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Comment by missedthecue | Hacker News Reader

Department wide meetings? Yeah I agree.

2-4 person meetings are great because everyone has a chance to interact and ask questions.

I haven't seen any downsides to having these smaller meetings via zoom though. Sure if someone has kids running around that would be less than ideal, but that's not so much a WFH problem as it is a pandemic problem which will eventually go away.

Big thing I miss with in person meetings is the ability to start sketching on the board. Sure you have virtual whiteboards and stuff but it’s not the same. The bandwidth of idea transmission is just lower online.

Last year I tried a recent digital whiteboard (basically a fast 55" touch screen), and it felt really good. If those things had real-time syncing - connected to meeting software, of course - and were affordable enough, I could see them really taking off.

Can you not just use it with Zoom's whiteboard feature? A quick search online showed a few touch displays in the range of 1500 - 2500 for mid 30" to mid 50" in size. Although not sure how responsive they are.

The display I used (Samsung Flip) is a standalone product with its own OS. I'm not sure a regular OS connected to the display would work so well.

I feel like whiteboard cukture died years ago when the "open office" was invented.

That doesn't match my observations over the last few years where every company I worked at was open office. Usually there are either nooks, rooms or just hallways away from the desks with big whiteboards.

From what I've noticed, the overall pace of zoom is meetings is slower. When in-person, the one talking can pick up subtle indications that other's get the point or that someone else wants to talk. Over zoom I've seen more tendency for people to go on unnecessarily.

I've also personally noticed an interesting subtle difference: in-person there seems to be a tendency to contribute if someone is present in the meeting and hasn't said anything. With zoom the general tendency seems to be the opposite (the longer someone is on mute, the more likely they are to stay on mute).

Anyone else notice things like this?

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