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Comment by zucker42 | Hacker News Reader

I fundamentally disagree. The reason synchronous video communication continues to dominate is because it's more information dense than text in many situations, and more interactive than asynchronous alternatives.

Asynchronous communication has its place, and it's amazing what has been accomplished over the LKML and similar. Software projects tend to make this sort of communication ideal, since they are amenable to individualized contributions. But the prescription that efficient digital communication must be asynchronous and textual is incorrect.

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I work as IT-Support for a university and during the last months I mainly had to do with video conferencing both on and off work (a person living in my household still studies and they have been in conferences as well).

My feeling is: video conferencing took hold for two main reasons (in the university context):

1. It is the most straightforward continuation of whatever existed before (those who talk, talk and those who listen, listen)

2. People have desire for beeing close with others

However in terms of efficiency, I noticed that the raw educational value of some (often 4h+ long) meetings could have been summarized by watching a well produced 15min video and reading a 10 page PDF, if one were to skip all the chitchat and pointless hollow remarks. In terms of information density the seemingly unlimited nature of video conferencing doesn't work out well in practise (especially if paired with people who like to hear themselves speak).

Most of our educators are certainly not happy with what it does to the way they have to teach (less interactivity — anything other than a 3-way conversation is nearly impossible, the rest has to be passive). They say it leads to more frontal and less communicative education.

As musician, artist and programmer i know async collaborations and projects — the best stuff was always a combination of sync and async. This is why I tend to recommend to our educators to view video conferences not as the replacement for their usual seminars, but as part of a strategic mix with synchronous (video conferences) and asynchronous components (email, collaborative text editing, etc).

In my experience with the many educational services and communities that do summarize the important content, if you do simply read/listen to the hyper condensed version of 4+ hours a week of lecture you will most likely need to spend that same amount of time saved reviewing to absorb the material if it is anything past the most basics. What the most basics are will vary between people but at a certain point in your learning the time spent thinking about what you're learning simply becomes an important part of the learning process.

Personally I find the "chit chat and hollow conversation" far more pleasurable than spending those hours alone reviewing notes, obviously with the caveat that most of the discussion is related to the material at hand in some way

> well produced 15min video and reading a 10 page PDF,

It is surprisingly difficult to create a useful 15 minute video. Go ahead and be rich if you find it easy. It takes me about 8 hours to produce 15 minutes of truly information-packed video content. And it is not as re-usable as you think.

> if one were to skip all the chitchat

Many people need the social chitchat to feel OK. It is not a negative side of video conferencing, it is added value.

> It is surprisingly difficult to create a useful 15 minute video.

I think that's exactly the point. Makes someone think about what they want to say. At least only one person has to do it, rather than all the participants doing the same work in their heads.

Apparently at Amazon you have to write a document/essay before every meeting.

> It takes me about 8 hours to produce 15 minutes of truly information-packed video content.

i would consider that short!

the benchmark i have is 1 minute of video is 1 hour of production time.

I was interviewed for a 5-minute TV piece once. (I was one of several people interviewed. The clips from my interview made up about 30 seconds in the final cut.) Since I had the chance, I asked the producer for an estimate of how many hours of work go into the piece. She did some back-of-the-envelope estimates and finally settled on 80 hours, across research, scheduling and conducting interviews, obtaining footage, editing, voiceover and communication between all involved parties.

So that would be 16 hours per minute of airtime, although admittedly that particular format was higher-than-average production quality.

I also have some personal experience producing scripted podcasts, and there I have about 0.5 hours per minute of airtime. It's a lot less work since I'm doing it as a single person and I don't have to care about video.

When you're saying "1 hour per minute" for video content, I actually find that incredibly efficient.

> When you're saying "1 hour per minute" for video content, I actually find that incredibly efficient.

haha, i am only including editing of video (and may be the script). Not the research or anything like that.

The 1hr per minute is from professional editors for video production companies. it's like i, as a professional programmer, can probably get about 100 lines of debugged code per day, excluding thinking/research time.

> Many people need the social chitchat to feel OK. It is not a negative side of video conferencing, it is added value.

I think this aspect really needs more attention. Personally, I have never felt much need for much of social bonding at work but I am fully aware that many people have stronger desires in this area.

We ignore human psychology at our own peril. Even very technical people with low social requirements remain human and, more importantly, work with other humans that may have different needs.

> Many people need the social chitchat to feel OK. It is not a negative side of video conferencing, it is added value.

It is an added value for some, and it is a negative value for others.

Every minute that you're feeling great because of being "social" at work is a minute that someone else dreads, because they're feeling as if they were in a circus and would prefer to reserve being social for people they like spending time with, not the people they are forced to spend their time with.

I studied film (and have a Master of Arts thanks to that) – so yes – you are right. But I don't see why as an educator you would have to create everything yourself. There is a lot of good existing stuff. And if there isn't, you don't need to create a masterpiece. It would be enough if you think about what to say and what not to say in a limited timeframe (as opposed to improvising for an hour).

And I never said chitchat isn't okay. I clearly said that this is part of why people do it. We have to realise that people sit at home, and can get very easily distracted. If you are an educator your goal should be to counter that by creating a clear structure. Let's say: 15mins of focused introduction, 20 mins on free chitchat, then watching a video collectively, then discussion about it, etc. This is what successful educators in our university do. If you don't structure it (e.g. I witnessed 4 hours of unstructured chitchat), you are exhausting everyone, and they would have gained more from just watching one youtube video on the topic.

> It is surprisingly difficult to create a useful 15 minute video. Go ahead and be rich if you find it easy. It takes me about 8 hours to produce 15 minutes of truly information-packed video content. And it is not as re-usable as you think.

This is the problem. Why does it matter if it takes 8 hours?

What this comment replies to talks about 4 hour meeting but just with 3 people it nets 3 hours saved as a collective (assuming all 3 watch the 15 minute video).

This past week there was an article on HN that talked about the benefits of written communication. The argument of effort to produce such "memos" was throughout the discussion but it is the very same as the conversation about video here.

I've seen this at multiple places that contributors don't want to put the upfront additional work for the collective benefit. Human nature at it's best, selfishness.

But that's only true as a one-way information dump. If it takes more than 1 person to make that video, you've lost time rather than gained.

If it's truly collaborative, with each person contributing on the fly, then there's no way to make that 15 min video without all participants anyhow.

> Why does it matter if it takes 8 hours?

It matters because letting impatient people get rid of social conventions placing boundaries on their access to others' time is a dangerous thing to do, doubly so when the pretext for doing so is dumping responsibility for creating deliverables on small subsets of an org, which they will never be able to escape once the expectation is established.

The thing about synchronous is that the important people who refuse to read anything all have to sit in a chair and fidget at the same time to get the answers they want. There is no fiction that I will produce an artifact allowing me to disseminate information 1-to-M, and each important person enforces with the others that they can't interrogate me out-of-band and skip the meeting. There's only collective benefit if the document author can tell people "fuck you, read the memo." Otherwise, you're just spending hours putting up a sign-post for lazy people to bother you.

can you have a proper multi-channel chitchat in zoom? I mean can you chitchat without interrupting the main speaker or others?

Balancing efficiency and normal social contact can be tricky to get right even in a physical office setting, but I'm fairly sure aiming for peak efficiency to the exclusion of all casual conversation is not a good plan. Those friendly chats when everyone is getting to work in the morning or while the coffee is on matter. One of the downsides of remote working, particularly in the current situation with the virus, is the sense of isolation and potentially loneliness it creates if you don't take active steps to stay connected to your colleagues, and video chat allows that in a way no glorified mailing list ever will.

> I noticed that the raw educational value of some (often 4h+ long) meetings

In person 4h+ meeting would have equally low value. In all seriousness. Plus, people would be all antsy due not inability to go to bathroom or get the drink.

When you are at 4h+ meeting, the video conferencing is the least of problems.

But isn't that almost always the case?

If you are talking about 4 hour meetings of collaboration, then you are creating something together. And while it's quite often more efficient to see a distilled version of something rather than going through all steps as it's developed (kind of like reading a review article in a journal as opposed to all of the original research), the problem is that you need to go through that original stuff (the 4 hour meeting) to get to the outcome. If you aren't participating then you aren't helping create that information.

On the other hand, if you are talking about 4 hour presentations that can be distilled to 15 minutes of actual value, that's a different problem entirely.

I disagree. The reason is that some people is not educated in async or just lazy. It takes just one person that refuses to go async to make everybody use video. I heard it thousand of times: "let me call you cause I explain better by phone" No, you don't. You just use many resources to keep conversation going until you find terms and produce proper phrases. You could perfectly have elaborated this by your own and wrote it down in an email or chat group.

Sorry this was deep inside me and had to come out :D

I have the exact opposite observation: In my company developers/engineers over use chat (in this case Slack) and email compared to other groups which causes unnecessarily long discussions. It's great that it's async, it works very well for simple factual information, but it doesn't work for topics where not everyone agrees. Those drag out over time, and cause a lot of misunderstandings, while a short standup meeting or video call would have solved it in less time.

And simple factual information belongs in good documentation, not being asked in Slack as a crutch and then claim "but it's searchable"

I’m not sure I’d call Slack async, it’s somewhere between async and slow synchronous. There’s a cultural expectation in many places that you respond to Slack messages ASAP that I’ve never experienced using email.

I can sympathize with this take. Although I'm generally fine with either async or sync--whichever is most efficient--it seems that individuals don't usually know which is right for them.

That's only for single message info-dumps or single query-response. If I need to tell you something, it will save your time if I distill it. But note that it may be more efficient overall to do it by voice, or maybe my time actually is more valuable than your time. (or vice versa).

If we're doing it interactively, I can verify your comprehension and limit my need to elaborate, saving us both time.

And if we need back-and-forth collaboration, interactive is likely to be much better than multiple interruptions and context switches.

My general rule is, if it's going to be more than 2 back-and-forth exchanges, do a voice call.

And waiting while someone types a response is pure waste.

One important factor that this statement doesn't take into account is that you can only approximate understanding what the other person is going to understand when they read what you expressed. This becomes harder when it's more than one person receiving the message.

> The reason synchronous video communication continues to dominate is because it's more information dense than text in many situations, and more interactive than asynchronous alternatives.

You really don't join the kind of video conferences I'm called into, where an hour long meeting might easily have been done in a few minutes by email.

In my opinion if you have a meeting where a few people talk to thousands in a company you're better served by sending everybody a static video and allowing for Q/A via email. Every time I hear about meetings that could of been emails I can't help but think somebody's trying to justify their jobs.

Edit: Typo, and on a sidenote, I'm glad I hear about these sorta meetings from others, my boss does his best to keep us out of useless cruft.

> video communication [...] is more information dense than text

this has never been my experience. group meetings devolve into explaining the same thing in many different ways, for every item that is discussed.

Agree on information density - I am finding also that conference calls (internally) are getting shorted. 1hr was norm, then 30mins now 15min catchups are in place. I actually like this - can work if both parties are like minded - a lot of information can be exchanged this way in 15min. Obviously does not leave much time for 'small talk' though, which for me is good.

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