[wpietri]

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]

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.

[pdonis]

> He explained exactly why he believes it is worse: the lack of information to be collected by the various senses.

Yes, but he left out the most important part: why he thinks that extra information is important.

He does leave a clue: at one point he says his ability to "read the room" is mostly lost.

The subtext to this is that he's a manager, and his job is not just cranking out technical content, it's managing people and processes to achieve a larger goal. And his ability to do that is impaired by the much reduced information he's able to get from other people in a video call as opposed to an in person meeting.

My personal response is, this mode of working isn't going away because too many people have realized how many upsides it has as compared to a daily commute to an office and having to be in that office every day. So people who were depending on the extra information that was available in that office environment are just going to have to learn how to operate without it.

[wpietri]

Ooh, this is a good point. My remote-work experience has been less manager-focused, more about worker-to-worker collaboration around goals. I wonder if what he experiences as reduced information is telling us something about the whole notion of management going forward.

[b112]

In the very early 80s, there was a game on floppy disc which had tracks with scents on them.

If you entered some parts of the game, it would run the read head over the track, and you'd smell things.

Maybe zoom could distribute a smellotron or some such. Put a variety of pheromones on it, eg anxiety, etc

[nunez]

That is super cool.

[nickelpro]

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]

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

[nickelpro]

> 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“.

I really encourage you to spend some time in a youth community if you can't come up with answers to theses questions. The answer is, you don't. You pitched the thing already in a group chat. People either reacted with dozens of emoji and filled reply threads with "let's talk about this..." or they didn't and your pitch died on the vine. In more formal environments, pitches are usually in an RFC-like format and feedback is via comments on that doc (or Github issue, bug tracker, whatever-they-have-in-Jira)

Speaking persuasively in a one-on-one Discord video chat is identical to in person, or it is for people who don't feel awkward on video chat to begin with.

The design discussion thing, where the back and forth is purely technical, again just doesn't happen in video conferences. Meetings themselves were a shit format for this as well, all of this is done in dedicated group chats (Discord/Slack/Teams/whatever) where people can reference and link documentation readily and on their own time. Schedules are managed via shared calendars. Private discussions are taken to DMs.

Traditional conference-type meetings are for very specific topics, typically emergencies or something happening in real time where the pace of events lends value to being able to shout something quickly into a mic. Basically the same reason video games use voice chat. Sometimes there will be a monthly touch-base or whatever but I saw a lot of those get phased out during the pandemic because people realized that nothing new was getting put out over them.

One-sided teleconferences, where you're just dialing in to listen to a presentation of something and maybe a little Q&A, work identically to someone standing at the front of an auditorium giving a presentation. I present in a similar format weekly as part of a training program and the only difference is I get to sit down instead of standing at a podium.

All that said, I've been in a video chat with a dozen recent grads and they didn't slow down for a beat or appear to have an trouble reading one another. I cannot emphasize enough that you and I struggling with this doesn't mean anything was lost, just that we're getting older and the world keeps on spinning.

[dilyevsky]

Yes instead of reading peoples body language which happens naturally for most folks I’m supposed to parse a chat stream for emoji reactions twitch style. That’s not adding any cognitive overhead at all. I mean this social media thing works so well for general life and politics why not sprinkle over workplace too amirite?

[wpietri]

Sorry, but I was in plenty of in-person meetings where people rambled on way too much. I also have been in plenty of remote meetings where people didn't. So I think at best this is a problem of people learning to adapt to the new technology.

As a simple example, look at the protocol for half-duplex radio channels. One says something short and then says, "over" to signal that it's the other person's turn. Is this different than how people talk in person? Sure. Does it work? Definitely.

In your shoes, I would reexamine my concept of "design discussion". My team has made plenty of design choices during the pandemic. Maybe "pitch something" and "speak persuasively" is the wrong approach now.

[dilyevsky]

Your answer is basically just use async process which was already a thing before pandemic and it sucked then

[wpietri]

That's not exactly my answer.

One of the things that I think remote work changes is that traditional power is diminished. If you are used to forcing people to have contentious discussions where you win your favored outcome, that may be the wrong framework.

After all, "design" in software is really just making a lot of small choices consistently. Arguing people into a decision is one way to get consistency, but far from the only one.

[wpietri]

Yes, he explained it, and yes I disagree. I do agree that when I switched it was harder because some of the ways I was used to gauging other people weren't available. But now I've learned other approaches, and people, or at least my colleagues, have learned other ways to communicate their state. So I still believe he is not yet used to it.

[ghiculescu]

If after 2 years he is not used to it, I think that’s certainly a long enough time to question it.

[wpietri]

I guess? Dude's my age, and it's becoming clear to me that a lot of my contemporaries are losing their ability to adapt even faster than I am. I think it's fine for him to question it for him, or maybe for his demographic, but I think it's a mistake to universalize that.

Maybe I'm just lucky here. I found the BBS scene when I was ~12, so remote communication has been an important part of my social life since before my voice changed. So maybe I have less adaptation to do.

But either way, I don't think my fellow olds should be judging technology as if our experience is universal. If I want to know the true limits of remote collaboration, I'm going to look at the 12-25 demographic segment, as they have a lot less to unlearn than people my age.

[KerrAvon]

This is the most spot-on response here. Those of us who are remote-native, if you will, are not put off by this transition.

[themadturk]

So true, especially in organizations where all the people calling the shots are both older and non-technical. I’m in my mid-60s and didn’t get into computers until the mid-80s, but I’ve long been comfortable with remote and ansync communications; I’m not remote-native, but definitely remote-assimilated. Too many in my age group simply don’t get it.

[troupe]

While Zoom may be kind of terrible, there are ways to make video conferencing work a lot better. Having a separate big monitor for the video conferencing with the camera above where you see the people is a good start. Having multiple large screens where the participants are spread across at a resolution where you can see facial expressions is even better. These are easy things to optimize and aren't even very expensive to make remote work better than the horrible zoom meetings that the author describes.

I do like being in person with people, but, like you, I also like being remote. But sometimes it feels like there is an effort to not use the things that could improve remote work just so there is an excuse to go back to the office.

[wpietri]

For sure. I think we're very early on in our understanding of how to use technology to enable remote work. And how to adapt as people to the technology at hand. Like you, I tend to put Zoom on one big screen and put it in Brady Bunch mode so I can see expressions. I also tend to turn off viewing myself, as I find that's a big part of my Zoom fatigue.

[troupe]

I know Cisco Tendberg and others have really invested a lot of money in trying to create "telepresence" and create setups where the technology is as transparent as possible. But I don't see that companies have worked very hard to get that type of tech into people's remote environments.

[spc476]

The one thing that makes remote meetings at work barely tolerable is that no one bothers to use the camera. Everyone has their camera turned off.

[troupe]

So the in person equivalent of everyone coming in with a bag over their head or standing in the hall and dialing into the phone bridge in the room. :)

[wpietri]

Nah, more like a classroom or an auditorium, where you just don't expect to see everybody's faces, but they can still raise their hand and speak.

[troupe]

When I speak in a classroom or auditorium, I always expect to see people's faces.

[wpietri]

Truly?

Imagine you're in an audience. Somebody two rows behind you raises their hands and asks a question. Do you leap to your feet so you can turn around and stare at their face?

Most people certainly don't. Ditto if the person is otherwise hard to see. They just listen and it's fine.