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by Sodman 1699 days ago
Conversely, other people are annoyed with "selfish" people forcing what could otherwise be a productive in-person meeting to now need to include one person dialed in over zoom, perhaps without a video feed. Hope you weren't planning on collaborating using physical media such as whiteboard or post-it notes. Obviously we can do our best to reduce unnecessary meetings, but for those remaining necessary meetings, an in-person meeting is almost always more productive than a zoom meeting in my experience.

This is why both sides are so fired up over remote vs in-person. Your decision to work either remotely or in person has negative consequences for your co-workers either way. WFH folks are mad that they are being asked to commute, in-office folks are mad that they are being forced to use clunky online tools strictly to accommodate their remote-only peers.
2 comments
tablespoon 1699 days ago
> Conversely, other people are annoyed with "selfish" people forcing what could otherwise be a productive in-person meeting to now need to include one person dialed in over zoom, perhaps without a video feed.

That's actually a good point. Conference speakerphones are garbage, so once one needed person is remote, everyone has to dial in. The experience is really only workable if everyone is using a headset.

> in-office folks are mad that they are being forced to use clunky online tools strictly to accommodate their remote-only peers.

This isn't just a side effect of WFH, offshoring/distributed teams force it too. Even before the pandemic, most of my co-located team's meetings were online, since we almost always had to accommodate someone who was based at another site.

To go a little off-topic, there are a lot of good arguments against open office plans, but weirdly the one that seemed hardest for advocates to shrug off was the difficulty of having a bunch of co-located people joining the same call, and having to deal with echo. I think that's because it challenged the assumption that work happened mainly in a very particular co-located way (e.g. like a bunch of people sitting at consoles in a mission control center).

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sam0x17 1685 days ago
I find it hilarious that people think there is still justification for an expense as large as office real estate / office rent, when the non-biased peer-reviewed studies all show a 15-20% productivity gain from WFH anyway. So what, you want to spend way more to be less productive? Offices are dead. Wouldn't want to be whatever idiot apple exec just commissioned their new campus. Useless real estate. Dollar value of $0.
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nottorp 1699 days ago
> Conversely, other people are annoyed with "selfish" people forcing what could otherwise be a productive in-person meeting to now need to include one person dialed in over zoom, perhaps without a video feed.

And that is why you should seek remote only companies if possible. Add in asynchronous work culture. Let the "productive" people waste their time in video meetings.

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Sodman 1699 days ago
Asynchronous culture and no-meetings-ever is great if you're a somebody who has the ability/experience/authority to take a high level task and run with it without needing to collaborate with or have input from anyone else, but that's not how most companies work in reality.

If you're waiting for multi-day turnaround times on agreements because there's back and forth where two parties are trying to have a debate over requirements in a document but both only check for updates every few hours, I'd argue you're not being as "productive" as you think.

It's true that many meetings could have been an e-mail, but there are a few crucial meetings that can save days by just getting everyone together in a room for 30 minutes to reach an agreement.

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nottorp 1699 days ago
> It's true that many meetings could have been an e-mail, but there are a few crucial meetings that can save days by just getting everyone together in a room for 30 minutes to reach an agreement.

Oh, and what stops you from doing that in an async company? If the meeting is justified, that is. It's the other 98% of meetings that you get rid of.

And incidentally, why "everyone in a room" and not "everyone in a group chat"?

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