Pluses and minuses for sure... I feel like the video meetings are always filled with people only 70% there... sure, you can glance at your phone every once in a while you are in a meeting... but you aren't making food, writing an email for a completely different topic or watching Youtube videos on a different screen.
That factor has made a fair amount of my meetings better. Meetings that really only needed 2 or 3 people, but 12 end up getting invited. All the extra meeting passengers no longer feel as though they have to appear engaged, so the conversation takes place between the people who actually needed to talk, everybody else zones out and pipes up with a quick “thanks everybody” at the end.
I have a weekly meeting about a project I'm only peripherally involved in, so I get on with everything else, however if they need some clarification on my department's area I can provide an instant update.
Check this project out for spacial audio meetings, misses the mark on the video piece but interesting none the less. It's built on jitsi meet. https://github.com/capnmidnight/Calla
Before spatial audio it would be great if the noise suppression wouldn't interfere with several people talking at once. At least on MS Teams I have the impression that it totally garbles everyone if more than 1 person is talking, which obviously doesn't happen in real life.
We are still missing basic primitives in video conferencing interfaces, and this failure of abstraction surfaces as "virtual meetings feel weird".
* We still don't have a button to signal that we intend to speak; we don't need a fancy "pressure sensitive chair" to accomplish this.
* Video conferencing apps still refuse to show everyone the same layout of faces. Because we don't share the same virtual space, of course our experiences feel disjointed.
* We can't silently "react" to someone else speaking, making it difficult to intuit the consensus opinion. These reactions need to appear on _their_ tile, not on your own (looking at you, Zoom).
These are not hard to implement, but conferencing solutions are so sticky that they just don't seem to have the incentive to improve their stagnant UI's.
Discord lights up the avatar's outline when they speak, which is fantastic by itself, but combined with push to talk it's perfect as you can convey the exact intention of taking over the conversation and solve it much more quickly when there's overlap than any 'raise hand' mechanism I've used. Those tend to just not work as raised hands get more ignored than just talking.
It's...something. But it still doesn't feel quite right. A formal "raise hand" button feels too clumsy of a replacement for the natural body language we use to imply that we want to jump in to say something. I don't want a button that "requests the floor", we need something more fluid than that.
Basically the situation we need to avoid is the example raised in the article, wherein two people stumble around each other trying to figure out who should speak and who should back off. The reason that happens is that both participants have no clue that the other person is about to speak until they already have.
Discord solves this beautifully with push-to-talk. Since I have to press the push to talk button _before_ I speak, the UI can hook into that to naturally indicate that I intend to speak just by lighting myself up. I can just hold down the button and wait for the current speaker to cede, or jump in myself at a suitable pause. This latter case is now possible since everyone in the chat can see that I am about to do that, rather than be caught by surprise. But more importantly, _I can back off myself_ just by letting go. In Teams, you'd have to "rescind" the raised hand explicitly (not even sure if this is possible).
Now combine this with a shared virtual space: everyone sees the same order of faces, and when someone pushes-to-talk, they move up. Everyone sees this at the same time, so it's much more natural for that person to start speaking!
As a counterpoint, I feel that a lot of in-person meetings would be improved by having people discretely request the floor rather than relying on having your body language acknowledged. Certainly it would help for those of us to whom aggressive/imposing body language doesn't come as easily.
That's just reality: some people are not attentive and will steamroll others. It's up to us to jump in and help people get heard. If we start running into the same problems as real life, then we're going in the right direction.
I think a "request the floor" button still has its place in much larger group events (imagine a seminar), but for small to medium meetings it's pretty overkill. The goal should be to lower the bar for fluid conversation, rather than to formalize it into a turn-taking process.
This depends heavily on what layout everyone is using. We usually have a screenshare taking 90% of the space and if we have cameras on then most video conference software seems to show random 3 people in a small tile somewhere while the rest are just hidden.
Can't fit arbitrarily large numbers of people on a laptop screen, it's way harder to pick up this kind of motion from a mosaic of small 2d tiles, and everyone needs their camera on which isn't always feasible (connection issues, privacy of others in a home office setting, etc.)
Did your in-person meetings ever had this many participants? If this many people needs to be involved, then I'll argue a meeting is a nonsense anyway. It would be extremely hard even in-person.
You are trying to replace in-person meetings without using cameras? It scales pretty well to a reasonable amount of people. How many people do you need in a meeting? If you have meetings with more than 12 people, then you are probably holding a conference and your meetings suck anyway. A written announcement would work better.
You are trying to bend reality to your will, it doesn't work like that. The fact of the matter is that sometimes you have large meetings, and often times participants will have their cameras turned off. Instead of fighting it and saying that people are Doing It Wrong, we need to accept this reality and work with it.
A push-to-talk system with shared layouts solves all these problems, is scalable, and doesn't require cameras.
"Raise hand" is an attempt to solve the right problem, but it doesn't solve it in a realistic way. Virtual meetings feel weird because we're all more Trumpy than we realize - in actuality nearly every speaker's turn ends with an impatient interruption by the next speaker. This just doesn't feel "natural" with the latency of a phone call or video conference. I know, it's cynical, but it's one reason we love to hate meetings - we never get to finish tal
I think a big one is actually latency and framerate. If you have a low latency videosetup (e.g. SDI Cameras and two monitors) you can try out what real low latency feels like. This works soo much better already because you can react to one another's mimic expression etc.
Unfortunately, that requires the end user to update their hardware. We have to live with the reality that people are not going to have low-latency setups, and design with that in mind. Everybody wins!
If your video conferencing platform _requires_ all participants to have low-latency setups, you are going for a very niche market. I'm talking about fundamental design changes we can bake into the general-purpose video conferencing apps that exist today, such as Teams, Hangouts/Meet, and Zoom.
latency in audio is definitely a big deal. I've definitely had the experience many times of starting to talk a second or two after someone else finishes, only to find someone else had started talking - and all this takes is maybe 500ms of delay to become super noticable.
I've also found it extremely noticable when someone is screen sharing, and their screen share lags behind their audio several seconds often. If they are going through an interface fast, it can be hard to tell what they are referencing on their screen.
I frequently dial into zoom calls via phone, which seems to improve the latency issues a bit. It also helps with stuttering audio in general. It sometimes results in AV sync issues, but I’d rather have smooth sound than jagged sound connected to jagged video.
I dial in all the time, whenever possible. A client's corporate Webex will call me when the meeting starts - that's been great. Another client's zoom will send an invite with a clickable phone number but it doesn't have the appended , and passcode on it, so I have to look that up and type (before the system thinks I'm not there) - super annoying.
It gives me the freedom to pace/walk/move without being tethered to the laptop/desk/screen. Now... I often connect in there as well, so I can see any shared screen, but if I need to walk away for a bit (coffee/etc) no one knows, but I can keep listening. Muting myself on phone is easy too.
And yes, I've found it helps with some audio stuff too - often I'll hear other people making comments about losing audio, or delays, but I rarely experience those when dialed in by phone.
Agreed, but the thing that makes it "weird" for me is that anytime people stop talking in a zoom meeting it becomes dead air that people feel compelled to fill up.
Natural breaks in the conversation don't work virtually right now.
Speaking as a masters student who's had a lot of seminars through teams it is a fairly good solution. However, it requires effective moderation - the situation is still lacking in social cues.
> There is a raise hand button in teams. But as all our meetings are small enough, we never used it, so I don't know how useful it is
Not all that useful really. The icon is small and gets easily missed. Also, when you're presenting, you can't see it at all which is mind-blowingly stupid to me. If there was ever a time I want to know if somebody has a question, it's when I'm in lecture mode and can't see people's faces.
It's not just primitives, but more generally power features are lacking in all packages I've used. For instance, the most basic tool used in audio production is a vu-meter. On my Linux workstation, I keep the Gnome sound settings window open to check the gain.
I understand you want the experience to be as automated as possible, but in large meetings it would be extremely useful for at least one admin type participant to have access to tools to diagnose sound issues. Same for layout, I don't understand why there's no way to force a particular layout. In Webex, you can't seem to be able to view chat and video at the same time, which is idiotic. Just sharing an URL is cumbersome.
As I outlined elsewhere in the thread, a "raise hand" button is way too bulky since it's essentially a "request the floor" button. When you're talking naturally with a group of people, you don't submit formal requests for the floor; you simply lean in and everyone subconsciously acknowledges the fact that you intend to say something. The speaker can naturally cede, or you can jump in at a suitable pause. Or you can back off entirely and that's fine too!
The simplest way to accomplish this is through push-to-talk. Since you have to push a button before you can speak, the UI can highlight your speaker tile and allow others to acknowledge your intent. It's much more fluid and natural than formally "raising your hand" and then having to rescind it if you decide to back off. The point is to provide low-level primitives that can become almost reflexive parts of video chats.
Push-to-talk is necessary but not sufficient: you need to actually light up the square and move that speaker up so everyone notices that they intend to speak. Not sure if Zoom does this. Hiding a little "mute" icon in the corner is not good enough, we need to bake this functionality deep into the UI so that it becomes a natural and reflexive part of meetings. Zoom doesn't share layouts across all participants, which is a big problem too.
The image I get from this article is that their work is very unorganized? They complain about issued with discussing stuff online, yet they don't use video?
> Engineers who worked remotely with the engineers in the U.S. said, “We miss the hallway stuff.” Andrei told me that when he spent time in Houston, he was able to build a mental map of “who knows what.” When he got back to Romania, the map got out of date quickly.
How the hell are you supposed to keep knowlage like this? What if someone leaves the company. Whay if you have someone new? Why would every person need to build this map. Create it once, share it with everyone, make it accessible and editable.
IMO online work often magnifies the issues that are already there.
It’s uncomfortable to write down that “Abel is here primarily because he’s good friends with the CTO but he mostly stays out of the way, Baker is the one who really knows what’s going on but can’t write reliable code, and Charlie is a code monster but doesn’t have the faintest idea of nor interest in how our business actually works.”
Pick your combinations of what pros and cons each team member brings, but it’s rare for the unvarnished truth about your people map to be exclusively positive.
> How the hell are you supposed to keep knowlage like this?
By talking to people on a regular basis?
This problem isn't new and even affects open source. Which people in the Linux kernel are experts on which USB drivers? You can look at commits, but that doesn't always reflect the reality on the ground of the people with the actual understanding of the detailed bits of the hardware. Unless you sit on the mailing list and chat server for a couple weeks, you won't figure this out.
Big companies used to have this problem all the time back before ubiquitous communication. Some group would need knowledge about Subject A. They would appoint Person B in the group to be the liaison with Expert C who was in some other division--they would have to talk on the phone, fly to the the other division, etc. to maintain that knowledge Over time, Person B would become the "local" expert and would probably become a global expert as well. How would you find out who the experts are and where they are? You would tap your network and start walking it.
So it's like keeping data in a RAM instead of a persistent storage. Does not sound like a good practice. I would also say it does not scale.
The advice I usually hear from people running software houses is to have an internal KB. Even experts forget what they told 3 months ago or how the complex process was supposed to go like.
> How would you find out who the experts are and where they are?
Team Directory. Write down who knows what and how to reach them. People figure out in small, focused groups who knows what by seeing who delivers. You don't need to do it in a hallway.
You're basically describing the difference between a free market and a regulated economy with extra transaction costs. Harnessing people's natural tendencies gets results that bureaucracy does not. the choice isn't chitchat vs wiki, it's chitchat vs wiki vs do nothing because maintaining wiki is to much work and typing is slower than talking.
Video calls, as currently implemented with available technology and existing software, is clearly not filling the non verbal communication gap.
Instead, it is creating the false expectation that we have a non verbal channel, when we really don't. This disconnect is at the very heart of the article.
Turning off video removes the expectation. In lieu of better, low latency tools, an audio long meeting is likely higher quality, not to mention lower bandwidth requirements and possibly lower latency as well.
Better that video will be virtual avatar based tools, like meeting in a video game.
I agree that Zoom and tech like that are not filling the non verbal comm gap but turning off video will only make it worse, and video-game avatars are totally dystopian.
Because I actually believe in the concept of non-verbal communication. That's a hyper-minority opinion here in this forum. Most find it not to be just worthless, but actually malignant, see: any work-from-home thread ever
I think the lack of eye contact is a big problem, possibly the biggest. Right now, when you look at the camera, the other person sees you looking them in the eyes. And when you look them in the eyes, they see you looking somewhere else. And when you move around, the other person's gaze doesn't track your position in space. The body language dimension of communication gets all messed up.
Here's an example of tech that could fix this, using gaze tracking and 3D reconstruction to make the screen behave as a stable "artificial window" from your room into the other person's room, changing the view as you move your head. That way you can look at the other person and make eye contact naturally: https://www.fastcompany.com/90498000/move-over-zoom-this-mag...
I couldn't agree more. It's the biggest problem that I experience, and certainly the lowest-hanging fruit for a technical solution. Surely the current vendors know this and are working on it? Is there something that makes it harder than it seems?
I had a laptop from work with a webcam beneath the display and hated it. Never used it as I never wanted to force people to look up my nose. When it was refresh time, the guys were telling me all about how much more RAM and processing power I was getting, all I asked was "Where's the webcam?" (It was up top, they'd fixed it.)
I think they mean literally underneath the screen, like what phone manufacturers are trying to achieve to avoid having a black dot or notch.
Not having the camera physically at the bottom of the screen (closer to the keyboard rather than at the top) like I believe the Dell XPS 13 has (or had?).
Sounds awful - I think this was one of the highest-rated 'niggles' of laptop design in one of the review sites, a really poor perspective looking up at people.
Or if the laptop is on a stand, possibly just showing the top of your head.
NVIDIA just announced this AI-based video conference system that addresses the problem of gaze correction and 3D reconstruction, as well as a bunch of other stuff.
The 3D reconstruction piece is interesting -- it ends up being a video compression algorithm as well. It replaces a video codec with a GAN algorithm. It takes an initial high-res snapshot your your face (keyframe), maps out a set of keypoints which gets transmitted to the other end. The algorithm at the destination uses a GAN to reconstruct the face. Because keypoints (vectors instead of raster) are an order of magnitude smaller than images, this results in a very high level of compression and very low latency video conferencing on low-bandwidth connections.
I usually make the zoom window small and place it right under the camera so looking at the person is indistinguishable from looking at the camera. This doesn't solve the problem of making eye contact with individuals though, you can only make eye contact with the current speaker.
I’d wager that most people tend to look at their own video more the the other person’s. And if that’s true, their layout choice would make it appear more natural for the other party.
Newer phones will have a selfie camera positioned behind the screen. I guess one solution for video calls is to make sure the other person's eyes overlap the camera of your phone (using eye tracking and a perspective transform). Then, as long as both people keep eye contact with each other, the phones can be moved and rotated freely. I wonder if this exists already.
> I think the lack of eye contact is a big problem, possibly the biggest.
Interestingly, we do audio-only calls in my company and I don't miss the video at all. Maybe that's because the implementations I've seen so far have all the issues listed in this thread and if it the video was actually good enough it would prove to be an enhancement.
It's the latency. Getting a turn to speak becomes very difficult if the speaker doesn't provide a reasonable gap to break in to the conversation. You basically just need to push harder on the interruption than they push on continuing to speak. I know it sounds rude, but sometimes you need clarification if you want to have a chance at understanding what the speaker wants to say next. Sometimes you spot a flaw in what they've said and need to interject before they waste 10 minutes talking about something that's not going to work. And sometimes you just need to cut someone off to stop them from rambling and repeating the same thing in 5 different ways.
While there are non-verbal cues that indicate that you have something to say, my experience with physical meetings is that those cues get completely overlooked anyway.
I think Zoom makes this even worse because they nearly mute[0] the audio of all but the person currently speaking. (I'm not sure if this is a real feature, or just a side-effect of something else)
[0] I think the audio still plays, but at a greatly reduced volume.
Anyone who has done VoIP/comms for any length of time will agree with you. To feel immediacy, latency must be less than about 50ms, ideally less than 30ms. However we are capable of dealing with latency up to around 1s without wincing too much and even half duplex can work some times.
However, that is for one on one conversations. Unless everyone has reasonably decent comms (10 people, with video: roughly 10Mbs-1 each way at about 10ms to ISP router) then drop to voice only. You only need 64Kbs-1 for a high quality voice channel. Mobile quality is about 16Kbs-1. The killer is latency and the related jitter.
I spend quite a lot of time twiddling various parameters to get voice comms to work as well as I can. Latency is the biggest contributor to quality.
We had a virtual meeting where we almost insulted each other with my manager. For the context, we are real life friends, and even though we sometimes have heated arguments, as it was the case here, it never went that far.
After we calmed down, we talked to each other and realized that lag played a huge role. She thought I was constantly interrupting her and I thought she didn't listen to me. In reality, it was just a network problem and latency was over a second, but we didn't realize it as we were too busy arguing.
Virtual meetings are fine when people take turns speaking and no one is interrupting. But when you are debating, brainstorming, or working together on a problem, even a small amount of latency makes it terrible.
Yes, this. Also, I hate interrupting people, and hate being interrupted. In real life meetings though it's somewhat easier to tell if the other person is confused or wants to say something and give them a chance to speak.
Working for a global tech company, with a line manager and team in another continent I've grown very used to having Meet calls. I've also worked here for most of my working life - so I've grown up with having virtual meetings and I'd say even when in the office 90% of my meetings would involve someone from another office, country or company. So it does actually feel very normal to me, in a way it almost feels more strange _not_ being on a call.
Wonder how the younger generations opinions on this differ to the older generation?
I have been working in a large global firm for the past 3.5 years. Where many of my meetings have always had a remote VC component to them, either through Google Meet or Microsoft Teams. I have found that they really aren't that weird at all. We have been speaking to each other via mobile phones or conference calls for years which doesn't feel too different. Perhaps it is also because I grew up playing multiplayer video games on PC which required me to speak with groups of people in game.
I find there is an overall larger upside to virtual meetings than physical meetings.
> Do you consider conference call meetings to be more productive than in person?
Not more productive, but more efficient in the sense that they take less time; everyone on our team has to travel to meet in person, so in the end, it has to be conf calls. I also do not feel it's that big a difference; I prep for calls the same as in person meetings, usually they end fairly quickly because everything was pre-cooked in email / chat.
Firstly, travel time is a big one. Rather than travelling to the client for a 1 or 2 hour meeting where I need to sign in and wait. I can stay in the office and dial in right as the meeting is about to commence.
Secondly I generally have a workpaper of some sort or a set of notes I am working off of during a meeting. During a virtual meeting I can talk, look at my notes and type without having to constantly give eye contact to the client. I can acknowledge what they're saying through non-verbal cues as I look at my notes and type.
Thirdly, it's much easier for myself or the client to share our screens during a conversation.
Edit: Due to COVID our ability to work remotely from other cities is also expanding. It is much easier for me to rely on Google meet or Teams to dial a colleague in, rather than hope that the client has a working AV system to dial them in physically.
My response to this will always be: whoever solves live music performance (as in two or more musicians in two different locations happily playing together over the internet) will win the video conferencing wars.
It's not just latency, it's the non-verbal cues, dynamics (including silence that often represents acknowledgement), "energy" and rhythm that I miss about in-person communication.
I have perhaps an unusual personal perspective on this.
I'm not diagnosed but have several aspergers/autism traits. The ones relevant to this are... I don't make eye contact and am largely blind to all but the most blatant nonverbal communication (ex: sobbing). Additionally, I have a flat affect (don't express emotions through facial expressions the way others do and have a monotone voice).
At my current work no one uses a camera, so there's not even the chance of seeing facial expressions or making eye contact either direction, though presumably people notice my monotone voice. I feel like this work environment has finally putting me on a near level playing ground with my coworkers.
I've never been "liked" so much by people, coworkers or otherwise. Last week one told me I was the nicest person he'd ever worked with. Normally people perceive me as uncaring due to my personality/behavior quirks. I tend to have less social needs than most people, but it's still nice to be thought of positively rather than negatively.
It never occurred to me until reading the threads here that people would have feelings about these communication attributes they are missing out on. I often forget that people communicate on more layers that I do.
I also prefer the virtual meetings without camera, it does indeed level the playing field. I find it very nice to use skype voice + text chat, depending on how important I think my n cents are, I can chose to speak it or write it in chat instead.. I can also express myself more clearly, because I don't have to talk, but instead can take my time formulating what I want to say. And I can use links and pictures to support what I want to communicate.
I often find text exchanges to be lacking in cues, feeling anxious about being misunderstood, but I also avoid 1:1 videocalls with customers as I (1) find faces and visual cues distracting and (2) am not very good at facial expressions.
My preferred medium is voice: I still find it easy to tell whether the person is paying attention, get the synchronicity and the information throughput that make it possible to ensure we’re on the same page, all while dealing with less noise.
That said, many-to-many conference calls… I dislike those generally, video or audio.
Sorry for hijacking this reply, but I happen to have an acquitance (former friend) with some of those symptons. He has almost no interest in people except for his partner and sometimes his family, although I'm not sure if this is self-imposed or he really has interest in these people. He laughs and feels comfortable some times, but he doesn't express love, not even his family, except for his partner (sometimes?). He has suffered previously from a psychologically abusive partner who has made him cry and suffer, but during his relation with her, he has not showed any symptons whatsoever, and insists that although he cried back then, he insists he has never felt happiness or sadness.
During our friendship, I tried to make him feel better and support him, maybe helping him feel something. The truth is that it ends up being just psychologically exhausting, and despite being the only person he trusted, once I decided to insist in having contact with him, he just didn't even try. For long I have thought he was just a jerk who doesn't care about people, but your comment makes me wonder if there was something wrong with him (not trying to be offensive, I just don't know how to make a difference between being a jerk vs. having some kind of dissability/difficulty/handicap).
Seeing that you (may) be knowledgeable about asperger/autism, I wonder what would be your take on this thing.
I dunno what's going on with your former friend. Based on your description it could be lots of things. Off the top of my head there's: aspergers, depression, or result of abuse (dissociation, etc).
Did your friend actually ask you for help? Or did you just decide on your own you needed to "make him" feel things to your satisfaction? Why would you feel like "insisting" on more contact from someone than they want is a healthy thing to do? Frankly your second paragraph sounds awful.
> Did your friend actually ask you for help? Or did you just decide on your own you needed to "make him" feel things to your satisfaction? Why would you feel like "insisting" on more contact from someone than they want is a healthy thing to do? Frankly your second paragraph sounds awful.
While I'm not intending to start a heated conversation here, I don't know what you have gone through and I'm pretty sure I make mistakes, but I do feel your tone is accusatory and definitely inappropriate when you don't know the full context of anything.
In hindsight, maybe asking someone on the internet about this was not the best thing to do. Thank you anyway, I appreciate your time.
I came across an article recently (on HN perhaps?) that explained that now that all meeting are online, and all work is remote, different employees rise to the top than in the old situation with everybody present in the same location. Social or dominant manners are less important, and actually doing the work counts far more.
So it's quite likely that people who tend towards Asperger's or autism not only deal better with working from home, but will also be more successful in their organisation than they'd be under different circumstances.
I recently got Oculus Quest II and I tried few of this VR social platforms. Even with cartoonish graphics representing face, body and hands having 3rd (4th) dimension added something that no Teams, Zoom meeting has additionally it solves some of the things mentioned in the comments (spatial sound, people zooming out ect). I'm a tactile memory person so for me perhaps it matters more than for others. I look forward to next iterations of VR gear and hopping for wider adoption while being aware of scepticism, technical issues ect.
Ja this is a real concern: The other day I was talking to a "supplier" in Odessa (this is important later on) via a
conference call and they were recording it (They did ask permission first) - afterwards they send me the "link" of the video recording of the meeting: I was shocked how I looked !
Now usually (and I'm sure others as well) fidget and fiddle at times when bored or concentrating hard. I have this thing were I will "fiddle" a pencil between my fingers and sometimes use said pencil to scratch my ankles. Once I saw the video I was HORRIFIED. Every now and again I go for an "ankle scratch" my shoulder would dip down and there will be a verifiable "up and down motion" of my arm ! Basically it looked like I was "jerking" off ! :S
Now why the "Ukraine/Odessa" supplier part was import was because the "sales rep" was no mere "boring-pocket-pencil-procter-looking-dev" - it was a beautiful East-European woman !
I do virtual meetings with camera with friends. Meetings for work are usually without camera unless in special cases. Example: first meeting with a new prospect customer.
I know i'm rare person (well, my 70+ mother also has this affliction though) for this opinion, but I prefer typing to virtual and real meetings. It is faster/more efficient as I read faster than I listen and type faster than I talk. It is easier (and faster) to later read what was agreed in details (the MoMs always seem to lack details and then later it's a 'i did not say that' mess), it's easy to create docs / emails from the content and if it was technical, nothing is lost and can be copy/pasted to terminals etc. And it's async; the 'think on your feet' can be nice, but I notice not so many people are good at it.
I have ran companies like this for 25+ years, sometimes with people (as co-founders) I have never even spoke to (and never saw); works fine; I don't notice the difference (besides that I find this way of working more efficient).
I wondered what was the basic framing of the article, and it seems to be this:
> The COVID-19 pandemic has meant that many more people, like these engineers, are working on complex tasks through computer screens
It’s an interesting view of what it means for people who were mostly working on physical goods with physical tools, or in a “legacy” context with enough tradition that they have dedicated paper/boards/artifacts to work on before digitizing.
It’s a given that these jobs will never get to the same level of communication as being in the same room day in day out working on the same physical items, and the article is a good walk into what is missed.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] thread* We still don't have a button to signal that we intend to speak; we don't need a fancy "pressure sensitive chair" to accomplish this.
* Video conferencing apps still refuse to show everyone the same layout of faces. Because we don't share the same virtual space, of course our experiences feel disjointed.
* We can't silently "react" to someone else speaking, making it difficult to intuit the consensus opinion. These reactions need to appear on _their_ tile, not on your own (looking at you, Zoom).
These are not hard to implement, but conferencing solutions are so sticky that they just don't seem to have the incentive to improve their stagnant UI's.
MS Teams has a "raise hand" feature, is that the type of thing you're thinking about?
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/raise-your-hand-i...
Basically the situation we need to avoid is the example raised in the article, wherein two people stumble around each other trying to figure out who should speak and who should back off. The reason that happens is that both participants have no clue that the other person is about to speak until they already have.
Discord solves this beautifully with push-to-talk. Since I have to press the push to talk button _before_ I speak, the UI can hook into that to naturally indicate that I intend to speak just by lighting myself up. I can just hold down the button and wait for the current speaker to cede, or jump in myself at a suitable pause. This latter case is now possible since everyone in the chat can see that I am about to do that, rather than be caught by surprise. But more importantly, _I can back off myself_ just by letting go. In Teams, you'd have to "rescind" the raised hand explicitly (not even sure if this is possible).
Now combine this with a shared virtual space: everyone sees the same order of faces, and when someone pushes-to-talk, they move up. Everyone sees this at the same time, so it's much more natural for that person to start speaking!
I think a "request the floor" button still has its place in much larger group events (imagine a seminar), but for small to medium meetings it's pretty overkill. The goal should be to lower the bar for fluid conversation, rather than to formalize it into a turn-taking process.
Jitsi Meet has this: https://meet.jit.si/
Why not?
A push-to-talk system with shared layouts solves all these problems, is scalable, and doesn't require cameras.
Or we can live with the reality that some people will shell out for low-latency setups. There is room for both.
I've also found it extremely noticable when someone is screen sharing, and their screen share lags behind their audio several seconds often. If they are going through an interface fast, it can be hard to tell what they are referencing on their screen.
It gives me the freedom to pace/walk/move without being tethered to the laptop/desk/screen. Now... I often connect in there as well, so I can see any shared screen, but if I need to walk away for a bit (coffee/etc) no one knows, but I can keep listening. Muting myself on phone is easy too.
And yes, I've found it helps with some audio stuff too - often I'll hear other people making comments about losing audio, or delays, but I rarely experience those when dialed in by phone.
https://youtu.be/P7mFEGah27c?t=1359
Natural breaks in the conversation don't work virtually right now.
There is a raise hand button in teams. But as all our meetings are small enough, we never used it, so I don't know how useful it is
Not all that useful really. The icon is small and gets easily missed. Also, when you're presenting, you can't see it at all which is mind-blowingly stupid to me. If there was ever a time I want to know if somebody has a question, it's when I'm in lecture mode and can't see people's faces.
I understand you want the experience to be as automated as possible, but in large meetings it would be extremely useful for at least one admin type participant to have access to tools to diagnose sound issues. Same for layout, I don't understand why there's no way to force a particular layout. In Webex, you can't seem to be able to view chat and video at the same time, which is idiotic. Just sharing an URL is cumbersome.
The simplest way to accomplish this is through push-to-talk. Since you have to push a button before you can speak, the UI can highlight your speaker tile and allow others to acknowledge your intent. It's much more fluid and natural than formally "raising your hand" and then having to rescind it if you decide to back off. The point is to provide low-level primitives that can become almost reflexive parts of video chats.
> Engineers who worked remotely with the engineers in the U.S. said, “We miss the hallway stuff.” Andrei told me that when he spent time in Houston, he was able to build a mental map of “who knows what.” When he got back to Romania, the map got out of date quickly.
How the hell are you supposed to keep knowlage like this? What if someone leaves the company. Whay if you have someone new? Why would every person need to build this map. Create it once, share it with everyone, make it accessible and editable.
IMO online work often magnifies the issues that are already there.
Pick your combinations of what pros and cons each team member brings, but it’s rare for the unvarnished truth about your people map to be exclusively positive.
By talking to people on a regular basis?
This problem isn't new and even affects open source. Which people in the Linux kernel are experts on which USB drivers? You can look at commits, but that doesn't always reflect the reality on the ground of the people with the actual understanding of the detailed bits of the hardware. Unless you sit on the mailing list and chat server for a couple weeks, you won't figure this out.
Big companies used to have this problem all the time back before ubiquitous communication. Some group would need knowledge about Subject A. They would appoint Person B in the group to be the liaison with Expert C who was in some other division--they would have to talk on the phone, fly to the the other division, etc. to maintain that knowledge Over time, Person B would become the "local" expert and would probably become a global expert as well. How would you find out who the experts are and where they are? You would tap your network and start walking it.
Humans network--that's just how they are.
So it's like keeping data in a RAM instead of a persistent storage. Does not sound like a good practice. I would also say it does not scale.
The advice I usually hear from people running software houses is to have an internal KB. Even experts forget what they told 3 months ago or how the complex process was supposed to go like.
> How would you find out who the experts are and where they are?
Team Directory. Write down who knows what and how to reach them. People figure out in small, focused groups who knows what by seeing who delivers. You don't need to do it in a hallway.
Mute yourself when you're not talking.
Use a client with decent dynamic range compression (discord gets this right, some others don't)
Video adds nothing.
I agree with your other points. One could run a compressor on an audio output easily enough. I have considered it.
Video matters when there is show and tell. In a manufacturing sense, having video makes for a 5x meeting.
People can consult drawings, identify features, express intent and query others about a part that is only rivaled by an actual conference room.
Now I will say skilled people can use audio and drawings to get it done. I can, but it takes many years to build that skill.
Add video and people developing their own can contribute and absorb that ongoing skill much better and that is good for everyone.
I do this regularly and have a / b tested a ton of times.
The fall back is shared photos. Good, but not great.
This is why I can't take HN seriously
Instead, it is creating the false expectation that we have a non verbal channel, when we really don't. This disconnect is at the very heart of the article.
Turning off video removes the expectation. In lieu of better, low latency tools, an audio long meeting is likely higher quality, not to mention lower bandwidth requirements and possibly lower latency as well.
Better that video will be virtual avatar based tools, like meeting in a video game.
You've had your HN account nearly twice as long as the person you're replying to. Why do you think they are HN, but you are not?
Here's an example of tech that could fix this, using gaze tracking and 3D reconstruction to make the screen behave as a stable "artificial window" from your room into the other person's room, changing the view as you move your head. That way you can look at the other person and make eye contact naturally: https://www.fastcompany.com/90498000/move-over-zoom-this-mag...
Q: The Interrotron? Did you make up the name?
A: No, it was named by my wife, Julia Sheehan. She liked the name because it combined two important concepts — terror and interview.
Not having the camera physically at the bottom of the screen (closer to the keyboard rather than at the top) like I believe the Dell XPS 13 has (or had?).
It just mostly shows the inside of your nose to people. Dunno how that got through QA.
https://developer.nvidia.com/maxine
The 3D reconstruction piece is interesting -- it ends up being a video compression algorithm as well. It replaces a video codec with a GAN algorithm. It takes an initial high-res snapshot your your face (keyframe), maps out a set of keypoints which gets transmitted to the other end. The algorithm at the destination uses a GAN to reconstruct the face. Because keypoints (vectors instead of raster) are an order of magnitude smaller than images, this results in a very high level of compression and very low latency video conferencing on low-bandwidth connections.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqmMnjJ6GEg
This idea is not unlike Apple's Memoji which uses facial recognition to create an animated emoji, except this reproduces real faces over the wire.
Interestingly, we do audio-only calls in my company and I don't miss the video at all. Maybe that's because the implementations I've seen so far have all the issues listed in this thread and if it the video was actually good enough it would prove to be an enhancement.
While there are non-verbal cues that indicate that you have something to say, my experience with physical meetings is that those cues get completely overlooked anyway.
[0] I think the audio still plays, but at a greatly reduced volume.
However, that is for one on one conversations. Unless everyone has reasonably decent comms (10 people, with video: roughly 10Mbs-1 each way at about 10ms to ISP router) then drop to voice only. You only need 64Kbs-1 for a high quality voice channel. Mobile quality is about 16Kbs-1. The killer is latency and the related jitter.
I spend quite a lot of time twiddling various parameters to get voice comms to work as well as I can. Latency is the biggest contributor to quality.
We had a virtual meeting where we almost insulted each other with my manager. For the context, we are real life friends, and even though we sometimes have heated arguments, as it was the case here, it never went that far.
After we calmed down, we talked to each other and realized that lag played a huge role. She thought I was constantly interrupting her and I thought she didn't listen to me. In reality, it was just a network problem and latency was over a second, but we didn't realize it as we were too busy arguing.
Virtual meetings are fine when people take turns speaking and no one is interrupting. But when you are debating, brainstorming, or working together on a problem, even a small amount of latency makes it terrible.
Spend years online with friends I've never seen. Most of my colleagues tried Tetris once and think games are an absolute waste of time.
Thanks
I'm expecting a lot of potential improvements and opportunities in this area.
Wonder how the younger generations opinions on this differ to the older generation?
"oh, you're going to get covid!" - "work virtually."
"oh, well i'm working virtually, but the meetings feel weird." - "fuck off"
I find there is an overall larger upside to virtual meetings than physical meetings.
Not more productive, but more efficient in the sense that they take less time; everyone on our team has to travel to meet in person, so in the end, it has to be conf calls. I also do not feel it's that big a difference; I prep for calls the same as in person meetings, usually they end fairly quickly because everything was pre-cooked in email / chat.
Secondly I generally have a workpaper of some sort or a set of notes I am working off of during a meeting. During a virtual meeting I can talk, look at my notes and type without having to constantly give eye contact to the client. I can acknowledge what they're saying through non-verbal cues as I look at my notes and type.
Thirdly, it's much easier for myself or the client to share our screens during a conversation.
Edit: Due to COVID our ability to work remotely from other cities is also expanding. It is much easier for me to rely on Google meet or Teams to dial a colleague in, rather than hope that the client has a working AV system to dial them in physically.
It's not just latency, it's the non-verbal cues, dynamics (including silence that often represents acknowledgement), "energy" and rhythm that I miss about in-person communication.
You're right. Talking on it feels much better than talking on the phone or video conference.
I'm not diagnosed but have several aspergers/autism traits. The ones relevant to this are... I don't make eye contact and am largely blind to all but the most blatant nonverbal communication (ex: sobbing). Additionally, I have a flat affect (don't express emotions through facial expressions the way others do and have a monotone voice).
At my current work no one uses a camera, so there's not even the chance of seeing facial expressions or making eye contact either direction, though presumably people notice my monotone voice. I feel like this work environment has finally putting me on a near level playing ground with my coworkers.
I've never been "liked" so much by people, coworkers or otherwise. Last week one told me I was the nicest person he'd ever worked with. Normally people perceive me as uncaring due to my personality/behavior quirks. I tend to have less social needs than most people, but it's still nice to be thought of positively rather than negatively.
It never occurred to me until reading the threads here that people would have feelings about these communication attributes they are missing out on. I often forget that people communicate on more layers that I do.
My preferred medium is voice: I still find it easy to tell whether the person is paying attention, get the synchronicity and the information throughput that make it possible to ensure we’re on the same page, all while dealing with less noise.
That said, many-to-many conference calls… I dislike those generally, video or audio.
During our friendship, I tried to make him feel better and support him, maybe helping him feel something. The truth is that it ends up being just psychologically exhausting, and despite being the only person he trusted, once I decided to insist in having contact with him, he just didn't even try. For long I have thought he was just a jerk who doesn't care about people, but your comment makes me wonder if there was something wrong with him (not trying to be offensive, I just don't know how to make a difference between being a jerk vs. having some kind of dissability/difficulty/handicap).
Seeing that you (may) be knowledgeable about asperger/autism, I wonder what would be your take on this thing.
Did your friend actually ask you for help? Or did you just decide on your own you needed to "make him" feel things to your satisfaction? Why would you feel like "insisting" on more contact from someone than they want is a healthy thing to do? Frankly your second paragraph sounds awful.
While I'm not intending to start a heated conversation here, I don't know what you have gone through and I'm pretty sure I make mistakes, but I do feel your tone is accusatory and definitely inappropriate when you don't know the full context of anything.
In hindsight, maybe asking someone on the internet about this was not the best thing to do. Thank you anyway, I appreciate your time.
So it's quite likely that people who tend towards Asperger's or autism not only deal better with working from home, but will also be more successful in their organisation than they'd be under different circumstances.
So milk this while you can, I guess.
Now usually (and I'm sure others as well) fidget and fiddle at times when bored or concentrating hard. I have this thing were I will "fiddle" a pencil between my fingers and sometimes use said pencil to scratch my ankles. Once I saw the video I was HORRIFIED. Every now and again I go for an "ankle scratch" my shoulder would dip down and there will be a verifiable "up and down motion" of my arm ! Basically it looked like I was "jerking" off ! :S
Now why the "Ukraine/Odessa" supplier part was import was because the "sales rep" was no mere "boring-pocket-pencil-procter-looking-dev" - it was a beautiful East-European woman !
TL;DR: Sit still in meetings even virtual ones !
I have ran companies like this for 25+ years, sometimes with people (as co-founders) I have never even spoke to (and never saw); works fine; I don't notice the difference (besides that I find this way of working more efficient).
But i feel it's not as good for selling your ideas.
As a co-founder, you need to do a lot of selling, how did you manage that ?
> The COVID-19 pandemic has meant that many more people, like these engineers, are working on complex tasks through computer screens
It’s an interesting view of what it means for people who were mostly working on physical goods with physical tools, or in a “legacy” context with enough tradition that they have dedicated paper/boards/artifacts to work on before digitizing.
It’s a given that these jobs will never get to the same level of communication as being in the same room day in day out working on the same physical items, and the article is a good walk into what is missed.