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Comment by scrooched_moose | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what changed with COVID, but something has been much worse in the last 9 months. I've always used a personal system similar to what I understand "GTD" to be based on the article but everything about it has broken down. Instead of focusing on a task until it's completed, I'm constantly being yanked back and forth by whoever is yelling at the moment.

My personal theory is the ~60% of useless middle managers have nothing left to do without an office. They now split their days into asking for constant status updates on every conceivable detail, and "breaking down walls" which is pestering whoever is holding up a project by a couple hours because they are focused elsewhere.

I've disabled my IM client which made them shift to phone calls, and the next step is turning off call forwarding.

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Don't know which industry you're in but it feels like my managers work burden has increased, and not because they pestered me more - as an IC my work are more or less unaffected, as even in office my development environment is cloud based anyways.

I'd agree. As a manager, conversations that used to be side of desk are now 30 minute meetings. The entire day is wall to wall Zoom calls. I try not to pester my team but it's a fine line between that and failing to keep communication lines open in a remote environment.

Async audio messages seems like it would cut down on the meetings? Something like Yac?

https://www.yac.com/

* Not a customer, investor, or the janitor. Just looks like a good solution to a wall of meetings.

I think there’s something different about real time conversation (whether typed or spoken) for certain problems, especially ones that just need to be solved ASAP with a good enough solution.

Too much overhead or something with asynchronous communications, or having to “spin” up your thoughts regarding the issue every time feels taxing. As opposed to a quick back and forth chit chat that addresses any concerns that come to mind and then closing that task out.

All the "crap, I got the answering machine instead" anxiety multiplied by also having video to worry about.

That it is intentional does not really help, because you still have to deal with the inherent awkwardness of not knowing if your tone and message come across correctly in a one-way conversation without feedback.

Wonder if you could set up a chat system that only starts PMs on the hour. So if a conversation has no interaction for more than two minutes, it "dies" and you need to wait until the next full hour to restart it.

I hate it when i get a voice message from my family through whatsapp.

Reading stuff is so much quicker.

One college asks me if i have time to do a short video chat for the update i need; The coordination take sprobably a higher effort then just writing it down.

The product provides searchable transcriptions.

The core feature/idea/thought on this product is still a voice message.

Otherwise you can just use whatever you have used already anyway.

Having something like this as main feature, means thats the default. In my opinion therefore not a good tool.

To me, most of the benefits of async communication go out the window when you require me to listen (or watch) it as if it were synchronous.

Putting in some effort on the sending side to express your thoughts as text makes things a lot more flexible for the receiver, and pays off big when you want more than one person to consume it.

The product provides searchable transcriptions.

It's the second heading, right at the top when you click the link - "Cut down on meetings & calls with voice messages, searchable transcriptions & async screen sharing"

Ah, cool, assuming the transcriptions are high quality. I was speaking more generally, not about this specific product, but it's nice that they see the value in text as well.

I know the whole world is obsessed with zoom calls currently, and sometimes its a good thing to see peoples faces in meetings. But I've found that just talking over the phone to be much less taxing than zoom. The fatigue is real! To the point where me and a few co-workers can just be conferenced in over the phone, and sometimes not talking for minutes at a time while working, but then collaborate at a seconds notice as if we were sharing an office again. (not that i'm advocating doing this for hours on end)

Also, I don't know if this is in my head or just speaker or mic quality, or on phone/network noise cancellation, or what, but I've found landline calls to be much more clear and easy to converse than zoom or cell phone calls. I think that may be where some of the fatigue comes from.

Talking on the phone at least means I can make a sandwich as we’re talking about what to talk about in the zoom meeting to have a briefing about the 2021 roadmap planning meeting.

Harder to do that over zoom because of an org policy that include the words “camera on”

My phone can point at my ceiling with the camera on...

My three month lockdown was basically "i don't have a camera", followed by "i'm waiting for the `amazon concurrent know to be slower` order to arrive" and then "sorry, this driver doesn't work on my kernel" (yes i did downgrade my kernel for this). By the end of the lockdown i still didn't have a camera and my manager stop caring.

I have the exact opposite experience. I can't have a phone call while doing something else since I don't have a hands-free set.

With a wireless headset connected to my computer I have much more freedom, and at least I can continue some low-key work during meetings which aren't all that interesting or have a lull

> I don't have a hands-free set

> ... With a wireless headset connected to my computer

Probably a wireless USB headset that wouldn't work on their phone?

Might be latency. Landline travels at the speed of light, while some video calls I’ve been in had latency measured in _seconds_. It turns meetings into carefully orchestrated back and forth and makes any kind of spontaneous communication impossible.

> It turns meetings into carefully orchestrated back and forth and makes any kind of spontaneous communication impossible.

This is my (and my team's) main problem right now. We like working from home but it broke down any kind of interactive process/exercise, every meeting for a workshop becomes this choreography of: how to ask for a spot to speak, how to leave space for others to take that spot, who will facilitate that. It kills any spontaneous take or realisation that you could bring up in a meeting room. It feels like everyone has to stay in a queue to have time to speak. A lot of times it's happened that people forgot what they wanted to say or the conversation went way past that point and people don't feel like backtracking the discussion.

I can say that people feel like they should only speak up and state *really important things™" but often the small unsaid things are really valuable.

It really sucks, I thrive in environments where I can pick up bits and pieces of information and glue them together into something meaningful to my team, I can't really do that remotely (not without pestering people or trying to have scheduled coffee breaks to just chat).

I've been taking notes during meetings just for my own benefit, and often refer to them later in that same meeting to bring a topic up that I missed. Also helpful to review at the end to see if there are unclear action items, etc.

for some of the spontaneity, and interactive process, I feel like using a group chat (we use our own IRC server) for the bulk of technical talk works, and keeps everyone up to date, even if they aren't paying attention at any given time. Its like a big long meeting that never ends. But you can leave for 2 hrs, and come back and get all caught up in no time. Granted, my team is <10 people, so the room never gets overwhelming, and it's easy to break out sub rooms or direct chats for whatever else, or join rooms from another team for whatever reason. All that being said, in the past few months I've tried to also keep some light hearted banter going in the room too, I like to think it helps some co-workers to participate more than they otherwise would.

Or maybe I'm just a luddite that likes landlines and IRC....

It is the latency, yeah. And it doesn't have to be seconds, even 200ms is enough to turn a fluid call into a very awkward "wait now talk". "wait, now talk" dance. Similar energy as driving and going from stop light, to stop light. Phone calls are way better at this.

It is the silence detection as well. Nobody can hear you taking a deep breath before speaking up, or giving assent by a slight "hmhm". Human audio communication is more than just words, but software forces it to be just words.

Ye. I can't stress enough how bad these anti-noise filters are. Just make people mute them self and use push-to-talk if the meeting is too big. Any natural "eehhumhum" before saying stuff goes dead. Surely it adds latency to, since the stream need to process some time before it can decide to start transmitting to everyone.

When I was using self-hosted Ventrilo playing with friends we didn't have this problem. It was like being in the same room. The ping was like 5ms and sound latency not noticeable.

Seems like some form of "Roberts Rules of Order" might need to be developed and become required reading for business/office culture.

Makes me wish we could increase the lag further. Flip the "I'm on the Moon" switch, which adds a 1.3 second delay in both directions.

One day in the far future, we'll have to learn to deal with the light lag. Why not start now?

You should be able to pihole yourself for that if that's what you really want.

It's kinda funny, but I sort of wish I had a landline again because of Covid. Spending much more time in phone calls (mainly using WiFi calling due to reception issues, which may be part of the problem) and spending so much time accidentally talking over people and awkward silences. It's been quite a while since I used POTS, but I remember it being so fluid and natural.

When hanging out with friends online (and when doing something else such that we don't need video) I've been using Mumble for voice chat. Not sure about the other "gaming" voice chat software as I haven't really used it, but I've found Mumble's latency at least to be miles ahead of the videoconferencing software I've had to use for work.

Makes me wish I could have work meetings there, honestly.

An old POTS landline would be nice too, but my understanding is a lot of landlines now are basically VoIP anyway.

>> but my understanding is a lot of landlines now are basically VoIP anyway.

Yeah I think you're right. VOIP and landline and probably one and the same these days, and as long as whatever voice application you use doesn't use excessive compression or any added complexity, or route you halfway around the world, you've prob got landline quality.

I hate the video call latency. I feel like the major apps are overoptimizing on video smoothness. I wish they would have the guts to deliver choppy artifact-laden video but with < 100ms latency.

Haven't noticed that audio issue on Webex Teams but some of my coworkers with poor internet connection use PSTN callbacks so while their audio sounds a bit more "tin can", at least it's a predictable quality. And that still works along with video sharing.

Disclaimer: we dogfood our own product.

Honestly I don't really care about video at ALL. I almost wish they'd replace videos with Animoji or a kind of animated avatar like some Twitch streamers are using.

I care a lot about video when doing calls to keep in touch with family and friends, but I find it's really not pertinent or useful at work.

Tuple is great at this. It's for pair programming (which requires low latency desktop streaming) but turns out it's just a good experience for video calls too.

My favorite part is how low-effort the video calls themselves are. It makes me far more likely to end the conversation instead of waffling around looking for other things to shove into a meeting

I am about to look for a new job and i'm hoping there are some companies out there that don't video zoom -- i feel like the video part is bad info, wasteful, stressful, etc.

So true.

what is an IC? it means integrated circuit to me.

Individual contributor

I agree. As IC, I proactively keep the parties updated. So they don't disturb me while I am in the middle of something.

Over communicating at times of my preference has been helpful

I concur.

The amount of useless emails has gone through the roof, with a lot of the content being managers reminding people they are still there.

Everyone cc's everyone now. If someone wrote an email to the ALL distribution group back in the day and there were more than 2 replies to that email, someone would immediately lose their shit and tell everyone to stop replying-all. Now those reply-all email chains happen weekly, with junior VPs laying hot takes all over the place.

A counter to this is Stripe's practice of ensuring that almost all emails end up on a mailing list so they aren't siloed just to the participants. I can find and search for relevant conversations that I wasn't first party to.

The key then is to make sure your inbox only contains items directly to you or from specific mailing lists.

This has been one of the main benefits of Teams for me, and I have pushed hard to get large group e-mails moved to Teams.

You only have to @mention the people who really have to see. All the other's who would have previously have been cc:ed can simply review the messages if they are interested at their leisure, withou being pinged.

Except Teams default is to ping for everything. Someone writes in a chat channel for a meeting from a month ago, watch your phone vibrate. It's madness.

Use the Team, not the chat.

This probably sounds crazy but I barely even read email anymore. Everything real is handled in chat and group calls now, so I don’t have time to organize/clean that stuff up anyway. I’m changing jobs this week and leaving behind about 13,000 unread. Work has gone from asynchronous to synchronous.

>>My personal theory is the ~60% of useless middle managers have nothing left to do without an office.

Most of these people where literally ruling by authority and not having physical presence is a huge problem for these people.

It also kind of sends across the message that things can run well without them.

We really are in a place where an operating system takes more resources to run than the programs it runs.

Its the responsibility of you to communicate your state so people can act on it. you might not be very good in transporting to people who need to know, what you are doing and how it is going?

And don't get me wrong but when your solution is to disable/block communication ways instead of communication with others on how you want/need to communicate, then the issue is on both sides.

Your solution is similar to mine, but I've gone a step further and put in times in my calendar when I'm available for questions/updates/requests etc. It doubles up as the admin-part of my day where I update my GTD-style inbox of tasks that may have come up and then allocate times in my calendar when I'll deal with various tasks in future.

There is a larger problem you're touching on that in most knowledge-workcompanies there is little to no attention paid to the production line process of how that work is 'produced' with the inevitable miasma of low-value busywork ('quick question, where are we with X','thoughts on X??' etc)

> I'm not sure what changed with COVID, but something has been much worse in the last 9 months.

The addition of the constant, unrelenting background stress of a global goddamn pandemic?

Some theories suggest only 10%ish of the information we use to communicate is speech, the remaining 90% is body cues. Makes sense from an evolutionary perspective; speech came along later.

With so many people acclimated to putting on themselves, and translating, office friendly body mechanics, working at home may indeed cause subtle anxiety from loss of habit.

At the web app layer, software is a simpler world to design and ship at any scale versus a decade ago. All the logistical nonsense needed to manage office life could very well be bullshit from a GTD standpoint. Satisfying last generations memes on corporate structure versus more atomized social networking abilities.

Just wait until they can't provide a status report to the people who decide budgets for your department, decide that since not much is happening there there's no reason to have the department, defund it, and you lose your job.

I've noticed that people whose jobs I would describe as "appear busy" have really upped their game around arranging unnecessary Zoom meetings (where nothing comparable was necessary before) - to appear busy while remote.

> I'm constantly being yanked back and forth by whoever is yelling at the moment.

> I've disabled my IM client which made them shift to phone calls, and the next step is turning off call forwarding.

Imagine being this socially awkward where you just can’t say “I’m busy.” or actually enjoying interacting with and helping others.

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