[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.

[dilyevsky]

Not really about “winning” but about having everyone on the same page. And yes you can do it async too but it’s more difficult. The result I think is more likely to evolve into either a bdfl style arrangement or everyone pulls in their own direction.

[wpietri]

I agree other ways are more difficult if you aren't used to them. And some other ways may be more difficult for you personally. But I disagree you can universalize your feelings here.

I've been part of in-person pair programming teams that had frequent pair rotation. We only rarely had meetings, and never had any formal design meetings with pitching and persuasion and whatnot. All our communications were synchronous and high bandwidth, but our design choices happened gradually and over time. It worked fine. Better, really.