I know this just from a Twitch streamer I watch. He'll occasionally have to stream with the camera off because having the camera on takes a lot of energy
I feel bad about it, used to have the stand up scrums and then just disappeared behind a computer oh well, been like that over a year and a half now. Only 1 out of say 10 people have their webcam on now used to be more early on.
Having the camera on is not a requirement for doing actual work. It can be nice to see your fellow coworkers, but it's no substitution for an actual physical meeting.
Having worked both in a remote and office setting, i much prefer the latter as it makes for better relations and getting to know people.
If you extrapolate that then you have a bunch of people all staring at a video of themselves for the duration of the meeting. No one is looking at you, but you feel on display and mentally fatigue yourself for nothing.
I also keep an eye on my self view, but not continuously throughout the entire call. I'll still pay attention to the person speaking and scan the rest of the cams like I would if I were in a conference room.
Doesn't need to be a constant thing, but more like glancing in the rear view mirror while driving. It's there when you need it, also there when you just want to check, but not going to keep you from the task at hand.
I haven't turned my camera on in meetings for over 8 months, I don't think anyone really cares that much, and I find some people like it because they feel less pressure to keep their own cameras on as a result. That's been my experience at least, I'm sure some people have bosses that require it for whatever reason which might make that not an option for everyone.
The ability to have someone instantly available, without requiring 100% of their attention, is useful. I have no problem with some people multitasking in meetings, and I don't judge people if they say "sorry, I wasn't paying attention, can you repeat that". I've learned to ask better questions that people can answer even if they weren't paying attention.
One thing I always found helpful with that is to lead with the person's name. So "Bob, do you have an opinion on this specific thing, in the context of this other thing?"
I totally understand drifting off in meetings especially virtual ones.
They care, they just don't want to pick a fight. They might judge you and believe the reason you're not on camera is because you're busy doing something else.
As if no one does the same on in-person meetings. Bringing their computers to the meeting, leaving them open and replying messages here and there.
If they believe that it's on their side, so the reason to keep my camera on is to "show" that I've been paying attention? I work with a bunch of people who leave their camera on and are completely inattentive for parts of meetings, doing something else while looking at the computer. How is that different?
Exactly, so it's not a remote, camera on-off issue, it's an attention issue that happens on any meeting. Stating that having the camera on helps with it is a non-argument to having a camera on, hence my point.
My brother works in accounting and my father works in engineering. They rarely have their cameras on. I believe this stems from the fact that pre-COVID, they dealt with many things via telephone conference call. Everyone dialed in via a phone.
When the pandemic hit, they simply brought their phone conference tendencies over to Zoom. Nobody sees it as a problem because prior to COVID, video wouldn't have even been an option.
Strangely this is perfectly fine to do with my employer, but I have a weekly meeting with some external developers and they immediately comment on my avatar or that I'm missing, while they all have their cameras on.
I'm regularly in meetings where people are on camera and where everyone has them off. It's clear the degree of people not following the discussion when the cameras are off is much more substantial.
And so, having made this observation, what steps have you taken to ensure that your meetings are purposeful and relevant to the people who are attending, so that they feel able to participate?
Maybe they're paying as much attention while on camera, but using the same fake signals they use to look like they're paying attention at in-person meetings.
Yes it's an advantage if other team members feel inspired by seeing you on camera.
But if you don't like it, you have to decide if it's worth the discomfort to get that advantage.
The way it works is... You make a decision like that, people will ask you why. You explain it by saying you don't want to be on camera a few times. After a while it becomes normal and nobody ever asks again. It's very simple.
Most people at our company just have their camera on for the start of the meeting and then drop off as the meeting progresses. As long as you cam up for the first 3-5 minutes, no one really cares.
I just blame it on poor webcam support over Citrix for Linux. All others run Windows but some dont turn on video just because. Management raised the point of video for a while and then basically gave up. Good. For technical meetings you dont need to see my face to evaluate the merits of my point. Performance review type stuff is a different matter.
If it’s a purely technical meeting, I’d wonder why it’s even a call rather than writing. But I’d guess that some might disagree that it’s “purely technical”, and there the video call makes sense. Perhaps there’s more need than ever to establish a purpose for the meeting before you start.
Have they also considered the fact that I’m literally hopping from one meeting to the next with zero minutes of downtime? I mean when I was in the office we at least had to walk to a new room, now I’m always a few minutes late to the next meeting and literally just signed out of the previous one.
I used to also take a lunch break, now I eat at my desk during meetings.
Yes, and that it's 100% business. Hard to get a good social conversation in a remote meeting with 5+ people, so the real meeting starts right away, and when it's done everyone disconnect. Compared to a physical meeting where people will talk in smaller groups before and after.
It's a cultural choice. In my team, standup takes 30 minutes because we spend the first 20 chit-chatting. It may seem like a waste of time but honestly it's a great mental kick-off for the day.
Nobody has the camera on at the engineering companies Iv'e worked. My SO though works in school kitchens, and they seem to have cameras on during meetings. I would find that really weird.
I've done full days of real meetings. Those were exhausting and very draining. I'm surprised that anybody would expect anything different from virtual meetings.
I have noticed that it's harder to feel people as fully human when they're little 2D movies. Even moreso when they're disembodied voices.
It's less so when I've met the people IRL. I'm guessing I can then link their image or voice to the human I know.
In my experience, there's also far less participation when everybody has their camera off.
Personally I have started leaving the camera on because it’s incredibly tempting to just use my phone and tune out with the camera off. I have also noticed that camera off people tend to speak a lot less than those with it on.
> I have also noticed that camera off people tend to speak a lot less than those with it on.
I think you're implying causality from camera off to speaking less, but I'd bet that it's more likely the other way around. That is, people in meetings where they're pretty sure they have nothing to say don't feel they need to be seen if they're not going to be talking.
Like those who can't touch type now, being exhausted by video calls may eventually be the exception. I expect to see a generational gap here. The twitch streaming, discord VC generation are not going to have the problems you're describing with video calls.
I'd argue against Twitch since these are more consumer-supplier. If anything, that'd prove the point of having only the primary speaker be visible while the remainder stays largely quiet or asks questions Q&A style.
On the flipside I could argue the situation is more akin to playing a multiplayer game over VC, at least for meetings that aren't "let's stare at cameras for (half) an hour". Your virtual space is limited, so audio becomes a more favorable channel and cues on the visual side need to be a lot stronger than wishy-washy human cues to be effective (e.g. explosive sticker emotes, popup text).
I'm sure anyone who has an idea can compare this scenario to your average "look at my screen" video call.
It is obnoxious that management wants video calls, when an incredible amount of business was happily done over the phone. And in person is definitely the least necessary, just a relic of an older time.
Some context: I'm a lead engineer on a team with six products.
I keep my camera off in meetings. I'm in far more meetings than I can possibly be productive in. I'm also usually not the active speaker in meetings. Why stare into a camera when what my yearly bonuses are calculated on is work/team output? I've found most meetings I get into are either:
- Developers who can't figure something out from documentation and are too impatient (or sometimes critical) to be helped over Slack.
- Executives who would rather speak than send an email or create a Slack thread.
It's not useful for me to pay attention the whole time when I'm also responsible for delivering code and 50-75% of my day is meetings.
Not necessarily. "delivering code" is not the same as "writing code" after all. It's very likely that half the meetings are with product, and higher ups, to discuss what the dev team can deliver, and the other half are with the dev team to discuss what they're going to deliver.
The way to avoid those meetings is to write documents instead, but you'd still not be writing code.
For the first quote maybe. But for the second ("I'm also responsible for delivering code and 50-75% of my day is meetings"), not really.
Technical Managers and Tech Leads need to participate in meetings but some also need/want to keep their coding skills and codebase knowledge sharp. A compromise is spending only 25%-50% of the time coding.
Some people are good with both and prefer to keep doing it.
I think your description is sound, but only for people managers of some kind. I burnt out pretty hard trying to meet similar expectations as an IC twice though. The first I was just trying to get code written when I was constantly being dragged into bureaucratic agile planning meetings, or talking to the PM about why my thing isn't done yet, or joining an "all hands". The 2nd had very little of the former, but I was responsible for fixing customer reported bugs, communicating with them in a timely and asynchronous manner about those bugs, and then also delivering features. It didn't help that they put me on some incredibly mundane React project near the end, but I reached a point where I'd sit at my computer and just feel bad about the day. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be in meetings all day, but I don't know that coding is what I'd want to be doing with the time in between, at least not to try and meet deadlines. To me, that'd be a recipe for deep depression.
Yeah, it really depends on the kind of management, kind of programming and the person. It's definitely not for everyone or for every situation. But when it works it's much better than the alternative.
It's an incredibly common one. Somehow, despite Peopleware being almost 35 years old, and pg's Maker Schedule, Manager's Schedule essay being twelve years old, we haven't learned anything and still have this incongruity that will not be reconciled in a direction which leads towards more productivity.
At times it feels like managers like to schedule meetings in such a way as to make it impossible to get any engineering work done on the clock. I particularly hate the the 10:00 AM, 2:30 PM meeting stack for it's ability to slice the day into chunks that are difficult to use productively for deeper work.
Another thing I don’t like is managers sending you a notification for a meeting in 30 minutes, which throws your concentration out of the windows. Then finding out the reason of the meeting was because they have not read your status report. Or something that could have been answered in a couple of slack messages. And then it’s already 4pm and your work day ends at 5pm.
Slack is not a panacea. Sometimes, you need to share a screen and have a fluid discussion, which Slack does not provide.
All-slack communication is definitely not great. It is ok for some communications that can be asynchronous and don't need a support, but that's definitely a small subset of the work communications needed for an engineering context.
Check out slack huddles, they actually work fairly well now.
Was not a fan initially but have grown to like the fairly fluid transition to fully sync comms (for the kind of interaction where I used to go to a co-worker's desk before we were full remote).
Same context, but I keep my camera on to help others do the same. I spent the last six months with an org that had a strong remote culture but held meeting on phone conference call. So I've worked with some of my teammates long enough to hear their children but I never saw their face.
It really helps to connect with the person you are talking to when you see them when speaking.
My only exception is when I do large conferences where only the PM is speaking or when I'm doing something else and not listening. In that case cutting my camera is more polite.
> It really helps to connect with the person you are talking to when you see them when speaking.
I don't feel the same way. I connect with my colleagues fairly easily, video or not. I was also raised in a world with gaming and IRC, so having to pay better attention to tone and phrasing inferences is second nature to me.
One difference between meeting people in MMORPGs and IRC vs meeting people while working remotely is that you rarely had to pressure someone to do something in the first context. At work, you need to do a lot of -sometimes unpleasant- things to make people go in the same direction. You can think of it like preventing all deaths in your team of a 40vs40 battleground.
The perceived the need to keep the camera off during a meeting is a good indication there is something wrong with the meeting, not that it's a good thing to keep the camera off.
We had some recurring meetings where people consistently didn't show up. The managers first impulse was to make the meeting mandatory. But the first thought should be: why are people not showing up? Engineers hate being unproductive, it should be a signal that there's something wrong with the meeting if nobody show's up.
Turning the camera off is just a socially acceptable way of not showing up. There are exceptions of course, some being just don't like being seen or have an issue being filmed out of privacy considerations.
> Turning the camera off is just a socially acceptable way of not showing up.
Why do you think that someone with a camera off is not present? How can you honestly equate camera-off with absence?
> There are exceptions of course
imo it's the opposite. Rarely to never does it matter if you see my face in a meeting. It's an exceedingly rare exception that you should need to as a business requirement.
Have you considered that... _you_ just like having your camera on, and like seeing other people? And other people just don't care?
Furthermore - even if you were right, I would say it's a good thing that busy people have a socially graceful way to opt out of the organisational mistakes of others.
> Have you considered that... _you_ just like having your camera on, and like seeing other people?
Yes, I think this is the whole point here. This is a bidirectional relationship.
We all have biases, and for a lot of people wanting some physical concept of the person they are working with is one of them, so yeah, they might just like seeing your face.
It's your prerogative to turn it off, but there is a very real chance this will impact your relationship with other people.
The biggest change for me is that I now hide my self video 100% of the time. I can't see myself in an irl meeting, so I don't need to see myself online either.
Don't this kind of makes the whole problem go away.
> Why do you think that someone with a camera off is not present?
I never said this.
> Furthermore - even if you were right, I would say it's a good thing that busy people have a socially graceful way to opt out of the organisational mistakes of others.
Maybe, if you have a company culture where such mistakes cannot be addressed frankly, then perhaps. The lack of facial expressions and other non-verbal cues will take away much of the signals that are available to the organizer however. Which in turn can make regular nonsense meetings last longer than they should.
In my experience quite a lot of these regular meetings are scheduled as a knee-jerk reaction of management to solve problems they don't actually understand. This is great source of unproductive meetings, bowing out 'gracefully' by turning off your camera and attention will not make things better. I'm used to being able to express my concerns openly though, without holding back, so maybe I'm biased.
What's wrong with with someone turning off their camera and eating a snack while developers dive into the weeds for 15 minutes?
Sometimes it's worthwhile for someone to be there just to make one or two important decisions in an hour long meeting.
I've learned when you have a question for someone you need to say their name at the begining of the question, not the end, and give a few seconds of background - which is also a good way to ensure everyone is on the same page.
Online meetings and turning off the camera are new, let's do what we can to take advantage of the pros they offer rather than establishing a new social norm that staring into a camera for 15 minutes and saying and doing nothing is the only polite thing to do.
> I've learned when you have a question for someone you need to say their name at the begining of the question, not the end, and give a few seconds of background
I think this is necessary for me in person or online. My mind tends to wander during meetings, especially meetings that don’t specifically involve (say, group status meetings where people just read their completed items and backlogs that we all already see).
Making recordings of meetings that are setting out to make decisions or even just discuss things in deep detail means people who weren't able to attend, or are just interested in the discussion had, are able to watch it on demand.
What's wrong with someone being on camera and eating? If you book me for lunch, I'll show up. With video. Eating. Same as if we were in the office. Book me for lunch? Expect me to show up with a plate or ask you to "go talk over lunch".
If you have the camera off, I have no idea if you're listening. If we're in a regular meeting in an office I can see that you're disinterestedly looking at your cell phone and react accordingly if I really need your attention. If you're camera off in an online meeting I have to assume with every single thing that I say that you are distracted and even if I say your name I am not sure if you even heard me until I say your name and wait for your acknowledgement (e.g. you turning on your camera or saying something to the effect of 'now I'm listening because I heard my name'). Seems like this is a real drag on productivity. This can obviously be different within an actual team that has a history of working together and working together well without the need for this. I.e. if you have a team meeting and you know every word is listened to even if everyone is off camera. That's not the kind of meeting we're talking about here though I think. We're talking about cross functional meeting between people that have lots of other stuff on their plate and at least half the meeting is not interesting to them.
Coming from the the game modding scene meetings never have webcams. It's always just voice calls. Using a video camera is such a foreign idea to me. I don't even own a web camera for my PC. Another weird thing to me is people using other's real names. It's just taboo to use people's real names instead of their screen names. Even my boss and the owners of the company I refer to by their screen name.
Same thing for me, although I'm not coming from the game modding scene but from the "made friends online". Webcams have never really been a thing between me and my friends.
It's rather baffling the business world likes to pretend our communities don't exist despite the fact online collab communities have been doing this since the early 2000s.
Balaji Srinivasan sees this as the future of work. There's little upside to mixing your work and personal identities and a lot of downside. I can only imagine that it would prevent the most overt forms of discrimination also.
I can honestly say I hadn't thought of it, but I think you're right. I'd love to have that layer of anonymity, as it were, at work, since I'm a completely different person on the job anyway.
One of my basic policies was "no scheduled recurring meetings" (I'd think that scrum meetings count as those).
Meetings, for me, were "one-off" events, with focus on a particular, singular goal.
Of course, I worked for a Japanese company, so my policy didn't mean squat to the higher-ups. I had regularly-scheduled meetings; whether or not I wanted it. Many of these meetings were little more than "gab sessions," which was often a nice break from the grind, but had no other positive effect on the projects at hand.
Recently, on the project I'm developing, we had a problem, where the top brass allowed themselves to become complacent, and ignored my frequent status updates (I'm big on process transparency). This came to a head, one day, when they discovered that the product I was making, which had gradually reshaped to meet reality, had deviated from their original goals.
They decided on twice-weekly video meetings (usually only a half hour). This helped them to get a lot more involved. It does nothing at all, for me, but it does help me to keep the work I do "in their face."
As a result, they have changed their original goals, to meet the ground truth, and also has helped me to get important feedback from them.
The fact these meetings are short, and to the point, as well as just the two of us, helps a lot.
> The perceived need to keep the camera off during a meeting is a good indication there is something wrong with the meeting, not that it's a good thing to keep the camera off.
Reading this discussion, I start to feel the same way. People seem to use it as a coping mechanism to deal with bad meetings. Surely fixing the meetings would be a better thing.
I worked with some folks from one of the major management consulting firms, three or four years ago. Well into Zoom and other video conferencing being very much a thing.
They strongly favored actual call-in-with-a-phone phone conferencing. No video. Not even, necessarily, a computer at all.
Some places do video conferencing but have a culture of keeping cameras off. Usually this is driven from the top down.
... it is nice to have video for e.g. visual social cues of who might want to say something next, or whatever, but having cameras off is fine too.
However, having the camera off definitely saves a ton on fatigue by keeping you from feeling like you have to sit in one spot, in more-or-less one position, staring at either one particular screen or at your camera, to mime paying attention. Me, I like to pace and wander around the house when I'm on a call, even if I'm very interested in it. Hard to do that with video on.
Some industries that adopted virtual meetings long prior to Zoom becoming mandatory are very used to doing voice-only conference calls.
And they work! Nobody in those orgs thinks they are the equivalent of "not showing up." How do you think bankers, lawyers and CPAs got huge deals done in the 80s and 90s, despite everyone being in different offices and often in different cities? Lots and lots of conference calls.
Video calls are a recent innovation made possible by tech. But many organizations have no functional memory of how to do calls prior to Zoom et al. And so some of them have created these bizarre sets of social norms around having to have video on to be "present", apparently unaware of the decades of doing it without video that worked extremely well with less fatigue.
Personally, I love walking around (if only just pacing) while on the phone. The physical movement makes my mind work better and allows me to better process what the other person is saying. And that's how lots of people did it prior to video.
Agreed on how draining a full day of face—to-face meetings is, our worse: a full-day conference meeting. I once went to one at the company that had acquired us. It was a literal airing-of-grievances meeting for the engineering managers, that they ran annually, so that people could get shit off their chests. It was by far the most dysfunctional and stupid meeting I’ve ever had to endure. We had to fly to Chicago for it.
If it was virtual I’d have turned my camera off and chilled out, and come away a fraction as stressed. As it was my team went straight to the bar, and a week later one of my colleagues - foreseeing her future amongst these people - quit.
I think there’s a lot of rose-tinting on how great in-person meetings actually used to be.
I just can't keep focus on online meetings, everything said just quickly washes over me. IRL meetings are a bit more engaging, but if they become more presentation-style, I just fall asleep (either in the sense of "I'm not paying attention" or "zzzz").
> In my experience, there's also far less participation when everybody has their camera off.
I feel this is a blessing in most cases.
Remembering in-person meetings, half of the “participation” was asking to get back one slide before to check a point that went too fast, questions on points that are dealt with two slides further, people getting asked questions as a punishment for being visibly bored to death, and facts that could be checked by a 10s document search but would seem rude to be looking for right now.
Forcing people to share their documents, everyone free to get back and forth in the slides on their side, and just able to cut the camera/mic and look for whatever they feel they need to look for, do whatever they need to do just helps tremendously to cut down on unneeded back and forth, and improves a lot on efficiency.
This is all even worse if you try to carry over the same process to remote work. I feel like virtual meetings increase the emphasis on slides too much. In person, the presenter can be up front, gesturing, pointing, really bringing animation to the slides. In virtual meetings it's just the screen share of the slide and a talking head. It's a horribly unengaging experience.
The easy fix to this is sharing presentation files before the meeting so everyone can follow along however they want. Meetings should mostly be to discuss the information that you already have, not to be surprised with brand new information.
Couldn't agree more with this, however it's hard to make happen in practice. A lot of times people are so caught up in their own tasks and responsibilities they don't set aside time to read up before a meeting, not to mention slides/docs are rarely laid out well enough for people to inform themselves completely.
You can't make your coworkers do anything. But if you're the boss, you can create whatever type of meeting culture you want. Some companies do read-aheads very well, which I really like.
The point isn't to come completely informed. Just enough to prepare some thoughts and questions.
> But if you're the boss, you can create whatever type of meeting culture you want.
If only. Bosses can really only mess things up. Leadership sets expectations, but employees as a group have to keep each other in check, and propagate the culture to new hires as they come on board, or things deflate pretty quickly.
While I sympathize with your point, I kinda wonder how much it really helped to have a charismatic peoples deliver meh information.
More and more I see meetings that stop for 30s~1min because the presenter raised a point that hit us and we take a few moments to digest/double check. On the other end basic reporting meetings got a lot shorter.
Basically, if there is nothing to be said, it just ends up with that unengaging, really boring feeling. If there was any interest in the subject, time goes faster as we’re also checking a lot in the background. I kinda see the default boringness as a feature really.
In our company we do it exclusively without a camera since we mostly show the workspace of someone while talking about it or the document to be discussed. Exceptions are sometimes meetings with externals or job interviews, when it is nice to be able to see someone at least once. I really don't get the appeal otherwise, why not use the time to write something down at least?
An exception is the sales department which prefers to use a camera for obvious reasons. But engineers vary rarely use cameras. I don't even have one right now in my office.
I think if you know the people you are talking with, a camera isn't needed to "feel" people.
>I have noticed that it's harder to feel people as fully human when they're little 2D movies. Even moreso when they're disembodied voices.
This is exactly how see online meetings. It doesn't feel like I'm interacting with real people. I can't gauge people's level of attention. Conversational turn-taking feels like swimming through mud. And we don't even have the basic expectation that speaking more loudly (or softly) is perceived accurately by the listeners.
Across my roles in the past 10 years or more, I've probably spent more than the average amount of time in f2f meetings - and I am someone that enjoys a great f2f meeting or ideas generation/problem solving session.
When we first moved to video due to covid I was exhausted every single day. I grew to hate video calls. But how much of this was my inexperience with the tech, my own lockdown tiredness and just the general funk of life at the time, I cannot say.
18 months later I LOVE video calls. I love the fact that I'm in my own comfy quite space, I love the fact that I can move from standing to sitting and back without distracting those on The calls. I love that I can turn my video and mic off and have a pace around or eat some food.
It is great - and yes as you say the video helps hugely.
Years ago I was working with an international team that my local team were struggling with. Each day we'd be in a phone call and I could feel the tension simmering. Then we got video going, saw we were all humans and got back in the problem, solved it and came out of the delivery good friends. I swear being able to see them and knowing they could see us changed everything about how we worked together and behaved.
> I have noticed that it's harder to feel people as fully human when they're little 2D movies. Even moreso when they're disembodied voices.
I've had the opposite feeling. With cameras on, everyone looks at each other's faces for cues on when to start speaking, but the lag leads to people speaking over each other. There are a bunch of "oops, sorry" moments followed by a lot of awkward pausing while we try to climb back out of the uncanny valley.
> there's also far less participation when everybody has their camera off.
In my experience, participation doesn't seem to be related to whether the camera is on or off. Participation is generally reduced because such meetings really only allow one person to speak at a time, and if you aren't extroverted then you have a hard time horning in to be able to speak. It also makes actual group conversation essentially impossible.
Virtual meetings work best when there's a single presenter addressing an audience. They're really awful when everyone is expected to chime in.
I found out early on on that meetings are much less fatiguing if I’m not looking at the web meeting app at all i.e. I have some document/code on my screen instead. If there is screen sharing involved so I have to look a the web meeting screen, I go full screen and minimise all their video streams which a) gets me more screen real estate, b) means it effectively becomes an audio only meeting at that point.
We used to have a shortage of meeting rooms when having them physically and locally. This was great as it meant they naturally spread out over the week. Nowadays folk think they can get you to hop on a virtual meeting room in minutes regardless of what you’re doing.
I’m very good at declining meetings where I think I’ll not be offering much value giving a reason why. I find quite often people want me in because they think I’ll enjoy it, or don’t want me out of the loop. They can summarise after by email if that’s all they want.
> for some people, not having to write that (or any) email is the whole point of having people in meetings
Which can lead to some annoying problems where, for example, you might have several meetings where people harangue you for wanting things done in way X but then find out after you've spent two weeks doing things in way Y that they actually conceded on way X after those things but no-one bothered to write it down or communicate it in any way.
(Not that this was a one-off; the whole company had a culture of meetings without notes or any kind of documentation.)
To make a different point than all the camera naysayers so far:
I I'd be WFH for two years during covid, and everyone had their cameras off, I'd go crazy. Not seeing a face for months, being stressed about the other party in a meeting not even paying attention, just speaking into a void etc.
It's extremely rude in my opinion when people simply don't turn their cameras on in virtual meetings. Unfortunately, no one at my workplace except me does.
Rude? Have you considered the other side? I'm extremely fatigued by having the camera on, I feel surveilled and every movement I do in front of it is calculated by my unconscious mind. It takes a real toll on my productivity having to have the camera on for a string of meetings.
I feel it's extremely rude to dismiss others' experiences with the damn camera on for a virtual meeting. What is up that you need someone else to have a camera pointing to their face that you can't have with their voices? For most meetings that I don't require my computer I'll even go for a short walk around the house, while bouncing ideas, raising questions and so on. I feel much more productive in the meetings I'm able to disengage from my computer and surroundings and immerse on the conversation without having to care about a camera showing my face.
Being very honest, being forced to turn my camera on is a major red flag, the fatigue is real and consumed me after a year on this, since last December I've been turning my camera off and it's been incredibly productive.
Judge as much as you want but it seems you have no empathy, worse than that, you want to force your ways of working unto others without even considering others' struggles with it.
I constantly think about how I'm coming across, whether my hand gestures are visible in frame, if I look like I'm frowning too much, if I'm nodding big enough to be seen, if I seem like I'm not paying attention when I look away from the screen, etc etc
But is that because you have the visual feedback of yourself? As I say, I can relate and that's why I disable my own tile.
I'm being a bit encroaching here, but I'm guessing you'd have to do as much and probably more self regulation in in-person meetings. Nobody cares where your hands are, probably no one even looks at them because you're one of many tiles. Where you're looking is not interesting because nobody knows where your camera sits related to your face. I constantly look out the window while talking. Genuinely, I've had to force eye contact on bad days in in-person meetings and everyone knew, it felt as pathetic as looking at my own face and checking if my gesturing and face ist appropriate
No, to be clear, I would have more anxiety because I wouldn't know how I'm coming across. I guess my question is, if I'm one of many tiles and no one cares where I'm looking, what's the point of having the camera on?
In small to medium sized groups, body and facial language helps to understand how a person feels about something. Most people like to imagine everything is completely rational but most things at work have a human component. If I feel like someone's unhappy with the work they're allocated I will ask them about it. It's like watching a movie without the image.
I’m sure this doesn’t apply to you at all, but cynically, I just feel that when I hear these weird to me reasons that I can’t understand, I just assume the person hasn’t showered in a week.
I had female coworker confide to me that she didn’t like turning her camera on because it takes 40 minutes to apply her makeup every day. So she only does it for important meetings, but otherwise leaves the camera off.
> I’m sure this doesn’t apply to you at all, but cynically, I just feel that when I hear these weird to me reasons that I can’t understand, I just assume the person hasn’t showered in a week.
If you are working remotely, does it matter? Does it matter if someone hasn't showered in a week and doesn't want to show that on camera but is still a productive worker?
I really don't get this nosiness about people's lives when you aren't sharing a common physical space.
I enjoy sometimes being able to get out of bed a bit later, not having time to do a full morning ritual before work if I can get some 30-45 min more out of my sleep, why should I have to care about all of that to show my face to colleagues on camera? Why should you judge someone that doesn't want their camera on?
> So... if you don't understand someone else's reasons for doing something, you assume they aren't being honest with you?
I feel you are getting somewhere with this train of thought, so far I've replied a few people on this thread that seems to think this way and project this need of having a camera on because they don't understand how that can negatively affect others and assume people are being dishonest.
Having a disability that isn't visible, I deal with this problem all the time.
The underlying issue is thinking of other's behavior as if it it was own behavior and then determine the other person's motivates from that assumption.
If you don't understand someone else, you'll assume their reasons for a specific thing are the same as if you were doing that thing.
Example: I take more days off than I have PTO for.
Conclusion: I'm claiming to have a disability to get to have more vacation days.
Reality: I've gone six months without any kind of vacation and many of my weekends spent barely recovering from work. My disability has taken so much from me that I find it hard to justify staying alive.
When I get back to work, people ask how my vacation was.
Ever think that its people like you that drive people to not want to turn on their cameras? The fear of constantly being watched and judged? If someone is working remotely the way they look or if they have not showered is completely irrelevant. Only questions that matter are is the work getting done and is the person answering questions competently. Nothing else should matter, least of all if you can watch them on cam.
If other participants having a tiny 200px image of you (among 6 other people) in the corner of their screen is extremely fatiguing to you, how does it work when you go to the office ? Do you get seizures after 15min of in-person meeting ? Panic attacks ? How did you deal with life 5 years ago ?
Going from mostly physical office to mostly work-from-home on zoom is already a massive change that gives a lot of comfort to people. I think refusing literally ANY kind of human interaction apart from sound and written text is waaaay too anti-social.
Interaction is good, interaction is fine, this is where good ideas come from. Don't become a virtual entity. Humans are real.
Video conferences are as if everybody were potentially constantly staring at you, but you couldn't tell if or when this was the case, and despite everybody looking at you, you couldn't even make eye-contact with anybody, share a smile etc.
No, I like offices, I'm a very outspoken and outgoing person, I enjoy social interactions. I don't like a camera pointing at my face.
It's not that difficult to see that this is a very different experience than sharing an office. And I'm tired of repeating this.
This is the 3rd time I'm replying that I feel that the experience of a camera is very different than real life interactions and I like real life interactions, I'm getting really exhausted of this non-sequitur being repeated...
> What is up that you need someone else to have a camera pointing to their face that you can't have with their voices?
Smiles, frowns, nods, glazed looks, puzzled looks, surprised looks, I-want-to-say-something-but-I-can't-get-a-word-in looks, zoning out, impatience, et cetera, et cetera. There's really a lot people communicate with their faces, both consciously and unconsciously.
This is fair, but I'm skeptical that these things are actually taken into account in the vast majority of video meetings. Whereas you're right, they're important face-to-face.
If I'm at an in-person meeting of 5-8 people, and 3 of them get into a longer discussion about things that are irrelevant to me, and for understanding which I don't have the background, I can zone out and nobody cares, because nobody is looking at me. Everyone is looking at the people talking.
On a video call, my zoned-out face will make the trio feel uneasy; instead of discussing their topic quickly, they'll stumble and try to "talk to the audience", or god forbid, drag everyone else into the discussion. So with forced camera on, I have to look focused while squinting at the other screen, discretely playing 2048 and pinching myself to not yawn visibly, while with camera off, I could get off my chair, stretch a little, or do something actually useful for the company.
I'll be happier with having always-on camera on long videocalls when videocalls start working like real-life meetings: not everyone is looking at everyone else all the time, and everyone can tell who's looking at them in any given moment. The way things are today, I find this constant surveillance to be mentally tormenting, and only activate my camera on the basis of courtesy: 1:1 meetings, some team meetings, meetings with an important higher-up who also has their camera on, etc.
I use people zoning out as a sign that the topic is not a good fit for this meeting, and should be discussed outside of it with a smaller group. That seems to work well to keep meetings quick and on point.
In my context there is the unspoken agreement that we turn cameras on when a meeting starts and after greeting and checking the agenda everyone is free to turn their camera off.
> I feel surveilled and every movement I do in front of it is calculated by my unconscious mind
What do you do in in-person meetings? Or supermarket visits etc.? Everything you do is way more visible in those, and I've never heard anyone complain about being surveilled in person.
Do you feel the same way in front of a camera pointing to your face as you do on a normal day-to-day interaction with non-verbal cues, room to use body language to express yourself, etc.?
It's not about the visibility, it's the psychological impact it has, having a camera pointed directly at my face 100% of the time is very different than sitting in a room, reading others' faces, attention (where are they focusing their gaze? When are they drifting off? When are they tapping their fingers on the table?).
I don't know why I hear this argument so many times, a camera on my face is a very different experience than sharing a room with others, I don't see the parallel.
Well, I don't understand, as the parallel seems obvious; you're meeting with a group of people and you can see them and they can see you. If anything I feel freer with the camera, as others' visibility of me is much more limited than in person. I like cameras in meetings for exactly what you say, reading others' faces, attention, body language, non-verbal cues, etc. Without being able to see people I find it much harder to understand them, and to be sure they're understanding me.
When I'm meeting in person I can move around, I can look at whoever is the center of attention at the moment without having to care if someone is watching me, it's much more easy to tell if you are being watched or not and when to relax or not.
The parallel does not work, I don't think it's that hard to realise that a camera pointing at your face, showing how you look at any given moment to anyone that looks at you and you can't tell if they are looking at you or not is equivalent to an in-person setting where you are aware of your surroundings much more naturally.
I really don't know how to be more explicit than this about the major differences between in-person to a virtual meeting with cameras...
I guess I don't have that strong need to know exactly when someone is looking at me. If I'm with other people I behave as if they can see me, because they probably can, and if appropriate I relax. I don't think I could reliably keep track of who was looking at me in an in-person meeting with more than three people anyway. Keeping track of that and changing behaviour when people look at me or look away seems like it would be exhausting.
Do you feel this during in person meetings? Where you are constantly surveilled and every movement you make watched?
You feel this way shopping in the grocery store? Where the cashier is constantly looking at you when speaking? Is your productivity lower because the other people in the store can see you?
The problem with virtual meetings is you can't tell what someone is looking at. If you have 9 people looking straight ahead, it looks like they are all looking at you.
This may not be an issue for you, but it makes some people uncomfortable. Add anxiety disorder and it's a fucking nightmare. I have no issue if I can see where people are looking.
It may depend on the context. In a small or one on one meeting, yes it is usually rude. In a meeting with more than 5-10 people where I'm not expected to be a very active participant? I think it's fine. I also expect if someone would like the camera to be on at these meetings they would be able to tell me that and I'd usually be happy to do so if requested.
In one-on-one meetings we're usually discussing some technical detail or issue, and one or both of us will be looking at an IDE, or a document, or something that is not the browser tab where the audio is coming from.
Not having a camera distracting me helps me to help the other party and give them my full concentration. This is amply reflected in the audio, just like a telephone call, and in a one-on-one call you can both just leave the mic open and have a normal conversation with all the social cues audio communication offers.
Why rude? Organizer of the meeting should either tell participants to use camera or whichever they prefer. And chosing not to turn it on is far from rude
Counter point: i find the expectation to have a camera turned on rude.
Different people have different expectations and there are probably a lot of reasons for the wide variety.
However it kinda sounds like you have a different expectation than the team you work with. Would be mindful of taking the stance that ‘everyone else is wrong’
That tells you your opinion is wrong. It is not rude at all and nobody but you minds. Just say "I would prefer if" instead of claiming that something "is rude".
I think it very much depends on the circumstances, just like most social rules. If somebody is in an office space, then it can make sense to have everybody on camera as the default. On the other hand, if people are working from spaces that were never intended as working space, then it would be rude to assume that they should give a view into their private space.
For the first ~12 months of the pandemic, I was working from home, using my desk in the living room because there wasn't a good spot for it anywhere else. Having my camera on would have meant having my living room in full view, often including my partner on the couch in the background. While background detection/subtraction does exist, it isn't perfect, and so that would be an intrusive view into our private area.
I've since moved to a different location, with a room to be a dedicated home office. Here, it wouldn't impose on private space to turn on the camera, because that was part of the intent behind that room. However, you as the person on the other end of the call cannot know which situation somebody is in, and so it would be rude to insist on video beyond a polite request.
I don't know, I have kept my camera on for the last 6 months during my current project and it is exhausting. Its not like a regular in person meeting, your face is magnified. Every flaw is made larger, if I have not shaved or had a chance to shower yet (we have very early meetings to accommodate offshore teams) its obvious. Keeping the camera on means that people are seeing your house which is far more personal that meeting in an office. I have kids that regularly wreck the place and if I don't have time to clean up after dropping them off at school it can be obvious. In addition camera being on means I have to face it and it limits my ability to work during the meeting. One might argue that I should not be working during the meeting but I have work that needs to get done regardless of how many useless meetings I am dragged into every day (lots). I decided today that going forward I am going to keep my camera off. If someone calls me out on it I will reconsider but going forward I am going to be comfortable. Working from home already means I am always at work, I am going to attempt to claw back some of my independence.
Yes, very true. Having the camera off also means that we miss out on lots of non-verbal cues. I can't tell you the amount of difficult meetings I have had where people are edgy when the camera is off. With it on there is often a more relaxed vibe as people don't get the wrong end of the stick as much.
This can go the other way as well, thinking visual cues imply X when they actually imply Y. On the other hand, one can resolve most of these scenarios by asking the other party to elaborate and to keep emotionally charged arguments / personalities off the table, rather than assuming their emotional state and trying to play off of it or feeling attacked.
This is a huge part of why I prefer text. It would be one thing if people could misread my face or voice, then take my word for it when I tell them what I actually mean. But what often happens is they dig in on thinking they've struck it rich on some deep insight into my psyche and proceed to tell me what I really think.
Not everyone is like this. I can have a great time with people who compare inputs, see they diverge, and weigh the one that provides the most charitable view higher. This is usually my actual words, which I've been told sometimes comes with a "tone" that sends all the wrong signals. It turns out a lot of people read my usual pace--which can be way too fast at first--as anger or annoyance. When people focus on the words, it's obvious (by their own account) that I'm calm and enjoying the conversation.
It's usually a cue to take a deep breath and slow down. But it's hard to remember to do that from the start, and not everyone is willing to let the tone go once I take that control. And then the deep breath becomes part of the imagined anger/annoyance. It's made me wary of voice and video chat, and wary of people who prefer it specifically because they want to use the way people look and speak to determine what's going on in their heads rather than pay attention to their words.
I actually enjoy video-off-first with the very occasional video share invitation. At first I thought I'd hate it, but now the stress of maintaining "meeting face" for hours on end is removed.
I find camera use exhausting. It feels considerably more demanding and awkward than meeting IRL. There are many benefits to working from home but avoiding endless meetings is still not one of them. I attribute it to all those years working at an office, which have made many people frustratingly bad at written communication and asynchronous work.
I’ve now worked at two companies in remote setting. First had cameras mostly off and my current (remote first) has cameras on. I vastly prefer cameras on as putting a face to a person makes interaction feel much more personal and connections much more real.
I don't turn on my camera for meetings. You really don't need to see my face. Anyone who says otherwise is not a serious person. We have been multitasking while on the phone for decades. This is no different.
I think it's OK to have the camera turned off for meetings but if it's a company meeting or a more social catch-up I'd like to see my co-workers. So 99% of the time no problem. But once a week or once a month I'd like to see everyone.
Do you never nod in agreement when someone else is making a good point. Or use hand gestures? Also you can smile at a joke when you have your camera on. Sometimes it’s nice to have a joke with colleagues.
Where I work there are basically two types of meeting, one for mass participation (> 10 people) when a few are speaking and most are listening, and one for small team discussion, which tend to be focussed on screen sharing one or more person's screen. Neither of those need a camera.
When meetings are 1-1, or maybe < 5, then they make sense, but I don't really feel the need for them otherwise.
My team had a discussion about that at a previous job.
I also don't find cameras necessary, but me and some other people I know find that long 1-1 meetings with the camera turned off feels like a prolonged phone call, which is extremely tiring for people who also dislike long phone calls.
Short camera-less meetings with quick, focused, telephone-like discussions are perfectly fine, of course. But if one of the parties has to keep going into a computer type a bunch of stuff in-between all the time, it suddenly feels like I'm trying to cancel my cable or newspaper subscription.
It's better to have notes and do it later, or at lest share the screen, rather than only using 5 minutes out of 30 for actual talking.
I found that some people who use Discord audio chats are used to having calls like that, but I'd check with the other person if they're ok before.
For me it's not seeing a face but also having my face seen. It's basically a kind of raised attentiveness.
But generally virtual meetings are easy but that doesn't mean they are cheap. Where in person meetings were hard you knew they were expensive and had a kind of built in value of worth. Virtual meetings are easier but the costs are more hidden.
Well, the problem for me specifically is the "hurry up and wait" feeling.
If the person operating a computer is doing stuff related to the meeting, time seem normal for them. But the person waiting has to remain focused to answer follow-up questions, so multitasking might not be a possibility.
Seeing a face helps in my experience, but I have no idea why. However, screen sharing is probably better. Or just not having long interruptions.
Ah, if it's that kind of 1-1, screen sharing definitely helps.
My 1-1's are almost always to discuss or troubleshooting something, so not much "downtime" at all. When troubleshooting, screen sharing is almost always used, otherwise I probably don't need the other person at all.
In my opinion more important than the cameras, we need to standardize some sort of 3d audio to distinguish 'spacially' between different speakers in meetings.
Cisco has some systems like this. I've used them. It's neat, but it only really helps with a small number of participants.
Also note that while audio is physically 3D, we are only good at distinguishing on a 2D plane. Basically, you easily get left/right, and you kinda get near/far, but you don't get up/down. Not unless you cock your head.
I haven't found camera usage in meetings to be useful for anything other than raising the stress level of the participants. One of the benefits of working from home is not having to be dressed up for work when you aren't doing any client-facing activities.
For me, camera off if possible, but don't mind turning it on if required. I also don't care if the other users have, and usually I prefer them off, but strangely I like it more when they have a profile picture, either a real life foto, an avatar or even an abstract drawing, something that allows me to "map" the sound to something while hearing it.
One advantage to virtual meetings is that we're no longer suffering the portal effect when we exit the conference room.
I had one particularly bad manager who treated meetings like coffee brakes, anything we said or did was forgotten as soon as he stepped out of the room. There has been research done on this portal effect and how it makes us forget our current task.
In my experience, meetings definitely feel more productive when at least the key participants have cameras on. So I would not advocate for a "camera off" culture. Instead, something that helps me and might help others - When I am not speaking, I keep my camera on, but I don't keep the camera view myself - i.e, I don't watch myself or others. Instead, I switch to the content being shared/presented, if any. This helps me a lot, as I think a lot of the anxiety comes from having to watch myself, which is always uncomfortable and not something that we are used to.
Secondly, I think virtual meetings are fatiguing also because of the constant staring at the screen. In in-person meetings, you spend a lot of time not looking at a screen, whereas you are constantly staring at a screen in a virtual meeting. Something that helps me is to take some of the meetings like 1:1s while walking with only audio.
> meetings definitely feel more productive when at least the key participants have cameras on.
I agree with the corollary at least. If someone hasn't spoken for the last 5 minutes, they are not a key participant and can turn off their camera.
The optimal middle path is probably that people sometimes have their cameras on, and sometimes don't. This option seems to get the least amount of consideration.
Something that is throwing me off in these discussions is how do you deal with documents ?
You do have written support to guide the meeting, right ? Won’t you all be looking at that document, eventually taking notes, and not looking at the speaker ?
Even when some people turn the camera on, I can’t imagine anyone in the meeting seeing more than their small tile in the corner while the main doc is front and center covering 90% of the window.
I personally find the most productive meetings are where there is some kind of screen sharing on a document/something else. It gives something to focus on (so you're not tempted to read emails/do other things) and you don't have the annoyance/distraction of cameras (or they're only a small part of your screen).
It's got better now days but at the start of the pandemic every other video call with over n people would have interruptions/digressions when someone's dog/cat/kid walked into the background of someone's video.
As someone who's partially deaf, I really appreciate camera on. It's a lot easier to understand people. I actually like Zoom meetings more than F2F at times, simply because everyone (with a camera) is equal - I see all their faces (and mouths) the same. F2F? Masks cover up faces, and we all have to stand far apart - horrible conditions for someone HoH.
I'm completely deaf and I can only recommend transcripts. Both zoom and teams have built-in transcription systems (though you have to enable them) and there is also an Android app called Google live transcribe. The former two work the best since everyone has a mic to their mouth and their voice never mix before going through the transcription system.
At my last workplace, we got into a “camera off” default in my team during the pandemic because one person initially had lots of connection issues with their wi-fi, and it kind of stayed that way even after that was resolved, but I felt meetings probably suffered from this in terms of people not participating (plus it’s nice to see people’s faces!).
My new place doesn’t say anything about cameras but most people seem to go for camera on - but their policy (which was agreed upon by the team and is written down, which is great when you’re a new starter trying to work out the culture) is that they’d rather more people were invited to the meeting than fewer (so people don’t miss out on potentially relevant topics), but if you don’t think it’s relevant you’re under no obligation to attend and if it’s only somewhat relevant, you should feel free to get on with some other work or whatever. This seems to work pretty well in practice as there’s no “shame” to having your camera on and clearly be looking at another screen if the topic isn’t relevant, while still having the benefit of keeping your camera on if you are happy to.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadHaving worked both in a remote and office setting, i much prefer the latter as it makes for better relations and getting to know people.
I guess remote work is just not for everyone.
Idk why it works but I find it smoothing and allows me to control how I am being seen. Just my personal experience.
Doesn't need to be a constant thing, but more like glancing in the rear view mirror while driving. It's there when you need it, also there when you just want to check, but not going to keep you from the task at hand.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rearview-handy-mirror-camera/i...
Very grateful I work for the former.
I totally understand drifting off in meetings especially virtual ones.
Yes, inferring bad motives to other people is bad. We should try to be charitable.
>> They might judge you and believe the reason you're not on camera is because you're busy doing something else.
Sounds like these people ^^^ are the ones who need to hear that message.
If they believe that it's on their side, so the reason to keep my camera on is to "show" that I've been paying attention? I work with a bunch of people who leave their camera on and are completely inattentive for parts of meetings, doing something else while looking at the computer. How is that different?
It's not, no one has said it is. Being inattentive is bad no matter how it's done.
My brother works in accounting and my father works in engineering. They rarely have their cameras on. I believe this stems from the fact that pre-COVID, they dealt with many things via telephone conference call. Everyone dialed in via a phone.
When the pandemic hit, they simply brought their phone conference tendencies over to Zoom. Nobody sees it as a problem because prior to COVID, video wouldn't have even been an option.
But if you don't like it, you have to decide if it's worth the discomfort to get that advantage.
The way it works is... You make a decision like that, people will ask you why. You explain it by saying you don't want to be on camera a few times. After a while it becomes normal and nobody ever asks again. It's very simple.
MS Teams has had this for a long time.
Some people failed to notice, but for those who did it was a bit like uncanny valley.
I used to also take a lunch break, now I eat at my desk during meetings.
I've done full days of real meetings. Those were exhausting and very draining. I'm surprised that anybody would expect anything different from virtual meetings.
I have noticed that it's harder to feel people as fully human when they're little 2D movies. Even moreso when they're disembodied voices.
It's less so when I've met the people IRL. I'm guessing I can then link their image or voice to the human I know.
In my experience, there's also far less participation when everybody has their camera off.
I think you're implying causality from camera off to speaking less, but I'd bet that it's more likely the other way around. That is, people in meetings where they're pretty sure they have nothing to say don't feel they need to be seen if they're not going to be talking.
On the flipside I could argue the situation is more akin to playing a multiplayer game over VC, at least for meetings that aren't "let's stare at cameras for (half) an hour". Your virtual space is limited, so audio becomes a more favorable channel and cues on the visual side need to be a lot stronger than wishy-washy human cues to be effective (e.g. explosive sticker emotes, popup text).
I'm sure anyone who has an idea can compare this scenario to your average "look at my screen" video call.
I keep my camera off in meetings. I'm in far more meetings than I can possibly be productive in. I'm also usually not the active speaker in meetings. Why stare into a camera when what my yearly bonuses are calculated on is work/team output? I've found most meetings I get into are either:
- Developers who can't figure something out from documentation and are too impatient (or sometimes critical) to be helped over Slack.
- Executives who would rather speak than send an email or create a Slack thread.
It's not useful for me to pay attention the whole time when I'm also responsible for delivering code and 50-75% of my day is meetings.
The exceptions I have for this are:
- 1:1's
- Interviews
> I'm also responsible for delivering code and 50-75% of my day is meetings.
There's an organisational issue here.
The way to avoid those meetings is to write documents instead, but you'd still not be writing code.
Technical Managers and Tech Leads need to participate in meetings but some also need/want to keep their coding skills and codebase knowledge sharp. A compromise is spending only 25%-50% of the time coding.
Some people are good with both and prefer to keep doing it.
There's no one-size-fits-all solution.
At times it feels like managers like to schedule meetings in such a way as to make it impossible to get any engineering work done on the clock. I particularly hate the the 10:00 AM, 2:30 PM meeting stack for it's ability to slice the day into chunks that are difficult to use productively for deeper work.
Slack is not a panacea. Sometimes, you need to share a screen and have a fluid discussion, which Slack does not provide.
All-slack communication is definitely not great. It is ok for some communications that can be asynchronous and don't need a support, but that's definitely a small subset of the work communications needed for an engineering context.
Was not a fan initially but have grown to like the fairly fluid transition to fully sync comms (for the kind of interaction where I used to go to a co-worker's desk before we were full remote).
It really helps to connect with the person you are talking to when you see them when speaking.
My only exception is when I do large conferences where only the PM is speaking or when I'm doing something else and not listening. In that case cutting my camera is more polite.
I don't feel the same way. I connect with my colleagues fairly easily, video or not. I was also raised in a world with gaming and IRC, so having to pay better attention to tone and phrasing inferences is second nature to me.
Maybe it's a symptom they miss human contact.
We had some recurring meetings where people consistently didn't show up. The managers first impulse was to make the meeting mandatory. But the first thought should be: why are people not showing up? Engineers hate being unproductive, it should be a signal that there's something wrong with the meeting if nobody show's up.
Turning the camera off is just a socially acceptable way of not showing up. There are exceptions of course, some being just don't like being seen or have an issue being filmed out of privacy considerations.
Why do you think that someone with a camera off is not present? How can you honestly equate camera-off with absence?
> There are exceptions of course
imo it's the opposite. Rarely to never does it matter if you see my face in a meeting. It's an exceedingly rare exception that you should need to as a business requirement.
Have you considered that... _you_ just like having your camera on, and like seeing other people? And other people just don't care?
Furthermore - even if you were right, I would say it's a good thing that busy people have a socially graceful way to opt out of the organisational mistakes of others.
I_want_socially_acceptable_absence => I_join_with_camera_off
but there's no 100% certainty the other way round.
Yes, I think this is the whole point here. This is a bidirectional relationship.
We all have biases, and for a lot of people wanting some physical concept of the person they are working with is one of them, so yeah, they might just like seeing your face.
It's your prerogative to turn it off, but there is a very real chance this will impact your relationship with other people.
The biggest change for me is that I now hide my self video 100% of the time. I can't see myself in an irl meeting, so I don't need to see myself online either.
Don't this kind of makes the whole problem go away.
These are just digital calls that someone put poor representations of facial expressions alongside.
I never said this.
> Furthermore - even if you were right, I would say it's a good thing that busy people have a socially graceful way to opt out of the organisational mistakes of others.
Maybe, if you have a company culture where such mistakes cannot be addressed frankly, then perhaps. The lack of facial expressions and other non-verbal cues will take away much of the signals that are available to the organizer however. Which in turn can make regular nonsense meetings last longer than they should.
In my experience quite a lot of these regular meetings are scheduled as a knee-jerk reaction of management to solve problems they don't actually understand. This is great source of unproductive meetings, bowing out 'gracefully' by turning off your camera and attention will not make things better. I'm used to being able to express my concerns openly though, without holding back, so maybe I'm biased.
Sometimes it's worthwhile for someone to be there just to make one or two important decisions in an hour long meeting.
I've learned when you have a question for someone you need to say their name at the begining of the question, not the end, and give a few seconds of background - which is also a good way to ensure everyone is on the same page.
Online meetings and turning off the camera are new, let's do what we can to take advantage of the pros they offer rather than establishing a new social norm that staring into a camera for 15 minutes and saying and doing nothing is the only polite thing to do.
I think this is necessary for me in person or online. My mind tends to wander during meetings, especially meetings that don’t specifically involve (say, group status meetings where people just read their completed items and backlogs that we all already see).
Serious question: aside from not being required to be in the same physical place at the same time, what are the pros?
If you have the camera off, I have no idea if you're listening. If we're in a regular meeting in an office I can see that you're disinterestedly looking at your cell phone and react accordingly if I really need your attention. If you're camera off in an online meeting I have to assume with every single thing that I say that you are distracted and even if I say your name I am not sure if you even heard me until I say your name and wait for your acknowledgement (e.g. you turning on your camera or saying something to the effect of 'now I'm listening because I heard my name'). Seems like this is a real drag on productivity. This can obviously be different within an actual team that has a history of working together and working together well without the need for this. I.e. if you have a team meeting and you know every word is listened to even if everyone is off camera. That's not the kind of meeting we're talking about here though I think. We're talking about cross functional meeting between people that have lots of other stuff on their plate and at least half the meeting is not interesting to them.
One of my basic policies was "no scheduled recurring meetings" (I'd think that scrum meetings count as those).
Meetings, for me, were "one-off" events, with focus on a particular, singular goal.
Of course, I worked for a Japanese company, so my policy didn't mean squat to the higher-ups. I had regularly-scheduled meetings; whether or not I wanted it. Many of these meetings were little more than "gab sessions," which was often a nice break from the grind, but had no other positive effect on the projects at hand.
Recently, on the project I'm developing, we had a problem, where the top brass allowed themselves to become complacent, and ignored my frequent status updates (I'm big on process transparency). This came to a head, one day, when they discovered that the product I was making, which had gradually reshaped to meet reality, had deviated from their original goals.
They decided on twice-weekly video meetings (usually only a half hour). This helped them to get a lot more involved. It does nothing at all, for me, but it does help me to keep the work I do "in their face."
As a result, they have changed their original goals, to meet the ground truth, and also has helped me to get important feedback from them.
The fact these meetings are short, and to the point, as well as just the two of us, helps a lot.
I could not agree more. We as a culture do meetings entirely wrong.
Reading this discussion, I start to feel the same way. People seem to use it as a coping mechanism to deal with bad meetings. Surely fixing the meetings would be a better thing.
They strongly favored actual call-in-with-a-phone phone conferencing. No video. Not even, necessarily, a computer at all.
Some places do video conferencing but have a culture of keeping cameras off. Usually this is driven from the top down.
... it is nice to have video for e.g. visual social cues of who might want to say something next, or whatever, but having cameras off is fine too.
However, having the camera off definitely saves a ton on fatigue by keeping you from feeling like you have to sit in one spot, in more-or-less one position, staring at either one particular screen or at your camera, to mime paying attention. Me, I like to pace and wander around the house when I'm on a call, even if I'm very interested in it. Hard to do that with video on.
And they work! Nobody in those orgs thinks they are the equivalent of "not showing up." How do you think bankers, lawyers and CPAs got huge deals done in the 80s and 90s, despite everyone being in different offices and often in different cities? Lots and lots of conference calls.
Video calls are a recent innovation made possible by tech. But many organizations have no functional memory of how to do calls prior to Zoom et al. And so some of them have created these bizarre sets of social norms around having to have video on to be "present", apparently unaware of the decades of doing it without video that worked extremely well with less fatigue.
Personally, I love walking around (if only just pacing) while on the phone. The physical movement makes my mind work better and allows me to better process what the other person is saying. And that's how lots of people did it prior to video.
If it was virtual I’d have turned my camera off and chilled out, and come away a fraction as stressed. As it was my team went straight to the bar, and a week later one of my colleagues - foreseeing her future amongst these people - quit.
I think there’s a lot of rose-tinting on how great in-person meetings actually used to be.
I can well believe it leads to more engagement on your part, for the reasons you describe. I feel the same way.
But do other people engage with your comments etc? Does your enthusiasm bring out other people.
I feel this is a blessing in most cases.
Remembering in-person meetings, half of the “participation” was asking to get back one slide before to check a point that went too fast, questions on points that are dealt with two slides further, people getting asked questions as a punishment for being visibly bored to death, and facts that could be checked by a 10s document search but would seem rude to be looking for right now.
Forcing people to share their documents, everyone free to get back and forth in the slides on their side, and just able to cut the camera/mic and look for whatever they feel they need to look for, do whatever they need to do just helps tremendously to cut down on unneeded back and forth, and improves a lot on efficiency.
This is all even worse if you try to carry over the same process to remote work. I feel like virtual meetings increase the emphasis on slides too much. In person, the presenter can be up front, gesturing, pointing, really bringing animation to the slides. In virtual meetings it's just the screen share of the slide and a talking head. It's a horribly unengaging experience.
The point isn't to come completely informed. Just enough to prepare some thoughts and questions.
If only. Bosses can really only mess things up. Leadership sets expectations, but employees as a group have to keep each other in check, and propagate the culture to new hires as they come on board, or things deflate pretty quickly.
More and more I see meetings that stop for 30s~1min because the presenter raised a point that hit us and we take a few moments to digest/double check. On the other end basic reporting meetings got a lot shorter.
Basically, if there is nothing to be said, it just ends up with that unengaging, really boring feeling. If there was any interest in the subject, time goes faster as we’re also checking a lot in the background. I kinda see the default boringness as a feature really.
An exception is the sales department which prefers to use a camera for obvious reasons. But engineers vary rarely use cameras. I don't even have one right now in my office.
I think if you know the people you are talking with, a camera isn't needed to "feel" people.
This is exactly how see online meetings. It doesn't feel like I'm interacting with real people. I can't gauge people's level of attention. Conversational turn-taking feels like swimming through mud. And we don't even have the basic expectation that speaking more loudly (or softly) is perceived accurately by the listeners.
Just a deeply frustrating experience all around.
When we first moved to video due to covid I was exhausted every single day. I grew to hate video calls. But how much of this was my inexperience with the tech, my own lockdown tiredness and just the general funk of life at the time, I cannot say.
18 months later I LOVE video calls. I love the fact that I'm in my own comfy quite space, I love the fact that I can move from standing to sitting and back without distracting those on The calls. I love that I can turn my video and mic off and have a pace around or eat some food.
It is great - and yes as you say the video helps hugely.
Years ago I was working with an international team that my local team were struggling with. Each day we'd be in a phone call and I could feel the tension simmering. Then we got video going, saw we were all humans and got back in the problem, solved it and came out of the delivery good friends. I swear being able to see them and knowing they could see us changed everything about how we worked together and behaved.
I've had the opposite feeling. With cameras on, everyone looks at each other's faces for cues on when to start speaking, but the lag leads to people speaking over each other. There are a bunch of "oops, sorry" moments followed by a lot of awkward pausing while we try to climb back out of the uncanny valley.
In my experience, participation doesn't seem to be related to whether the camera is on or off. Participation is generally reduced because such meetings really only allow one person to speak at a time, and if you aren't extroverted then you have a hard time horning in to be able to speak. It also makes actual group conversation essentially impossible.
Virtual meetings work best when there's a single presenter addressing an audience. They're really awful when everyone is expected to chime in.
We used to have a shortage of meeting rooms when having them physically and locally. This was great as it meant they naturally spread out over the week. Nowadays folk think they can get you to hop on a virtual meeting room in minutes regardless of what you’re doing.
I’m very good at declining meetings where I think I’ll not be offering much value giving a reason why. I find quite often people want me in because they think I’ll enjoy it, or don’t want me out of the loop. They can summarise after by email if that’s all they want.
I sometimes get the feeling that, for some people, not having to write that (or any) email is the whole point of having people in meetings.
Which can lead to some annoying problems where, for example, you might have several meetings where people harangue you for wanting things done in way X but then find out after you've spent two weeks doing things in way Y that they actually conceded on way X after those things but no-one bothered to write it down or communicate it in any way.
(Not that this was a one-off; the whole company had a culture of meetings without notes or any kind of documentation.)
I I'd be WFH for two years during covid, and everyone had their cameras off, I'd go crazy. Not seeing a face for months, being stressed about the other party in a meeting not even paying attention, just speaking into a void etc.
I feel it's extremely rude to dismiss others' experiences with the damn camera on for a virtual meeting. What is up that you need someone else to have a camera pointing to their face that you can't have with their voices? For most meetings that I don't require my computer I'll even go for a short walk around the house, while bouncing ideas, raising questions and so on. I feel much more productive in the meetings I'm able to disengage from my computer and surroundings and immerse on the conversation without having to care about a camera showing my face.
Being very honest, being forced to turn my camera on is a major red flag, the fatigue is real and consumed me after a year on this, since last December I've been turning my camera off and it's been incredibly productive.
Judge as much as you want but it seems you have no empathy, worse than that, you want to force your ways of working unto others without even considering others' struggles with it.
I feel very uneasy looking at myself when talking, so I've figured out how to remove my tile and it's suddenly like a normal conversation.
There are way less social codes you have to follow when wfh and people tend to not bother as much with enforcing them.
I'm being a bit encroaching here, but I'm guessing you'd have to do as much and probably more self regulation in in-person meetings. Nobody cares where your hands are, probably no one even looks at them because you're one of many tiles. Where you're looking is not interesting because nobody knows where your camera sits related to your face. I constantly look out the window while talking. Genuinely, I've had to force eye contact on bad days in in-person meetings and everyone knew, it felt as pathetic as looking at my own face and checking if my gesturing and face ist appropriate
It's not that difficult to see that this is a very different experience than sharing an office. And I'm tired of repeating this.
I had female coworker confide to me that she didn’t like turning her camera on because it takes 40 minutes to apply her makeup every day. So she only does it for important meetings, but otherwise leaves the camera off.
If you are working remotely, does it matter? Does it matter if someone hasn't showered in a week and doesn't want to show that on camera but is still a productive worker?
I really don't get this nosiness about people's lives when you aren't sharing a common physical space.
I enjoy sometimes being able to get out of bed a bit later, not having time to do a full morning ritual before work if I can get some 30-45 min more out of my sleep, why should I have to care about all of that to show my face to colleagues on camera? Why should you judge someone that doesn't want their camera on?
So... if you don't understand someone else's reasons for doing something, you assume they aren't being honest with you?
I feel you are getting somewhere with this train of thought, so far I've replied a few people on this thread that seems to think this way and project this need of having a camera on because they don't understand how that can negatively affect others and assume people are being dishonest.
The underlying issue is thinking of other's behavior as if it it was own behavior and then determine the other person's motivates from that assumption.
If you don't understand someone else, you'll assume their reasons for a specific thing are the same as if you were doing that thing.
Example: I take more days off than I have PTO for.
Conclusion: I'm claiming to have a disability to get to have more vacation days.
Reality: I've gone six months without any kind of vacation and many of my weekends spent barely recovering from work. My disability has taken so much from me that I find it hard to justify staying alive.
When I get back to work, people ask how my vacation was.
Is it any of your business?
Going from mostly physical office to mostly work-from-home on zoom is already a massive change that gives a lot of comfort to people. I think refusing literally ANY kind of human interaction apart from sound and written text is waaaay too anti-social.
Interaction is good, interaction is fine, this is where good ideas come from. Don't become a virtual entity. Humans are real.
The big difference to presence meetings is that you send your picture into the void and don't get any social cues back, or very different ones.
You're arguing against a bit of a strawman there.
Video conferences are as if everybody were potentially constantly staring at you, but you couldn't tell if or when this was the case, and despite everybody looking at you, you couldn't even make eye-contact with anybody, share a smile etc.
If anything, video conferences are dehumanising.
This is the 3rd time I'm replying that I feel that the experience of a camera is very different than real life interactions and I like real life interactions, I'm getting really exhausted of this non-sequitur being repeated...
Smiles, frowns, nods, glazed looks, puzzled looks, surprised looks, I-want-to-say-something-but-I-can't-get-a-word-in looks, zoning out, impatience, et cetera, et cetera. There's really a lot people communicate with their faces, both consciously and unconsciously.
If I'm at an in-person meeting of 5-8 people, and 3 of them get into a longer discussion about things that are irrelevant to me, and for understanding which I don't have the background, I can zone out and nobody cares, because nobody is looking at me. Everyone is looking at the people talking.
On a video call, my zoned-out face will make the trio feel uneasy; instead of discussing their topic quickly, they'll stumble and try to "talk to the audience", or god forbid, drag everyone else into the discussion. So with forced camera on, I have to look focused while squinting at the other screen, discretely playing 2048 and pinching myself to not yawn visibly, while with camera off, I could get off my chair, stretch a little, or do something actually useful for the company.
I'll be happier with having always-on camera on long videocalls when videocalls start working like real-life meetings: not everyone is looking at everyone else all the time, and everyone can tell who's looking at them in any given moment. The way things are today, I find this constant surveillance to be mentally tormenting, and only activate my camera on the basis of courtesy: 1:1 meetings, some team meetings, meetings with an important higher-up who also has their camera on, etc.
What do you do in in-person meetings? Or supermarket visits etc.? Everything you do is way more visible in those, and I've never heard anyone complain about being surveilled in person.
It's not about the visibility, it's the psychological impact it has, having a camera pointed directly at my face 100% of the time is very different than sitting in a room, reading others' faces, attention (where are they focusing their gaze? When are they drifting off? When are they tapping their fingers on the table?).
I don't know why I hear this argument so many times, a camera on my face is a very different experience than sharing a room with others, I don't see the parallel.
The parallel does not work, I don't think it's that hard to realise that a camera pointing at your face, showing how you look at any given moment to anyone that looks at you and you can't tell if they are looking at you or not is equivalent to an in-person setting where you are aware of your surroundings much more naturally.
I really don't know how to be more explicit than this about the major differences between in-person to a virtual meeting with cameras...
You feel this way shopping in the grocery store? Where the cashier is constantly looking at you when speaking? Is your productivity lower because the other people in the store can see you?
This may not be an issue for you, but it makes some people uncomfortable. Add anxiety disorder and it's a fucking nightmare. I have no issue if I can see where people are looking.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28986737
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28987453
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28986771
Not having a camera distracting me helps me to help the other party and give them my full concentration. This is amply reflected in the audio, just like a telephone call, and in a one-on-one call you can both just leave the mic open and have a normal conversation with all the social cues audio communication offers.
Different people have different expectations and there are probably a lot of reasons for the wide variety.
However it kinda sounds like you have a different expectation than the team you work with. Would be mindful of taking the stance that ‘everyone else is wrong’
For my company we’ve used zoom for the last 3 years, and never turn on our cameras unless there’s a specific reason.
> no one at my workplace except me
That tells you your opinion is wrong. It is not rude at all and nobody but you minds. Just say "I would prefer if" instead of claiming that something "is rude".
For the first ~12 months of the pandemic, I was working from home, using my desk in the living room because there wasn't a good spot for it anywhere else. Having my camera on would have meant having my living room in full view, often including my partner on the couch in the background. While background detection/subtraction does exist, it isn't perfect, and so that would be an intrusive view into our private area.
I've since moved to a different location, with a room to be a dedicated home office. Here, it wouldn't impose on private space to turn on the camera, because that was part of the intent behind that room. However, you as the person on the other end of the call cannot know which situation somebody is in, and so it would be rude to insist on video beyond a polite request.
Not everyone is like this. I can have a great time with people who compare inputs, see they diverge, and weigh the one that provides the most charitable view higher. This is usually my actual words, which I've been told sometimes comes with a "tone" that sends all the wrong signals. It turns out a lot of people read my usual pace--which can be way too fast at first--as anger or annoyance. When people focus on the words, it's obvious (by their own account) that I'm calm and enjoying the conversation.
It's usually a cue to take a deep breath and slow down. But it's hard to remember to do that from the start, and not everyone is willing to let the tone go once I take that control. And then the deep breath becomes part of the imagined anger/annoyance. It's made me wary of voice and video chat, and wary of people who prefer it specifically because they want to use the way people look and speak to determine what's going on in their heads rather than pay attention to their words.
When meetings are 1-1, or maybe < 5, then they make sense, but I don't really feel the need for them otherwise.
I also don't find cameras necessary, but me and some other people I know find that long 1-1 meetings with the camera turned off feels like a prolonged phone call, which is extremely tiring for people who also dislike long phone calls.
Short camera-less meetings with quick, focused, telephone-like discussions are perfectly fine, of course. But if one of the parties has to keep going into a computer type a bunch of stuff in-between all the time, it suddenly feels like I'm trying to cancel my cable or newspaper subscription.
It's better to have notes and do it later, or at lest share the screen, rather than only using 5 minutes out of 30 for actual talking.
I found that some people who use Discord audio chats are used to having calls like that, but I'd check with the other person if they're ok before.
What about seeing a face makes it less tiring than not seeing a face? Is this possibly an introvert vs extrovert thing?
But generally virtual meetings are easy but that doesn't mean they are cheap. Where in person meetings were hard you knew they were expensive and had a kind of built in value of worth. Virtual meetings are easier but the costs are more hidden.
If the person operating a computer is doing stuff related to the meeting, time seem normal for them. But the person waiting has to remain focused to answer follow-up questions, so multitasking might not be a possibility.
Seeing a face helps in my experience, but I have no idea why. However, screen sharing is probably better. Or just not having long interruptions.
My 1-1's are almost always to discuss or troubleshooting something, so not much "downtime" at all. When troubleshooting, screen sharing is almost always used, otherwise I probably don't need the other person at all.
Also note that while audio is physically 3D, we are only good at distinguishing on a 2D plane. Basically, you easily get left/right, and you kinda get near/far, but you don't get up/down. Not unless you cock your head.
I had one particularly bad manager who treated meetings like coffee brakes, anything we said or did was forgotten as soon as he stepped out of the room. There has been research done on this portal effect and how it makes us forget our current task.
Secondly, I think virtual meetings are fatiguing also because of the constant staring at the screen. In in-person meetings, you spend a lot of time not looking at a screen, whereas you are constantly staring at a screen in a virtual meeting. Something that helps me is to take some of the meetings like 1:1s while walking with only audio.
I agree with the corollary at least. If someone hasn't spoken for the last 5 minutes, they are not a key participant and can turn off their camera.
The optimal middle path is probably that people sometimes have their cameras on, and sometimes don't. This option seems to get the least amount of consideration.
You do have written support to guide the meeting, right ? Won’t you all be looking at that document, eventually taking notes, and not looking at the speaker ?
Even when some people turn the camera on, I can’t imagine anyone in the meeting seeing more than their small tile in the corner while the main doc is front and center covering 90% of the window.
It's got better now days but at the start of the pandemic every other video call with over n people would have interruptions/digressions when someone's dog/cat/kid walked into the background of someone's video.
Helps a great deal to have all (audio+video+text) to follow a conversation
My new place doesn’t say anything about cameras but most people seem to go for camera on - but their policy (which was agreed upon by the team and is written down, which is great when you’re a new starter trying to work out the culture) is that they’d rather more people were invited to the meeting than fewer (so people don’t miss out on potentially relevant topics), but if you don’t think it’s relevant you’re under no obligation to attend and if it’s only somewhat relevant, you should feel free to get on with some other work or whatever. This seems to work pretty well in practice as there’s no “shame” to having your camera on and clearly be looking at another screen if the topic isn’t relevant, while still having the benefit of keeping your camera on if you are happy to.