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Comment by goatherders | Hacker News Reader

Every conferencing solution shares one trait: at least one person on a call of N+1 people will have trouble joining and getting everything to work.

I have been making the same "joke" for years on calls that everyone on the call should join me in quitting our jobs to create a teleconference solution that works. Hardyharhar.

(The practical solution for teleconferencing issues is to get people to join a couple minutes early)

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My joke is that the unrealistic thing about Star Trek is not the faster than light travel or the matter transmitters it’s that their videoconferencing always works.

FWIW, our company used and loved Zoom for many years. We switched to Webex and it has been far more difficult to use.

I wouldn't discount the parent's post so quickly.

Do you know why they switched to Webex? I work at NIH and there is talk of moving from Webex to Zoom and I can't be more excited. Of course being the government it probably won't happen for another 2 years...

That’s really weird as WebEx is more costly and less featured in most cases. Zoom was designed by the same people, so I’m surprised it’s been a challenge for users.

> (The practical solution for teleconferencing issues is to get people to join a couple minutes early)

If everybody has to join early, then "early" is the new "on time". It's just sacrificing a different n minutes for setup issues.

Well, sure. My point is that showing up "on time" to an appointment and THEN making sure your tools work is backwards. No one says "I was on time except for needing to park, walk in, turn on the lights and sit down".

And I'm saying that if everybody is using unreliable tools, especially mandated ones, then it's not particularly backwards. E.g., during a consulting gig in Manhattan, it was not uncommon for a subway failure to cause the majority of people to be late for the first meeting of the day.

Similarly, I've seen a few companies where it's just assumed that a 9:00 meeting really starts at 9:05, so everybody has time to travel from their last meeting. I think the videoconference nonsense is effectively the same. It doesn't really matter if you designate 8:57-9:00 as your "make sure your tools work" time or 9:00-9:03. It just matters that everybody has the same expectation.

If the host has at least tried the conference solution before the meeting it is usually ok for us, but that quickly become a specialized task that only one person care about, when s/he is away there is a high chance of wasted time.

I think the rule is that the other conferencing system always works better than the current system until you buy it. Then they all seem to fail :)

Right now we are using MS Teams which so far has been reliable. I am just waiting for the day when it becomes flaky too.

Teams actually works well for us too. My only complaint is about startup time and the consistent 2 or 3 second hangs that happen when I'm typing things sometimes.

So for the n+1: For us there are lots of problems. Bluetooth headsets seem to make it nondeterministic if and how sound works. Sharing and videoconf have sometimes extreme bandwidth problems. People aren’t getting into the conference sometimes.

The Teams UI on a Mac seems like a horrible abomination. Using it as a guest I have 45 sec startup time with a blank screen, no UI pieces visible other than a logo. I have lost the chat function and it is nowhere to be seen. The workspace is confusing. I could go on. I hope it is better on Windows, as on the Mac it is terrible.

Teams is just using Skype for teleconferencing under the hood I believe. Unfortunately it has been terrible quality for my distributed team in comparison to other options. Results definitely vary!

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