[stingraycharles]

We tried that but it ended up being just a few people talking and most people just listening and/or continuing their work.

As a team lead within a small, fully remote company I’m struggling to find the right dynamics as I can see people really like to socialize (I have 3 1on1’s with each of them every week, and a lot of times we just talk about personal hobbies, what they did last weekend, etc), but it seems like in groups people end up being too shy to socialize.

[jobs_throwaway]

group discussions over zoom just don't work IMO. The sound only allows one person at a time to speak so its extremely your-turn-my-turn in a way that an organic, in-person group socialization isn't. It isn't as jarring in a 1:1 because you can watch that person's face and without much effort predict when they're going to speak and so not interrupt them. When it goes beyond that, the flow of the conversation gets stilted

[parpfish]

Even worse is the situation our hybrid half-remote/half-inperson company runs into during meetings:

The in-person group will go into the conference room and naturally start multiple rambling side conversations.

But the remote people just have to sit there and watch. Usually they can’t really hear each of these conversations and you can’t casually join a room-based side conversation from the remote because any audio that comes out of the teleconferencing screen automatically commandeers the whole rooms attention

[ghaff]

And the probably correct alternative is that if some people are just on video, everyone should be on individual video.

The the in-person group tends to be resentful that they've commuted into the office just to spend a good chunk of their day at their desks on Zoom calls.

It's always a tradeoff. Even pre-COVID and hybrid work at large companies, you were dealing with groups at different locations, often in vastly different timezones. But certainly current hybrid work makes the dynamics even trickier.

[jobs_throwaway]

> And the probably correct alternative is that if some people are just on video, everyone should be on individual video.

But practically though, how does this work in an office setting? I work in an exorbitantly nice office, and we still don't have near enough conference rooms/enclosed spaces for everyone to individually book a room

And in another sense, this is just defaulting to the lowest common denominator. People in-person go to side chats because its beneficial to do so.

[ghaff]

They call from their desks. Just like people did in the not so "old days." Back when I was a product manager I spent a good part of my day on the phone in my cubicle.

[parpfish]

the in-office folks still go into the conference room together, but they log in to the meeting from their laptop using "companion mode". that way every individual shows up in the meeting instead of one "room" member that has 20 blurry faced crammed into it

[scarface_74]

There are two rules about any job I take these days.

1. I will not work at in office job.

2. I won’t work for a company that is not “remote only”.

[ponector]

Hard to follow this rules unless you are living in a low cost of living area.

Remote people from India/Afrika will be happy to work for a fraction of western salary.

[scarface_74]

I lived in Atlanta GA in 2020. My company went remote - a startup - and stayed remote from then on (well it got acquired by an all remote company shortly afterwards).

A recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about a position as an SDE. It would have paid $75K - $80K more than I was making. But would have required me to relocate to Seattle at some underdetermined time in the future. There was no way in hell I was going to relocate to Seattle and sell my big house in the burbs that I paid $340K to have built in Atlanta in 2016 to work at Amazon.

She kept talking and suggested I apply to a “permanently remote” [sic] role at AWS ProServe. The position paid about 20% less but still around $60K more than I was making. I said sure why not?

I got the job and two years later we ended up selling the house anyway and moving to cheaper, no state tax Florida and downsized to a condo (and sold our house for twice what we paid for it a year later).

I currently make the same as a staff consultant working permanently at another company as I did as an L5 working at Amazon - still remote (not much by BigTech comp standards. But comfortable by every other metric) - and that’s after turning down an offer for a permanently remote role for a large non tech company where the director who was a former coworker was going to create a position for me to oversea the cloud architecture and migration. It would have paid around L6 level at Amazon - all cash.

I just didn’t want the headache of working for BigCorp anymore.

[widforss]

Sp you want to be the special remote guy?

[scarface_74]

I said just the opposite. I don’t want to be the special remote guy. I want to work for a company where everyone is remote.

[widforss]

Ah, missed a word.

[swiftcoder]

> group discussions over zoom just don't work IMO. The sound only allows one person at a time to speak

I do wonder if there are any technical solutions to be found to this. Now that high-speed fibre is pretty widespread, what if we transmitted every participants audio feed to every other participant, and merged them on the client, instead of the server?

[jerlam]

Discord is designed like this, because there is no special "presenter" or "organizer" and all participants are equal. Everyone can present simultaneously and you can mute individual speakers for yourself and not everyone else.

The single speaker is a design decision, not a technical issue. Only one "presenter" is allowed is allowed in business, or in school.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

There are a handful of Spatial Audio videoconferencing solutions that work pretty well to allow multiple simultaneous conversations.

[throwaway290]

Metaverse and VR Chat? They mix on the client because also you get to hear where each speaker is in the space next to you. Without it in zoom it's just one garble if more than one person talks

[swiftcoder]

I feel like we could probably just distribute everyone in a virtual circle - as if they are sitting around a big conference table - and skip the VR headset part of this

(don't get me wrong, I like a VR headset, but it's not something I've managed to work into my coding and docs writing setup just yet).

[starkparker]

Felt like a few dozen toys and a handful of startups all came up with this same solution during 2020-21 as next-big-things and Zoom still came out on top for so many other reasons

EDIT: Even MS Teams implemented it!

[throwaway290]

sure... I'm just saying mixing on client already exists.

[mystifyingpoi]

> just a few people talking and most people just listening and/or continuing their work.

Same experience on full time remote gig. Didn't help that my colleagues were mostly speaking about topics that I had zero interest in. So I just muted myself and practiced some guitar. You pay me for this time, you organized this meeting, so be it.

[count]

This is how group conversations happen in person at an office too. I think it's fine, and everybody has reported feeling more connected / less isolated during our periodic polls since we started doing it.