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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

> Please, put your camera on and end this creepy behaviour.

Some people aren’t comfortable being on camera. Some people don’t have a nice workspace and don’t want to feel shame over it. There should be no requirement to have the camera on, it really adds very little over voice alone and there are countless valid reasons to not want it on.

> how do you think a lone person with their camera on feels?

If you don’t like being the only one on camera, by all means shut yours off. Work was done by voice alone aka by phone for decades.

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> There should be no requirement to have the camera on, it really adds very little over voice alone

While I agree that people shouldn't be required to have their camera on for the first reasons you mentioned, I disagree on this point. I find that without a face to read, I have a very difficult time navigating conversations. It's the same reason phone calls give me so much anxiety. There are subtleties happening in facial expressions while a person is talking and gesticulating that communicate important information.

Maybe you've adapted to a set of circumstances throughout your life that means this doesn't affect you as much (maybe you spoke a lot on the phone when you were younger, I don't know), but I personally rely quite heavily on facial expressions for social cues. Without them, I fall apart.

Makes me wonder if Zoom or someone is working on an enterprise-friendly equivalent to FaceTime Memojis, so that you can show facial expressions without your actual face:

https://www.howtogeek.com/693237/how-to-use-memoji-during-a-...

Toss in some deepfake and you can map those expressions into a digital version of your face. So a touched-up, AI-generated version of your face- but not your actual face at the moment.

At this point, you might as well show your face. If the AI is mirroring your every mood on a deepfake, what's the reason not to?

Maybe you didn't clean yourself up as much as the AI image would indicate. Maybe you're dressed down. Maybe you want to use the simulation rather than your real image. And maybe the mood is tweakable.

Video calls give me anxiety.

Often enough, the other party's camera is off to the side so they appear as though they're not engaged, even though they are.

I _know_ they're probably paying attention, but it's reminiscent of a face-to-face conversation where the other party is staring at their phone more than they're looking at me.

So even though I know they're engaged, my brain's circuitry keeps telling me they're not.

We have video by default off in all of our meetings, and here we talk about top 10 bank in the world and 80k employees. The reason might be due to the fact they didn't provide us laptops with covid (or before), or any dedicated hardware like webcam, so we have audio-only meetings via app calling our phones. Mind you, I WFH on quite high-end desktop with 32" screen and very good webcam for calls with parents.

The benefits are that I don't need to mind what clothes I wear, since comfort is a major improvement for WFH. I can have my child running around while being on mute, dedicating to him small slices of my time. Anybody who has kiddo or two knows how perfectly clean place gets into messy state in few minutes, so there are toys and stuff just lying all around. Being so corporate, 3-5 meetings/day is a norm. I can have the meeting anywhere where phone can ring if quiet enough. If we need more cooperation, sure skype/screen sharing is an option too.

There are almost always more people on the call then really need be, or their time is 5-minute slice out of 30 minutes, so we all still stay in case of sudden questions/brainstorming, but we do our other stuff (and there is endless stream of it). Actually when randomly 1-2 persons come with video, it looks a bit weird. You don't want to study their facial expressions when they do other work, and I've seen a butt crack of a very high manager once or twice on a call with 10+ very senior people. If you think video is helping you stand out and looking oh-so-well dedicated, well not in such cases.

Nobody is bothered by this lack of video, once you get used to audio-only, it works great. I mean we are all adults here, if any doubt or unclarity, why being afraid to ask? There are no stupid questions as we all know.

> Nobody is bothered by this lack of video, once you get used to audio-only, it works great. I mean we are all adults here, if any doubt or unclarity, why being afraid to ask? There are no stupid questions as we all know.

Why do you assume I'm afraid to ask questions? I'm probably the most outspoken person at my workplace.

I suppose whenever I make a joke, I could ask "did anyone understand my joke? I just want to clarify that I was joking". Or maybe it would be safest to never make jokes at all anymore. My point is that it makes conversation more difficult. There are many more subtle human interactions, other than jokes, that are similarly hamstrung when you're not able to see a face on the other end.

> I find that without a face to read, I have a very difficult time navigating conversations.

I hear this a lot, and in my long experience I find that most people are terrible at reading others in the business world. I've seen so many misunderstandings because of people reading into others tone, body language, etc, instead of just listening to the words and interpreting them.

Some people aren't comfortable talking to people. But if you have to talk to people for your job then you have to be uncomfortable. If you don't have a car and you need it for work, then you are going to have to figure something out. If you don't have a nice workspace then you are going to have to figure something out.

If you, and the rest of the team, turn on your cameras most of the time then it's fine if you have to turn it off some of the time. Because sure there's reasons to turn it off. But if you default to off then everyone knows you aren't turning it off because of some good reason. You can tell yourself otherwise, BUT PEOPLE KNOW YOU AREN'T ENGAGED.

I've encountered a few cases where someone who consistently kept their video off was highly engaged, but it's very uncommon. You should assume other people have noticed this as well, and know that you have something to prove if you do that.

Agreed very much. I do believe seeing someone's face makes a great difference. Audience's facial expressions helped me a lot when I was talking.

Most managers in enterprises will happily sit in meetings and check emails while pretending to be doing something useful in there.

I actually liked the article, but then point 5 directly contradicts itself.

Point one is what makes engagement clear. I.e. keeping people out of meetings that don't need to be there. People can happily play PS5 while on CAM, doesn't mean the meeting is any more relevant or people are any more engaged.

If CAM is what you need for measuring engagement, your metrics are completely off.

It's kinda like how people used to say that you have to keep eye contact when having a conversation. But for people like me I focus with my ears. I can pretend to care and look into your eyes, but if you want my full attention, I'm actually not looking at you, or anything else for that matter.

> There should be no requirement to have the camera on, it really adds very little over voice alone

I couldn’t disagree more. You can see if people are agreeing, disagreeing, confused by something someone said, even if they won’t say it out loud. There’s a million important and valuable cues that get lost when people do meetings without a camera.

Ans “work was done by voice alone for decades” is just not true in any significant way. Most teams that needed to communicate and have meetings regularly were in the same room. People flew (and still fly) around the planet to have a single meeting with a group of people.

I’m just a student and employee, and therefore in no position to make anyone behave in any particular way when it comes to Zoom calls. But I think it’s rude and uncomfortable to have work meetings or lectures to a faceless crowd because someone “isn’t comfortable on camera”. If you don’t enforce any minimum etiquette for such meetings, it all just converges on the least effort, lowest engagement, minimum communication version because every person who drops off camera makes it creepier for the remaining ones to talk to a bunch of black rectangles.

You’re uncomfortable if cameras are off. I’m uncomfortable if cameras are on.

Someone has to lose.

Are you really going to force everyone else to look straight at the camera and pretend to be engaged for the entire meeting? Even if that means they’re shutting off their brains? Just to make you feel comfortable?

How many more people are you going to inconvenience with your demands that everyone turn on their camera and pretend to be engaged, versus me turning off my camera so that I can actually focus on what is being said?

My camera points at my bathroom door behind me. Sometimes I get out of the shower and find I need to fetch a clean towel. This is an accident waiting to happen. My camera remains taped.

Turning your camera on gives you an additional channel of communication and all the benefits that come with better communication. Ask yourself: how beneficial would being a better communicator be to me?

A coworker tells a joke and sees me legitimately smile and laugh at it, what effect does that have on my coworkers opinion of me?

Someone is expressing a weird idea and I get to frown and shake my head on camera, what power does this give me in the conversation? If I'm the only one with my camera on I've got a complete monopoly on a channel of communication, and humans only have 2 or 3, one of them is all mine.

People with higher quality audio are perceived as smarter [0]. I wouldn't be surprised if those with video enabled are perceived as smarter as well, and more likeable.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26818774

I agree that the bulk of human communication is non-verbal. The human brain devotes an immense amount of tissue to the processing of visual information, either directly or indirectly.

But a lot of that gets lost in a sea of tiny postage-stamp size sub-screens in a video wall.

What is the remaining percentage that is valuable?

How much mental effort do those people have to put into looking at the camera and pretending to be engaged?

Are you going to force all the lefties to write in a right-handed manner? Are you going to force all the females to adopt male pronouns? Where along that spectrum do the video-averse people rank compared to those who are video-craving and at what point are you costing the company way more money by forcing everyone to adhere to your particular preferences that may not be widely shared?

I’m not saying I have any answers.

I am saying that this is a problem that is more complex than a lot of people think it is, and a lot of thought needs to go into whatever standards you choose to set.

I don't think people should be forced to turn on their camera. I turn mine off sometimes, sometimes just because I feel like it. That's ok.

I was only suggesting that people turn on their camera if they want to be more relatable and have more influence.

In large-ish meetings (3+ attendees), I usually turn off my camera (and mute my mic) when I'm not the one talking. For less formal meetings I might relax this. But, in general, I've found that keeping cameras and mics on at all times usually derail meetings.

Agree completely. Non-verbal cues are helpful in person, but they just don't translate over webcam meetings very well at all. Instead you have a bunch of heads trying to look attentive staring off into weird directions. At one point my company asked us all to turn off video for a bit to save bandwidth while they were doing upgrades. None of the teams I'm working with turned cameras back on after the upgrades were done. Turned out that this whole time everyone was doing it because they felt like everyone else expected it of them, but on one actually wanted it.

> There should be no requirement to have the camera on, it really adds very little over voice alone and there are countless valid reasons to not want it on.

Not true. Audio only communication increases the cognitive load on the listeners, as well as giving _ample_ opportunity for distraction to any participant as they are more likely to alt-tab and begin some other task instead of paying attention to the call.

For the person speaking it's also a strain to not have visual cues from participants. Yes, even seeing a few simple nods, or confused faces, can make a difference.

Taking "camera breaks" is fine if it's a lengthy call (which is a problem itself, nobody should be having lengthy meetings of any kind IMHO, let alone remote) but otherwise just put the damn thing on.

Anyone "shaming" workspaces or whatever else is a different matter and I will wager a big chunk of money your org has far greater problems already that should be enough to warrant a new job before being shamed for your workspace is anywhere near the top of the heap.

One giant exception I have to this rule is MS Teams is so terrible at managing multiple videos that even my high end laptop wants to melt.

Apple solved this problem for me - the built-in camera on my MacBook Pro stopped working, as well as my Apple monitor, and no USB webcam will work either (even ones that are working on other Macs). I think it might be WebEx - when I installed WebEx on my personal MacBook Pro it's camera stopped working as well. I had to uninstall WebEx and reboot to get it working again. So I can't use a camera even when I want to!

We put a norm that non 1-1 meetings don’t need camera to be on, but if one person switches it on then it’ll be nice if someone gives company. But 1-1s without cameras are acceptable if they at least alternate with camera sessions. You’re being paid to work. Zoom can cover backgrounds. Get on the camera or don’t complain if you never get a promotion.

So, not willing to turn on camera = lazy worker?

Not lazy, but unwilling to expose anything other than your code to others? It’s hard enough to understand who your team is when you’ve never met them in person, now you don’t want to even show your face? Why even bother with a meeting then.

How is this exactly an issue if the general consensus of the team is to mostly not turn the camera on? Meetings are there to enforce synchronous responses and to quickly clarify issues and arrive at decisions. If the meeting has so many participants that people cannot communicate without visual responses, then the meeting size and scope should probably be reconsidered. It is tiring for minimally involved participants to maintain presence, both in real life and on camera.

Now, I admit that it makes sense to request camera time or meetings in real life once in a while, to maintain that human connection. But I'd argue that it should be mandatory only in contexts where it is reasonable to expect deception or where the stakes are especially high. For example in performance meetings, job interviews or negotiations.

This is quite a hostile attitude. "My way or the highway." I hope other employers can start learning to accommodate different personalities/comforts/anxieties, not to mention the huge environmental cost to video chatting.

If an employee is never comfortable showing their face in a video chat and I’ve never met them ever, it definitely is weird for me and I’m sure I’m not alone. No one in my team had any issues with the norms I mentioned above, and this was agreed upon among people without any managers giving pressure. So perhaps we have self selected among ourselves people who like to talk to actual faces then? Glad to stay in this bubble then.

I’d also much prefer to work in such a team than one where people keep their cameras off.

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