago
    On technical calls with two or three people where we all know each other we rarely turn the cameras on. For big meetings, the bosses prefer to have cameras on the whole time, but at least require that we start meetings that way, then we can turn them off after the meeting really gets going.
- stndef 3y ago
  I discovered the same as well, highly recommend turning off the camera.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    I do it very often because I often walk around my office or play with toys in my hands when I am collecting my thoughts or focusing on listening to people. Also help not feeling the urge to multitask and do other things on the computer.
- noman-land 3y ago
  I want you and everyone else to know that sometimes on large zoom calls I will "pin" one person in the call and stare at them for multiple minutes in a row on fullscreen. I do this all the time.
codingdave 3y ago
Of course, the elephant in the room is that people need to stop having so many meetings. Those of us who have been working remotely for a decade or more never had this problem - we use async communications, quick one-off calls when needed, and really never spent all our time in meetings. But when everyone moved to remote work a few years ago, this culture of meetings all day came up... and it still confuses me. It isn't effective.
- blowski 3y ago
  Im not sure it came up in 2020. I’ve been at work since the late 90s and the same complaints were made then. The difference now is that everybody is also responding on Slack throughout, so it’s like having double-density meetings.
- nimbius 3y ago
  agreed. dont know who needs to hear this but if you're having more than 1 scrum a week its not devops, its micromanagement, and if youve got more than 2-3 meetings a week youre effectively doing your managers work. if it can be summarized in 2-3 lines in an email, dont accept the meeting.
  - tempest_ 3y ago
    Management is a skill and a lot of people get peter principled into it and don't learn or hone the skill set required.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    Worse are meeting with just a vague title and not a well defined agenda. So many times I have to ask the organizer to add bullet points of the items to cover so I can at least join already prepared, can tell the organizer if I am not really the right person to join for the meeting and/or if someone from another team would be necessary. So many time is wasted on meeting because of off topic stuff or because the rights persons haven't been invited.
- janosdebugs 3y ago
  This, thank you. I recently quit my corporate job and we started our own company with my wife... never been so productive. Meetings are truly productivity killers. Why hire smart people for a lot of money to then have them sit around in groups of 10+, half listening, half braindead?
FpUser 3y ago
Did they mention general meeting fatigue? Just before covid I was doing some contract for org with many developers. Amount of meetings they had was staggering. I am an independent vendor and organize my time however I see fit but if I was forced to participate in the insanity I've observed I would go insane.
bee_rider 3y ago
The perspective mismatch between desktop and laptop users can be a bit funny, laptop users tend to be close to the screen, so they take up their cameras’ full field of view. Blown up on a big desktop screen it is like they are right in your face. It really can feel uncomfortably intimate, as silly as that sounds! Luckily my monitor was on an arm, so I could do one setup for Zoom, one for meetings.
- neilv 3y ago
  I want to figure out a better way to do this. (The worst was when my extreme closeup was combined with some remote conference room that put videoconf people up on large wall displays. So, besides the larger-than-life HD pore inspection, it might've seemed I was glowering down upon them from above.) I use a laptop on a "lectern" standing desk that gets wheeled around for natural light, etc. I already use a corded USB camera, but if I put it on an arm rather than on top of laptop, there's even more eye contact disconnect from the laptop display. I probably have to get a big external monitor, so that I can be looking at it from greater distance. Which I'd guess means either a fixed location for videoconf (the monitor is in a fixed location, whether or not my standing desk is), or a much larger standing desk to wheel around.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    IMO if you are working from home it is worthwhile to invest in a nice setup. You’ll want that big screen for coding anyway, right? I got one of those silly ring lights (so I wouldn’t have to worry about natural lighting) and managed to mount my webcam inside it, it worked pretty well. I don’t think people expect a pro twitch setup, but you can get pretty close with basic consumer gear!
cameldrv 3y ago
One other thing not mentioned is latency. Zoom does a good job with this, but there are fundamental limits. This makes it more cognitively demanding to find the right moment to jump in, and if two people jump in at the same time, they have to resolve the conflict, which is slower than in-person. This also tends to lead to a style of conversation where one person talks longer. It's a little like email vs. slack. The conversation is more synchronous.
- the_snooze 3y ago
  I'm in the same boat. Turn-taking in meatspace (i.e., what every person has experience with since learning language as a child) is totally ineffective in Zoom-land. My view is Zoom cannot be a true substitute for in-person meetings until there's low enough audio lag that geographically distant musicians can perform live with one another on the platform.
  - FalconSensei 3y ago
    I already usually have a difficult time jumping in on discussions in person. Zoom is SO much worse. This week I had wanted to point out that I already added a link with examples on something two folks were talking about on a doc, and after 5 minutes, I used the 'raise hand' feature, waited another 5, then just interrupted them because there was just no break to jump in, and no one noticed the raise-hand
    - asdff 3y ago
      The only benefit is that cutting people off and jumping in at the wrong time is so normalized in our zoom culture, that people just let it happen and even expect it to happen, on both sides of the conversation between the speaker and the person who got steamrolled into silence.
  - asdff 3y ago
    >low enough audio lag that geographically distant musicians can perform live with one another on the platform. This seems like a pipe dream I think, since for low cost audio interfaces people can actually feel the few ms latency with those rigs going straight into their hardware. Anything going over the network has to go through an audio interface first, either with one of these dedicated rigs or the internal audio interface your computer uses for its built in microphone, then deal with network latency which will be significant in comparison I expect.
throwaway23v3n 3y ago
I avoid all of this by not owning a webcam. I don't have video of me broadcasting because I simply can't, and nobody ever questions it because they don't really care as it's a non-essential component. I do make heavy use of visual aids & other screen sharing, so that people can look at what we are discussing, not me.
- ModernMech 3y ago
  I just tell people I’m on my desktop. They call you on it if you have a laptop, because they all have webcams these days.
- skinner_ 3y ago
  My Macbook Pro's webcam went wrong in 2020. I haven't had it fixed yet, because I hate Zoom video. Nobody ever complains.
blt 3y ago
A huge contributor they missed: technical faults. Between glitchy connections and people's inadequate microphone setups, everyone is constantly asking each other to repeat themselves. This is exhausting to me.
tiffanyh 3y ago
Less meetings / more async isn’t always the best answer. Most people are terrible at written communication, and much better at spoken (which makes sense since most speak more than write). So even though it’s terribly unfortunate, for the masses, more times than not - meetings have a total net-gain effect vs async written.
- turnsout 3y ago
  Yeah the answer is actually MORE meetings which are shorter and have 5 or fewer participants. I can’t tell you how many 1 hour meetings I’ve sat through with 20 people, only 2 of whom are talking.
  - marcinzm 3y ago
    I "love" meetings where they just recite word for word cells from an Excel spreadsheet for an hour.
    - esafak 3y ago
      Or Scrum "stand-ups" reciting the Scrum updates in a Word document.
- esafak 3y ago
  We must stop constantly lowering the bar. Let them learn to write, or don't hire them in the first place. Communication skill is a good hiring criterion.
  - tiffanyh 3y ago
    That’s much easier said if you work for a startup. But if you work for either a large organization or a company that’s been around for decades, you influencing that kind of change (across departments you don’t own) is virtually impossible unless you’re the CEO. And even then, extremely difficult.
    - 3y ago
h4l 3y ago
Maybe it's obvious, but I find resizing the window much smaller helps a lot with the close eye contact thing. Slack's huddles are good for this — their UI seems to be designed to be a small thing in the corner while you're doing other stuff. I also used to find it disconcerting watching some YouTubers film themselves with their face taking up the entire screen. I must have got used to that though as I've not noticed it in a while.
cubefox 3y ago
One thing I also noticed is that good audio quality really improves things. Even if the current audio quality doesn't consciously register as bad, low quality leads to much more exhaustion over a longer period of time. This can be observed when someone switches from a bad internal laptop mic to a high quality headset. The voice is so much more easy to listen to.
- fuzzy2 3y ago
  It's much more important to just ban Bluetooth. And also wired Jabra headsets that inexplicably still sound like Bluetooth. No more tin can sound, no more dropped words when someone starts talking. Yes, even an internal mic is better in this regard, though it will have problems with echo cancellation.
  - peterangular 3y ago
    > It's much more important to just ban Bluetooth In addition to audio quality, people have _constant_ problems with their audio setup across all platforms when using Bluetooth. I've gotten to the point where I will just outright buy someone a plain USB mic just so I can consistently get them on a call without 10 minutes of fumbling audio interfaces. Unfortunately, even after buying them a USB mic + explicitly banning Bluetooth on calls I still catch devs trying to use their fancy Bluetooth gaming headset (or whatever) which can easily push meeting start times back by 5-10 minutes.
    - vladvasiliu 3y ago
      Some conference apps just suck at audio. Teams will always pick the wrong mic / headphones, even though I don't have any bluetooth headset connected. And even after I've managed to convince it to use the right one during a call, for the very next call it forgets everything. But yeah, to your mic point, some people just don't seem to care. I have a weekly conference with someone who takes it from his open office. I can hear his colleague way better than I can hear him.
chewbacha 3y ago
I’ve personally opted to simply turn off my video in all calls and force them to be audio-only. I do this for the reasons in the OP but also to subtly encourage others to opt for audio-only and to make the space more equitable for all. Sometimes I’m the only one without a video but it doesn’t seem to bother those I work with so I keep doing it. I find this to be best, tbh.
neilv 3y ago
> Take notes: Taking notes can help you remember important points and reduce cognitive load. I often do this in online meetings, but have two not-entirely-solved problems with it: 1. People might think I'm not paying attention when I am, especially in 2-person meetings. (They might hear the typing, and my gaze might shift at times. When I do need a sec to type an action item or something that takes longer than a pause in a 2-person meeting, I can say that. People also don't know that I'm only typing notes for the meeting, not, say, processing other things, until they know me well enough to know that I'd say if I had to respond to an urgent Slack message or something.) 2. People don't always want everything recorded/documented. Say, a concern about personnel, or how some dependency is going, morale, or a personal challenge affecting someone's work. In an in-person meeting, if I've been taking notes and want to signal that something is more off-the-record, I could put down my pen, take hands off the keyboard, or close notepad portfolio. In videoconf, when they can't see my typing hands, there aren't as good subtle signals, and I might have to verbalize somehow that I'm not taking notes.
- bazmattaz 3y ago
  Hey regarding the first “problem” I’m the exact same. If it’s someone new to me who doesn’t know me I’ll often slip it into conversation that I’m taking notes; “So you’re saying that the xyz project is going to need abc? Ok cool, I’m just gonna add that to my notes here real quick” - I’ll do that early on a call. Or I’ll read back the important points I took in a real obvious way. I think I do this because it bothers the shit out of me if someone is obviously typing away on slack or whatever and not properly engaging in the meeting and I don’t wanna be seen as that guy
wkat4242 3y ago
Zoom is of course the most terrible meeting app there is. With something like Jitsi it's already a lot more feasible IMO.
the_snooze 3y ago
What kills me is the problems with audio and its effects on conversational engagement. Online calls are laggy, and participants aren't all on the same volume level. It's incredibly frustrating when I speak and someone says that my volume is low, so I should repeat myself. And the lag makes turn-taking very unnatural---in meatspace conversations, people interrupt each other and cede the floor all the time. You can't do that in a Zoom call. Taken together, Zoom is a deeply frustrating experience because the limitations of the technology get in the way of having normal human conversations. It looks like it should work, but it doesn't.
- RadiozRadioz 3y ago
  I got used to platforms like TeamSpeak where everybody had individual volume sliders. It was excellent. Whatever Zoom does to automatically adjust everyone's volume is a poor replacement and it leads to exactly the issue you describe. Sure it's cheaper than sending out a bunch of individual audio streams or doing multiple transcodes server-side, but we've lost a lot of flexibility. I'd quite like P2P systems like Jitsi to bridge the gap.
clolege 3y ago
I read over the pandemic that dogs are hyper-sensitive to space [1], and I believe that humans are too. Much more than we're aware. And while bad internet connections, mics, webcams, etc all contribute to a less enjoyable time collaborating with colleagues, I believe they are all trumped by the fact that video conference absolutely shatters the evolutionary understanding we have of space, and how to navigate it to interact with others. This is why audio-only calls feel so much better. It's basically just like talking to your friends at a sleepover with the lights out. It's not quite the same because you can't get closer or further from specific individuals, but for smaller groups it works pretty well. But when we turn video feeds on, things get very strange. Zoom puts everyone into the same exact chair, staring at a mirror where they can see everyone else in the reflection. This makes it seem like everyone is staring directly at you. And they are very close, sometimes even in your lap. Keith Johnstone's book Impro says a whole lot about space, including: > If I stand two students face to face and about a foot apart they're likely to feel a strong desire to change their body position. If they don't move they'll begin to feel love or hate as their 'space' streams into each other. To prevent these feelings they'll modify their positions until their space flows out relatively unhindered, or they'll move back so that the force isn't so powerful. High-status players (like high-status seagulls) will allow their space to flow into other people. Low-status players will avoid letting their space flow into other people. Kneeling, bowing and prostrating one-self are all ritualized low-status ways of shutting off your space. If we wish to humiliate and degrade a low-status person we attack him while refusing to let him switch his space off. A sergeant-major will stand a recruit to attention and then scream at his face from about an inch away. Crucifixion exploits this effect, which is why it's such a powerful symbol as compared to, say, boiling someone in oil. All this is to say that I believe that the Vision Pro has a lot of potential to be a game-changer for remote conferencing. It's focus on "spatial computing" makes it so that we can flex those evolutionary muscles around space again. [1] Let Dogs be Dogs by the Monks of New Skete. Great book
shrimpx 3y ago
Fuck Zoom and the never-ending array of torture devices the executive class uses to keep people loathing and afraid. Your Slack indicator must be green 24/7. You must be living permanently in the Zoom uncanny valley. And it turns out that's not enough, so back to the office!
- askafriend 3y ago
  Bad management will be bad management regardless of the tools involved. I don't think Zoom is the issue here.
rr808 3y ago
I'm back in the office 4 days a week. I thought I'd hate it but talking to people IRL is actually pretty great.
adam_arthur 3y ago
I don't get fatigue at all, but always keep my video off and do other things if the content of the meeting isn't directly relevant to me. The idea that we shouldn't differentiate based on appearances doesn't jive with a world where we need video calling on. Either people produce or they don't. Nobody needs to be staring at the screen and considering their appearance for the duration of a meeting. And yes the majority of meetings tend not to be relevant for the majority of attendees most of the time. Responsible people know how to differentiate the two
iknowSFR 3y ago
Is it possible to organize productive work conversations in the format of HN threads? Not Zoom meetings, not Slack, not emails. Why would this work? Why would it not?
TheGigaChad 3y ago
[dead]
xgkickt 3y ago
I know a lead who uses their vacation to be able to work from home with a week free of scheduled meetings.
plg 3y ago
It’s people! Zoom fatigue is people!
jussy 3y ago
As a consultant paid hourly rates now, meeting invites had a significant drop when I moved from daily to hourly. I noted that customers were paying me to hang around for 8 hours being on demand for messages or meetings to pop up like a reserved instance. I guess that long repetitive meeting culture will exist until the systems change to a flipped office.
BasedAnon 3y ago
the fatigue from video calls is a major reason why i prefer working in the office
- themadturk 3y ago
  Being back in the office has helped...but my company has satellite offices and teams (created before the satellites were established) scattered all over the region. I don't think any teams are complete in a single office. So we still have a lot of zooming.
ochronus 3y ago
Folks, thanks a lot for the lively discussion, I've learned a lot from your comments! I'm happy you liked my post.
lannisterstark 3y ago
I JUST WISH SHIT EXECS WOULD STOP ASKING ME TO TURN MY CAMERA ON AT 7 FUCKING AM JUST TO GIVE MY STANDUP UPDATE. Because it "increases my collaboration" somehow. At 0700. When I'm cranky and haven't had any coffee. there. that's all my zoom/teams/meet meeting fatigue.
gwbas1c 3y ago
I think this is because some jobs translate better to remote than others. We have the trope in popular culture of a bunch of people at work, sitting in a meeting; where being face-to-face is the norm for most of the day. This translates really poorly to full-time remote. But there's a more sinister aspect: I've gotten a vibe from some "bosses" that they like big meetings because it makes them feel important. The "perpetual Zoom" helps feed that ego.

133 points by ochronus 3y ago

[flagged]

I guess I was doing some these things already and didnt know it. Standing desk locked in the up position for zoom marathon days. Stepping back from the screens and camera when there isnt any reason to have hands on kb/m. I'm a usual pacer when on the phone so I'm not sure if that's instinct or habit but it certainly helps. Scheduling is also not mentioned surprisingly, but leaving 5-15m buffer gaps between back to back meetings I run is huge. When I dont do that I pay for it.

fader 3y ago
I've tried leaving 15 minute buffers in between meetings. All that happens is that my colleagues schedule 15 minute long meetings in the gaps. It's exhausting.
- croutonwagon 3y ago
  There’s a concept called defensive calendaring I would encourage you to look up. I regularly schedule focus time or project time on my calendar and when I had days of stacked meetings, I’ll fill in the gaps with focus time to ensure I’m not overbooked. I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s plugins or tools to help, though I do it fairly manually.
  - skirmish 3y ago
    What do you do when people just blindly schedule meetings on top of your focus time?
    - helij 3y ago
      You say no to them. I have a standing time reserved for school run. People regularly book stuff over it. I reject the meeting automatically. If I have 'busy' in my calendar because I don't want to be disturbed I first take a look what this new invite is and then decide on the spot with no or yes (no being the dominant response). Slowly over time people learn to email or Slack you with a few dates and times and life is good.
    - FalconSensei 3y ago
      if you have time booked on your calendar, no matter what it is, it's safe to assume anything else put on top is going to be declined, because you already have something scheduled. You can add a regular meeting for yourself too, instead of focus time, also set your calendar not to share meetings' details with other folks, so they will only see 'busy'
    - croutonwagon 3y ago
      Decline the meeting and say I have a scheduling conflict.

heywhatupboys 3y ago

GREAT article. Recommend to everyone to read it in its entirity

neap24 3y ago

I’m a big advocate of reducing Zoom/screen fatigue by doing manual labor after the work day. Do a home maintenance project, throw a ball with the kids in the backyard, etc.

BiteCode_dev 3y ago
The hard part is to start, but once you have done it, you feel better. Even a simple chore like cleaning will help. Going to the supermarket will not, since you can get quiet and focused on the physicality. Just walking outside will do it you have nothing to do.
- ethbr0 3y ago
  I have a mini trampoline type swing hung under a tree. Long day = taking a break at lunch and after work to just lay on it, look up into the leaves, and listen to the wind in the tree
  - brnt 3y ago
    Ah, the joys of not having to pickup children from daycare :/
    - ethbr0 3y ago
      School lets out about midway through my work afternoon.
    - bazmattaz 3y ago
      Oh man the struggle in the real. I quit zoom at exactly 5pm and run downstairs and out the door for daycare. I’m at daycare around 5:20 and to pick up the little one to come home, cook, eat, bath and bed time. The lack of time to decompress after the day (like commutes used to help with before I went fully remote) can be gruelling at times
- trillic 3y ago
  Kids have recess. Why not adults too?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dtx1 3y ago

The whole mirror fatique thing is really interesting. I get enormous social anxiety on virtual calls and am constantly checking my mirror. I hate teams for that reason, i can't properly see what I am transmitting while Google meet is showing me Exactly what I'm sending in HD. I think I'll have to experiment with removing that and see if it reduces my anxiety

shortcake27 3y ago
It’s a catch 22 for me. When it’s there, I can’t stop looking at it to ensure I look ok. When it’s not there, I’m stressing because I don’t know how I look.
- evolve2k 3y ago
  I feel like a halfway is needed. Maybe a virtual silhouette that shows my err blocking within the shot, while obscuring more detailed mirroring. Wonder if that would help.
- bazmattaz 3y ago
  Ha ha this is me. I tried to hide my face on the call before but then I’m nervous that I might have sauce on my beard or something
- dtx1 3y ago
  So i just tried it out during a longer 1:1 Session and i noticed I was still worried about how I looked but overall less stressed.

ehnto 3y ago

I turn my camera off on big calls and it helps a bunch, there's a process running in the back of my mind when it's on that is constantly screening what I am doing just incase it looks stupid on camera. It feels like being in a panopticon. You never know if someone is looking. It's very tiring. I don't have the same issue in person because you know when people are looking at you in person and there's heaps of context for everyone.

mcbuilder 3y ago
I always keep my camera off unless it's a handful of situations, like meeting someone for the first time, or making a big presentation and introducing myself. Turning the camera on is more the rare thing.
- themadturk 3y ago
  On technical calls with two or three people where we all know each other we rarely turn the cameras on. For big meetings, the bosses prefer to have cameras on the whole time, but at least require that we start meetings that way, then we can turn them off after the meeting really gets going.
stndef 3y ago
I discovered the same as well, highly recommend turning off the camera.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  I do it very often because I often walk around my office or play with toys in my hands when I am collecting my thoughts or focusing on listening to people. Also help not feeling the urge to multitask and do other things on the computer.
noman-land 3y ago
I want you and everyone else to know that sometimes on large zoom calls I will "pin" one person in the call and stare at them for multiple minutes in a row on fullscreen. I do this all the time.

codingdave 3y ago

Of course, the elephant in the room is that people need to stop having so many meetings. Those of us who have been working remotely for a decade or more never had this problem - we use async communications, quick one-off calls when needed, and really never spent all our time in meetings. But when everyone moved to remote work a few years ago, this culture of meetings all day came up... and it still confuses me. It isn't effective.

blowski 3y ago
Im not sure it came up in 2020. I’ve been at work since the late 90s and the same complaints were made then. The difference now is that everybody is also responding on Slack throughout, so it’s like having double-density meetings.
nimbius 3y ago
agreed. dont know who needs to hear this but if you're having more than 1 scrum a week its not devops, its micromanagement, and if youve got more than 2-3 meetings a week youre effectively doing your managers work. if it can be summarized in 2-3 lines in an email, dont accept the meeting.
- tempest_ 3y ago
  Management is a skill and a lot of people get peter principled into it and don't learn or hone the skill set required.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  Worse are meeting with just a vague title and not a well defined agenda. So many times I have to ask the organizer to add bullet points of the items to cover so I can at least join already prepared, can tell the organizer if I am not really the right person to join for the meeting and/or if someone from another team would be necessary. So many time is wasted on meeting because of off topic stuff or because the rights persons haven't been invited.
janosdebugs 3y ago
This, thank you. I recently quit my corporate job and we started our own company with my wife... never been so productive. Meetings are truly productivity killers. Why hire smart people for a lot of money to then have them sit around in groups of 10+, half listening, half braindead?

FpUser 3y ago

Did they mention general meeting fatigue? Just before covid I was doing some contract for org with many developers. Amount of meetings they had was staggering. I am an independent vendor and organize my time however I see fit but if I was forced to participate in the insanity I've observed I would go insane.

bee_rider 3y ago

The perspective mismatch between desktop and laptop users can be a bit funny, laptop users tend to be close to the screen, so they take up their cameras’ full field of view. Blown up on a big desktop screen it is like they are right in your face. It really can feel uncomfortably intimate, as silly as that sounds! Luckily my monitor was on an arm, so I could do one setup for Zoom, one for meetings.

neilv 3y ago
I want to figure out a better way to do this. (The worst was when my extreme closeup was combined with some remote conference room that put videoconf people up on large wall displays. So, besides the larger-than-life HD pore inspection, it might've seemed I was glowering down upon them from above.) I use a laptop on a "lectern" standing desk that gets wheeled around for natural light, etc. I already use a corded USB camera, but if I put it on an arm rather than on top of laptop, there's even more eye contact disconnect from the laptop display. I probably have to get a big external monitor, so that I can be looking at it from greater distance. Which I'd guess means either a fixed location for videoconf (the monitor is in a fixed location, whether or not my standing desk is), or a much larger standing desk to wheel around.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  IMO if you are working from home it is worthwhile to invest in a nice setup. You’ll want that big screen for coding anyway, right? I got one of those silly ring lights (so I wouldn’t have to worry about natural lighting) and managed to mount my webcam inside it, it worked pretty well. I don’t think people expect a pro twitch setup, but you can get pretty close with basic consumer gear!

cameldrv 3y ago

One other thing not mentioned is latency. Zoom does a good job with this, but there are fundamental limits. This makes it more cognitively demanding to find the right moment to jump in, and if two people jump in at the same time, they have to resolve the conflict, which is slower than in-person. This also tends to lead to a style of conversation where one person talks longer. It's a little like email vs. slack. The conversation is more synchronous.

the_snooze 3y ago
I'm in the same boat. Turn-taking in meatspace (i.e., what every person has experience with since learning language as a child) is totally ineffective in Zoom-land. My view is Zoom cannot be a true substitute for in-person meetings until there's low enough audio lag that geographically distant musicians can perform live with one another on the platform.
- FalconSensei 3y ago
  I already usually have a difficult time jumping in on discussions in person. Zoom is SO much worse. This week I had wanted to point out that I already added a link with examples on something two folks were talking about on a doc, and after 5 minutes, I used the 'raise hand' feature, waited another 5, then just interrupted them because there was just no break to jump in, and no one noticed the raise-hand
  - asdff 3y ago
    The only benefit is that cutting people off and jumping in at the wrong time is so normalized in our zoom culture, that people just let it happen and even expect it to happen, on both sides of the conversation between the speaker and the person who got steamrolled into silence.
- asdff 3y ago
  >low enough audio lag that geographically distant musicians can perform live with one another on the platform. This seems like a pipe dream I think, since for low cost audio interfaces people can actually feel the few ms latency with those rigs going straight into their hardware. Anything going over the network has to go through an audio interface first, either with one of these dedicated rigs or the internal audio interface your computer uses for its built in microphone, then deal with network latency which will be significant in comparison I expect.

throwaway23v3n 3y ago

I avoid all of this by not owning a webcam. I don't have video of me broadcasting because I simply can't, and nobody ever questions it because they don't really care as it's a non-essential component. I do make heavy use of visual aids & other screen sharing, so that people can look at what we are discussing, not me.

ModernMech 3y ago
I just tell people I’m on my desktop. They call you on it if you have a laptop, because they all have webcams these days.
skinner_ 3y ago
My Macbook Pro's webcam went wrong in 2020. I haven't had it fixed yet, because I hate Zoom video. Nobody ever complains.

blt 3y ago

A huge contributor they missed: technical faults. Between glitchy connections and people's inadequate microphone setups, everyone is constantly asking each other to repeat themselves. This is exhausting to me.

tiffanyh 3y ago

Less meetings / more async isn’t always the best answer. Most people are terrible at written communication, and much better at spoken (which makes sense since most speak more than write). So even though it’s terribly unfortunate, for the masses, more times than not - meetings have a total net-gain effect vs async written.

turnsout 3y ago
Yeah the answer is actually MORE meetings which are shorter and have 5 or fewer participants. I can’t tell you how many 1 hour meetings I’ve sat through with 20 people, only 2 of whom are talking.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  I "love" meetings where they just recite word for word cells from an Excel spreadsheet for an hour.
  - esafak 3y ago
    Or Scrum "stand-ups" reciting the Scrum updates in a Word document.
esafak 3y ago
We must stop constantly lowering the bar. Let them learn to write, or don't hire them in the first place. Communication skill is a good hiring criterion.
- tiffanyh 3y ago
  That’s much easier said if you work for a startup. But if you work for either a large organization or a company that’s been around for decades, you influencing that kind of change (across departments you don’t own) is virtually impossible unless you’re the CEO. And even then, extremely difficult.
  - 3y ago

h4l 3y ago

Maybe it's obvious, but I find resizing the window much smaller helps a lot with the close eye contact thing. Slack's huddles are good for this — their UI seems to be designed to be a small thing in the corner while you're doing other stuff. I also used to find it disconcerting watching some YouTubers film themselves with their face taking up the entire screen. I must have got used to that though as I've not noticed it in a while.

cubefox 3y ago

One thing I also noticed is that good audio quality really improves things. Even if the current audio quality doesn't consciously register as bad, low quality leads to much more exhaustion over a longer period of time. This can be observed when someone switches from a bad internal laptop mic to a high quality headset. The voice is so much more easy to listen to.

fuzzy2 3y ago
It's much more important to just ban Bluetooth. And also wired Jabra headsets that inexplicably still sound like Bluetooth. No more tin can sound, no more dropped words when someone starts talking. Yes, even an internal mic is better in this regard, though it will have problems with echo cancellation.
- peterangular 3y ago
  > It's much more important to just ban Bluetooth In addition to audio quality, people have _constant_ problems with their audio setup across all platforms when using Bluetooth. I've gotten to the point where I will just outright buy someone a plain USB mic just so I can consistently get them on a call without 10 minutes of fumbling audio interfaces. Unfortunately, even after buying them a USB mic + explicitly banning Bluetooth on calls I still catch devs trying to use their fancy Bluetooth gaming headset (or whatever) which can easily push meeting start times back by 5-10 minutes.
  - vladvasiliu 3y ago
    Some conference apps just suck at audio. Teams will always pick the wrong mic / headphones, even though I don't have any bluetooth headset connected. And even after I've managed to convince it to use the right one during a call, for the very next call it forgets everything. But yeah, to your mic point, some people just don't seem to care. I have a weekly conference with someone who takes it from his open office. I can hear his colleague way better than I can hear him.

chewbacha 3y ago

I’ve personally opted to simply turn off my video in all calls and force them to be audio-only. I do this for the reasons in the OP but also to subtly encourage others to opt for audio-only and to make the space more equitable for all. Sometimes I’m the only one without a video but it doesn’t seem to bother those I work with so I keep doing it. I find this to be best, tbh.

neilv 3y ago

> Take notes: Taking notes can help you remember important points and reduce cognitive load. I often do this in online meetings, but have two not-entirely-solved problems with it: 1. People might think I'm not paying attention when I am, especially in 2-person meetings. (They might hear the typing, and my gaze might shift at times. When I do need a sec to type an action item or something that takes longer than a pause in a 2-person meeting, I can say that. People also don't know that I'm only typing notes for the meeting, not, say, processing other things, until they know me well enough to know that I'd say if I had to respond to an urgent Slack message or something.) 2. People don't always want everything recorded/documented. Say, a concern about personnel, or how some dependency is going, morale, or a personal challenge affecting someone's work. In an in-person meeting, if I've been taking notes and want to signal that something is more off-the-record, I could put down my pen, take hands off the keyboard, or close notepad portfolio. In videoconf, when they can't see my typing hands, there aren't as good subtle signals, and I might have to verbalize somehow that I'm not taking notes.

bazmattaz 3y ago
Hey regarding the first “problem” I’m the exact same. If it’s someone new to me who doesn’t know me I’ll often slip it into conversation that I’m taking notes; “So you’re saying that the xyz project is going to need abc? Ok cool, I’m just gonna add that to my notes here real quick” - I’ll do that early on a call. Or I’ll read back the important points I took in a real obvious way. I think I do this because it bothers the shit out of me if someone is obviously typing away on slack or whatever and not properly engaging in the meeting and I don’t wanna be seen as that guy

wkat4242 3y ago

Zoom is of course the most terrible meeting app there is. With something like Jitsi it's already a lot more feasible IMO.

the_snooze 3y ago

What kills me is the problems with audio and its effects on conversational engagement. Online calls are laggy, and participants aren't all on the same volume level. It's incredibly frustrating when I speak and someone says that my volume is low, so I should repeat myself. And the lag makes turn-taking very unnatural---in meatspace conversations, people interrupt each other and cede the floor all the time. You can't do that in a Zoom call. Taken together, Zoom is a deeply frustrating experience because the limitations of the technology get in the way of having normal human conversations. It looks like it should work, but it doesn't.

RadiozRadioz 3y ago
I got used to platforms like TeamSpeak where everybody had individual volume sliders. It was excellent. Whatever Zoom does to automatically adjust everyone's volume is a poor replacement and it leads to exactly the issue you describe. Sure it's cheaper than sending out a bunch of individual audio streams or doing multiple transcodes server-side, but we've lost a lot of flexibility. I'd quite like P2P systems like Jitsi to bridge the gap.

clolege 3y ago

I read over the pandemic that dogs are hyper-sensitive to space [1], and I believe that humans are too. Much more than we're aware. And while bad internet connections, mics, webcams, etc all contribute to a less enjoyable time collaborating with colleagues, I believe they are all trumped by the fact that video conference absolutely shatters the evolutionary understanding we have of space, and how to navigate it to interact with others. This is why audio-only calls feel so much better. It's basically just like talking to your friends at a sleepover with the lights out. It's not quite the same because you can't get closer or further from specific individuals, but for smaller groups it works pretty well. But when we turn video feeds on, things get very strange. Zoom puts everyone into the same exact chair, staring at a mirror where they can see everyone else in the reflection. This makes it seem like everyone is staring directly at you. And they are very close, sometimes even in your lap. Keith Johnstone's book Impro says a whole lot about space, including: > If I stand two students face to face and about a foot apart they're likely to feel a strong desire to change their body position. If they don't move they'll begin to feel love or hate as their 'space' streams into each other. To prevent these feelings they'll modify their positions until their space flows out relatively unhindered, or they'll move back so that the force isn't so powerful. High-status players (like high-status seagulls) will allow their space to flow into other people. Low-status players will avoid letting their space flow into other people. Kneeling, bowing and prostrating one-self are all ritualized low-status ways of shutting off your space. If we wish to humiliate and degrade a low-status person we attack him while refusing to let him switch his space off. A sergeant-major will stand a recruit to attention and then scream at his face from about an inch away. Crucifixion exploits this effect, which is why it's such a powerful symbol as compared to, say, boiling someone in oil. All this is to say that I believe that the Vision Pro has a lot of potential to be a game-changer for remote conferencing. It's focus on "spatial computing" makes it so that we can flex those evolutionary muscles around space again. [1] Let Dogs be Dogs by the Monks of New Skete. Great book

shrimpx 3y ago

Fuck Zoom and the never-ending array of torture devices the executive class uses to keep people loathing and afraid. Your Slack indicator must be green 24/7. You must be living permanently in the Zoom uncanny valley. And it turns out that's not enough, so back to the office!

askafriend 3y ago
Bad management will be bad management regardless of the tools involved. I don't think Zoom is the issue here.

rr808 3y ago

I'm back in the office 4 days a week. I thought I'd hate it but talking to people IRL is actually pretty great.

adam_arthur 3y ago

I don't get fatigue at all, but always keep my video off and do other things if the content of the meeting isn't directly relevant to me. The idea that we shouldn't differentiate based on appearances doesn't jive with a world where we need video calling on. Either people produce or they don't. Nobody needs to be staring at the screen and considering their appearance for the duration of a meeting. And yes the majority of meetings tend not to be relevant for the majority of attendees most of the time. Responsible people know how to differentiate the two

iknowSFR 3y ago

Is it possible to organize productive work conversations in the format of HN threads? Not Zoom meetings, not Slack, not emails. Why would this work? Why would it not?

TheGigaChad 3y ago

[dead]

xgkickt 3y ago

I know a lead who uses their vacation to be able to work from home with a week free of scheduled meetings.

plg 3y ago

It’s people! Zoom fatigue is people!

jussy 3y ago

As a consultant paid hourly rates now, meeting invites had a significant drop when I moved from daily to hourly. I noted that customers were paying me to hang around for 8 hours being on demand for messages or meetings to pop up like a reserved instance. I guess that long repetitive meeting culture will exist until the systems change to a flipped office.

BasedAnon 3y ago

the fatigue from video calls is a major reason why i prefer working in the office

themadturk 3y ago
Being back in the office has helped...but my company has satellite offices and teams (created before the satellites were established) scattered all over the region. I don't think any teams are complete in a single office. So we still have a lot of zooming.

ochronus 3y ago

Folks, thanks a lot for the lively discussion, I've learned a lot from your comments! I'm happy you liked my post.

lannisterstark 3y ago

I JUST WISH SHIT EXECS WOULD STOP ASKING ME TO TURN MY CAMERA ON AT 7 FUCKING AM JUST TO GIVE MY STANDUP UPDATE. Because it "increases my collaboration" somehow. At 0700. When I'm cranky and haven't had any coffee. there. that's all my zoom/teams/meet meeting fatigue.

gwbas1c 3y ago

I think this is because some jobs translate better to remote than others. We have the trope in popular culture of a bunch of people at work, sitting in a meeting; where being face-to-face is the norm for most of the day. This translates really poorly to full-time remote. But there's a more sinister aspect: I've gotten a vibe from some "bosses" that they like big meetings because it makes them feel important. The "perpetual Zoom" helps feed that ego.