[rurp]

> Mostly no cameras.

It's interesting to hear this from others. Years ago I would have expected that camera-on meetings would be more productive on average, but my own experience is the opposite. I have only worked at a few remote companies but the places where cameras mostly weren't used had far far less wasted meeting time.

[notnaut]

David Foster Wallace was clever in his forethought here, though the reasons video calls have largely fallen out of favor in the real world may be different.

“Within like 16 months or 5 sales quarters, the tumescent demand curve collapsed like a kicked tent, so that by the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, fewer than 10 percent of all private telephone communications utilized any video image fiber data transfers … the average US phone user deciding that s/he actually preferred the retrograde old low-tech Bell-era voice-only phone interface after all. … Audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her ... video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable.”

[wodenokoto]

I definitely find camera-on meetings have people pay more attention. Whether that is more productive or not depends on your definition of productive.

The the “camera off lets me do other work”-theory that people in this thread adhere to says the meeting itself is unproductive and the less involved participants are the more chance they have of being productive.

[bradknowles]

Amazon is very much a camera-on kind of company. What I noticed is that everyone turns on their camera, then most people stare dead-eyed at the camera, not doing anything useful, but also making sure they don’t move or let their eyes drift from looking at the camera. And as soon as they join, they mute themselves or are automatically muted.

Only when they are called on do they then respond, and it’s usually a pretty perfunctory response. I mean, they have been listening and not doing anything else while listening, because they’ve been so focused on the fact that they are on-camera 100% of the time and they don’t ever want to be seen to be doing anything “wrong” during that time.

I do remember some folks had their camera aimed at them from the side (presumably from the laptop camera, while they’re using one of the external monitors as their main monitor), and they would sometimes be doing things while not looking at the camera. But they would quickly come back and respond, if someone called out their name.

In contrast, other employers have had a no camera policy, and that can get a bit weird to explain to external parties who are used to being on-camera 100% of the time. So, I’ve always tried to help explain that to the external folks.

For no-camera companies, it seems to me that those people are usually more engaged with actually listening to the conversation and responding in real time during the meeting, as opposed to waiting until their name is called. They’re also less likely to automatically mute themselves when they join the meeting, but also less likely to need to mute themselves when they join.

And the no-camera companies seem to be well aware of how much the meeting is costing in terms of how people are there and how long they’re all on the call, and then ending it early if they can.

It’s a big culture shift to go from one type of company to the other type.

[pjc50]

> they’ve been so focused on the fact that they are on-camera 100% of the time and they don’t ever want to be seen to be doing anything “wrong” during that time.

> For no-camera companies, it seems to me that those people are usually more engaged with actually listening to the conversation and responding in real time during the meeting

This seems to be a dichotomy between "producing Being Present In A Meeting" (a short documentary film of a person staring directly at the camera, knowing that looking away will be interpreted negatively; a species of hostage video), and participating in a conversation.

[andrei_says_]

This is interesting - Could you expand on the relationship between cameras and wasted time?

What qualifies as wasted time and how are cameras a contributing factor?