[2muchcoffeeman]

I find in person meetings more effective. I’d rather meet once a week or 2 and get all the big meetings done then go away to code, than have Zoom meetings every single day.

I predict that in all the full time WFH companies, some small group will start having in person meets once every X. Or some other startup will innovate past an incumbent by having a hybrid model.

Then hybrid will be the next “new” thing.

[rhacker]

Zoom is the new power point. Has anyone noticed we've replaced the concept of "the thing that is annoying about meetings is power point" to just blaming zoom.

I don't even think we have a point to make, it's just like a thing we say... like oh god another power point meeting, oh god another zoom call.

I think the real thing is "oh god another thing I have to do I don't want to" - but we're afraid to say it.

[BTCOG]

I guess I should be so fortunate that I've been working from home since the end of February 2020 and that all we use is Microsoft Teams for audio-only calls. We have never done video calls and I cannot imagine why anyone would stand for that shit.

[riffraff]

Well, for one you can just nod along while other people speak, or shake your head. Video just increases the communication bandwidth a bit.

You can also quickly switch to screen sharing some chart and discuss it. Or you can look at a backlog, or some bit of code, or a mockup.

I've been remote for 12 years, in my experience video calls are strictly better than audio only, but of course it's fine if someone can't join with video.

It's not video that makes meetings bad, it's people.

[2muchcoffeeman]

Oh, I’m not afraid to say I hate teleconferencing.

And I assure you I wasn’t imagining the average of 3-4 hours of online meetings every single day that was compressed to 1-2 days every 2 weeks once we started meeting in the office again.

[amerkhalid]

Zoom meetings have made me appreciate in-person meetings so much. It seems phrases like these, "Can you hear me?", "Sorry I was on mute", "You are breaking up", "Sorry can you repeat that", "Sorry my internet connection is bad today", take up way too much time. Then people speaking over each other and you cannot understand anyone at all.

I think once a week in-person meetings and rest of week heads down WFH would be a great idea. Or we can do everything in async communication like emails.

And no, not Slack. It is even more distracting and should ideally be used only during scheduled meeting in place of Zoom or for emergency situations.

[aix1]

I think that quality issues are part software and part internet connectivity. We use an internal version of Google Meet and it works fantastically well (and during the pandemic has acquired a ton of useful new features).

Internet quality and speed is a function of a few things, including where people live. I wouldn't want to extrapolate but I've not been finding connectivity to be an issue for internal meetings. Yes, occasionally there are hardware issues (e.g. I had a flaky WiFi chip in my laptop). These may be unfortunate for a particular meeting but tend to get fixed and so "can you hear me?" is definitely not a recurring pattern in my experience.

Sometimes people choose to join video calls from their phone while, for example, walking their dog (a completely acceptable thing culturally). In those instances video and audio quality can be variable; it's up to the individuals to make sensible choices around which meetings are suitable for this sort of thing.

Finally, there's a phone backup, where you can dial into a meeting (audio only) over a phone line. Some people use this if they need to take a meeting from somewhere with particularly bad connectivity. I personally have not needed to use it once in the 15+ months of WFH but I've seen others use it.

People unintentionally speaking over each other was definitely a thing in the beginning, especially in larger meetings. I've been founding it happen less and less over time, as people learned when to pause and we developed better ways to moderate large online meetings. Video makes this much easier compared to audio-only.

Overall, I think I've come to prefer video calls to in-person meetings, at least when _everyone_ joins over video. It'll be interesting to see how well the original, hybrid model (some participants joining in person and some over video) will work.

[Raed667]

I don't have that option. The number and length of meetings is the same if I'm WFH or in the office.

Since we're doing SCRUM, their spacing is also the same: sprint review, retrospective, splaning, refinement, ideation, etc..