[Gigachad]

I absolutely hate calls. WFH works well when you just need to grind out something solo, but it’s awful to communicate.

Personally I go in the office 1-2 days a week. If you want to talk to me, do it in person those days. If you add me to some 10 person video call. I’m just going to zone out.

[mrits]

I feel like you need to compare a 10 person video call with a 10 person in office meeting. And of course, a hallway chat vs a 1-1 zoom call or discord exchange.

[tomjakubowski]

Ten person meetings have felt better for me in person. I think it's because there's more room for impromptu overlapping discussions, which Zoom doesn't support well.

[OkayPhysicist]

This is the billion-dollar problem in VoIP. I call it the "cocktail party problem", because a cocktail party is the most extreme example. In meatspace, you're able to drift between conversations subtly queuing to the other participants in a breakout conversation that you're engaging with them, while still being able to pick up on nearby conversations which you can choose to swap to.

A multi-call system like a Discord server represents a small step, with the ability to see that conversations are happening in other calls, and maybe get a guess of what they're doing thanks to live presence, but it's far from a complete solution.

[neuronerdgirl]

Gather Town was tackling this issue surprisingly well during COVID, but anytime I tried to convince people to use it they defaulted back to Zoom because Gather was too confusing. I think it would take a real paradigm shift from the "call with video" model to get decent adoption of something like that, and now that it's so expensive to use Gather I don't see how they can get enough exposure to really convince the public at large.

[Terr_]

Perhaps another factor is that it doesn't seem like the nine other participants are always staring towards you, personally, specifically, persistently. There are breaks and ebbs and flows, as other people talk and you can take turns as an observer from the side.

[colechristensen]

I find meetings I shouldn’t have been invited to a great time to do the dishes. Likewise big status update meetings with low information content.

[selykg]

Wish that was easy for me. The people I work with seem to insist on having video on.

[Gigachad]

Because video off meetings are entirely pointless and just shouldn't be run. Not to say that turning video on magically makes the meetings have point, but if you are muted, video off, and doing the dishes, you just shouldn't be in that call.

Requiring video on probably makes people push back against being invited to useless meetings rather than seeing it as an hour to clean the house.

[BigJono]

People that schedule meetings like that don't want pushback. They're not trying to optimise the list of people in the meeting, they're trying to grow it at the expense of everything else.

They genuinely believe that whatever they're crapping on about to a brick wall for 2 hours straight is the most important thing in the universe and they want your undivided attention, productivity or profit be damned. That's why they force people to turn their cameras on.

[decafninja]

Because many meetings that involve many people are entirely pointless for the majority invited, period, regardless of format.

Many of the people for whom the meeting is pointless are usually in no position to push back on it.

[flappyeagle]

Just don’t go

[peristls]

You don't always have an option and when you do there are consequences. It cost me my grades in high school (during the lockdown, in an European country) because I was adamant on not wanting to show myself on camera. The same thing happened when looking for a job. I'd rather face the consequences rather than give in.

[thunky]

> you just shouldn't be in that call

Exactly. But most of the time you don't have a choice.

So may as well do dishes.

[flappyeagle]

Just don’t go. You have a choice. You are a sentient human being.

[thunky]

Oh...why am I even doing anything at all at my job? I could just refuse to work and get paid anyway? With no consequences?

Wow all this time like a sucker I've been doing what my boss asked me to do.

[Gigachad]

As an individual you may as well do dishes, but as a company you should believe that your meetings are actually important, and if they are, everyone should be present and video on. At least that way there will be pushback against useless meetings.

[thunky]

If I attend a meeting every day while I'm doing the dishes and my employer can't tell, then my employer has already failed your test.

There is no point in pushing back in this case. They just don't care about running an effective meeting.

[15457345234]

I absolutely love calls, you don't have to type and you have the other person's (relatively) undivided attention. Plus cajoling, browbeating and instigating techniques work better and if called out you can put things down to 'tonal misunderstanding.' Also a lot of people these days can't truly understand written content because they don't grasp nuance and only interpret things literally. When you actually talk to them they tend to be a little less robotic and start inferring more so you don't have to spell things out so elaborately.

[tomjakubowski]

> a lot of people these days can't truly understand written content

It's a two way street. A lot of people are terrible at writing to communicate, especially in a time-sensitive context like Slack, and we remote workers are having to do a lot more written communication than when we were in the office.

US national reading comprehension test scores have been flat, more or less, since 1992. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/reading/2022/

[cassianoleal]

> a lot of people these days can't truly understand written content because they don't grasp nuance and only interpret things literally.

There seems to be a disconnect between parts of this sentence. "Can't understend written content" because they "interpret things literally."

Why wouldn't they? If you have something to say, say it - or, in this case, write it.

Why leave things open to interpretation?

Furthermore, why not just say things literally in a video call or in-person meeting as well? Surely the only possibility is for less confusion this way.

[15457345234]

Because unless you take half an hour to write 500 words you're always leaving things open to interpretation. A huge part of human communication is interpretation and inference.

When you have a verbal communication people bring up things they don't understand in realtime and you correct as you go so that, by the end of the conversation, a mutual understanding has been reached.

In writing - especially if you're sending emails - people are often reluctant to come back for more info as they think it'll make them look dumb, plus there's the 'inertia' factor plus the factor of not knowing whether you'll get a timely reply.

[kccqzy]

You know you can just have an in-person meeting. You also don't have to type and you also have the other person's undivided attention (perhaps even more so).

[15457345234]

I don't like to move, I like to sit at my desk and summon

[steveBK123]

My problem is that in-office I'm going to zone out in 99 out of 100 of the micro conversations I get interrupted into per day.

[agumonkey]

Strange how I felt zero difference. As long as sound is crisp clear it feels like we're in the same room.

[closeparen]

No matter how clear it is, the audio is half-duplex, meaning the small overlaps that are part of normal conversation control-flow instead make it crash and burn. Calls work fine for one way presentation or very structured Q&A, not so much for interactive discussion.

[agumonkey]

I .. really don't experience that, we're regularly 3 on zoom and we chat as if we were in our company offices. There are some audio issues if we really overlap too wildly but really it got to the point that seeing zoom webpage makes me smile.

[closeparen]

Are you all using headsets? I always do, but many of my colleagues just use their laptop speakers, so echo cancellation is in play.

[agumonkey]

Some times one guy will have headset, but everybody use various setups quite randomly.

[closeparen]

Which videoconferencing service is this?