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Comment by kodah | Hacker News Reader

Some context: I'm a lead engineer on a team with six products.

I keep my camera off in meetings. I'm in far more meetings than I can possibly be productive in. I'm also usually not the active speaker in meetings. Why stare into a camera when what my yearly bonuses are calculated on is work/team output? I've found most meetings I get into are either:

- Developers who can't figure something out from documentation and are too impatient (or sometimes critical) to be helped over Slack.

- Executives who would rather speak than send an email or create a Slack thread.

It's not useful for me to pay attention the whole time when I'm also responsible for delivering code and 50-75% of my day is meetings.

The exceptions I have for this are:

- 1:1's

- Interviews

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The perceived the need to keep the camera off during a meeting is a good indication there is something wrong with the meeting, not that it's a good thing to keep the camera off.

We had some recurring meetings where people consistently didn't show up. The managers first impulse was to make the meeting mandatory. But the first thought should be: why are people not showing up? Engineers hate being unproductive, it should be a signal that there's something wrong with the meeting if nobody show's up.

Turning the camera off is just a socially acceptable way of not showing up. There are exceptions of course, some being just don't like being seen or have an issue being filmed out of privacy considerations.

> Turning the camera off is just a socially acceptable way of not showing up.

Why do you think that someone with a camera off is not present? How can you honestly equate camera-off with absence?

> There are exceptions of course

imo it's the opposite. Rarely to never does it matter if you see my face in a meeting. It's an exceedingly rare exception that you should need to as a business requirement.

Have you considered that... _you_ just like having your camera on, and like seeing other people? And other people just don't care?

Furthermore - even if you were right, I would say it's a good thing that busy people have a socially graceful way to opt out of the organisational mistakes of others.

There's a one-way implication here, not two way, i.e.:

I_want_socially_acceptable_absence => I_join_with_camera_off

but there's no 100% certainty the other way round.

> Have you considered that... _you_ just like having your camera on, and like seeing other people?

Yes, I think this is the whole point here. This is a bidirectional relationship.

We all have biases, and for a lot of people wanting some physical concept of the person they are working with is one of them, so yeah, they might just like seeing your face.

It's your prerogative to turn it off, but there is a very real chance this will impact your relationship with other people.

The biggest change for me is that I now hide my self video 100% of the time. I can't see myself in an irl meeting, so I don't need to see myself online either.

Don't this kind of makes the whole problem go away.

Meetings take place across big tables, not with your faces taped to a cardboard box a foot away from each other to inspect your zits and boogers.

These are just digital calls that someone put poor representations of facial expressions alongside.

> Why do you think that someone with a camera off is not present?

I never said this.

> Furthermore - even if you were right, I would say it's a good thing that busy people have a socially graceful way to opt out of the organisational mistakes of others.

Maybe, if you have a company culture where such mistakes cannot be addressed frankly, then perhaps. The lack of facial expressions and other non-verbal cues will take away much of the signals that are available to the organizer however. Which in turn can make regular nonsense meetings last longer than they should.

In my experience quite a lot of these regular meetings are scheduled as a knee-jerk reaction of management to solve problems they don't actually understand. This is great source of unproductive meetings, bowing out 'gracefully' by turning off your camera and attention will not make things better. I'm used to being able to express my concerns openly though, without holding back, so maybe I'm biased.

What's wrong with with someone turning off their camera and eating a snack while developers dive into the weeds for 15 minutes?

Sometimes it's worthwhile for someone to be there just to make one or two important decisions in an hour long meeting.

I've learned when you have a question for someone you need to say their name at the begining of the question, not the end, and give a few seconds of background - which is also a good way to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Online meetings and turning off the camera are new, let's do what we can to take advantage of the pros they offer rather than establishing a new social norm that staring into a camera for 15 minutes and saying and doing nothing is the only polite thing to do.

> I've learned when you have a question for someone you need to say their name at the begining of the question, not the end, and give a few seconds of background

I think this is necessary for me in person or online. My mind tends to wander during meetings, especially meetings that don’t specifically involve (say, group status meetings where people just read their completed items and backlogs that we all already see).

> let's do what we can to take advantage of the pros they offer

Serious question: aside from not being required to be in the same physical place at the same time, what are the pros?

Making recordings of meetings that are setting out to make decisions or even just discuss things in deep detail means people who weren't able to attend, or are just interested in the discussion had, are able to watch it on demand.

But that's not something you need Zoom for. People have been doing that for a long time before videoconferencing.

What's wrong with someone being on camera and eating? If you book me for lunch, I'll show up. With video. Eating. Same as if we were in the office. Book me for lunch? Expect me to show up with a plate or ask you to "go talk over lunch".

If you have the camera off, I have no idea if you're listening. If we're in a regular meeting in an office I can see that you're disinterestedly looking at your cell phone and react accordingly if I really need your attention. If you're camera off in an online meeting I have to assume with every single thing that I say that you are distracted and even if I say your name I am not sure if you even heard me until I say your name and wait for your acknowledgement (e.g. you turning on your camera or saying something to the effect of 'now I'm listening because I heard my name'). Seems like this is a real drag on productivity. This can obviously be different within an actual team that has a history of working together and working together well without the need for this. I.e. if you have a team meeting and you know every word is listened to even if everyone is off camera. That's not the kind of meeting we're talking about here though I think. We're talking about cross functional meeting between people that have lots of other stuff on their plate and at least half the meeting is not interesting to them.

Coming from the the game modding scene meetings never have webcams. It's always just voice calls. Using a video camera is such a foreign idea to me. I don't even own a web camera for my PC. Another weird thing to me is people using other's real names. It's just taboo to use people's real names instead of their screen names. Even my boss and the owners of the company I refer to by their screen name.

Same thing for me, although I'm not coming from the game modding scene but from the "made friends online". Webcams have never really been a thing between me and my friends.

It's rather baffling the business world likes to pretend our communities don't exist despite the fact online collab communities have been doing this since the early 2000s.

Well, business folks have very different world views and preferences for communication style/content than self-organizing geeks, wouldn't you say?

Balaji Srinivasan sees this as the future of work. There's little upside to mixing your work and personal identities and a lot of downside. I can only imagine that it would prevent the most overt forms of discrimination also.

I can honestly say I hadn't thought of it, but I think you're right. I'd love to have that layer of anonymity, as it were, at work, since I'm a completely different person on the job anyway.

I was a tech manager for 25 years.

One of my basic policies was "no scheduled recurring meetings" (I'd think that scrum meetings count as those).

Meetings, for me, were "one-off" events, with focus on a particular, singular goal.

Of course, I worked for a Japanese company, so my policy didn't mean squat to the higher-ups. I had regularly-scheduled meetings; whether or not I wanted it. Many of these meetings were little more than "gab sessions," which was often a nice break from the grind, but had no other positive effect on the projects at hand.

Recently, on the project I'm developing, we had a problem, where the top brass allowed themselves to become complacent, and ignored my frequent status updates (I'm big on process transparency). This came to a head, one day, when they discovered that the product I was making, which had gradually reshaped to meet reality, had deviated from their original goals.

They decided on twice-weekly video meetings (usually only a half hour). This helped them to get a lot more involved. It does nothing at all, for me, but it does help me to keep the work I do "in their face."

As a result, they have changed their original goals, to meet the ground truth, and also has helped me to get important feedback from them.

The fact these meetings are short, and to the point, as well as just the two of us, helps a lot.

> Meetings, for me, were "one-off" events, with focus on a particular, singular goal.

I could not agree more. We as a culture do meetings entirely wrong.

> The perceived need to keep the camera off during a meeting is a good indication there is something wrong with the meeting, not that it's a good thing to keep the camera off.

Reading this discussion, I start to feel the same way. People seem to use it as a coping mechanism to deal with bad meetings. Surely fixing the meetings would be a better thing.

I worked with some folks from one of the major management consulting firms, three or four years ago. Well into Zoom and other video conferencing being very much a thing.

They strongly favored actual call-in-with-a-phone phone conferencing. No video. Not even, necessarily, a computer at all.

Some places do video conferencing but have a culture of keeping cameras off. Usually this is driven from the top down.

... it is nice to have video for e.g. visual social cues of who might want to say something next, or whatever, but having cameras off is fine too.

However, having the camera off definitely saves a ton on fatigue by keeping you from feeling like you have to sit in one spot, in more-or-less one position, staring at either one particular screen or at your camera, to mime paying attention. Me, I like to pace and wander around the house when I'm on a call, even if I'm very interested in it. Hard to do that with video on.

Some industries that adopted virtual meetings long prior to Zoom becoming mandatory are very used to doing voice-only conference calls.

And they work! Nobody in those orgs thinks they are the equivalent of "not showing up." How do you think bankers, lawyers and CPAs got huge deals done in the 80s and 90s, despite everyone being in different offices and often in different cities? Lots and lots of conference calls.

Video calls are a recent innovation made possible by tech. But many organizations have no functional memory of how to do calls prior to Zoom et al. And so some of them have created these bizarre sets of social norms around having to have video on to be "present", apparently unaware of the decades of doing it without video that worked extremely well with less fatigue.

Personally, I love walking around (if only just pacing) while on the phone. The physical movement makes my mind work better and allows me to better process what the other person is saying. And that's how lots of people did it prior to video.

> I'm in far more meetings than I can possibly be productive in.

> I'm also responsible for delivering code and 50-75% of my day is meetings.

There's an organisational issue here.

Yes, that sounds like an organizational issue. It's a common organizational issue without easy solutions.

Not necessarily. "delivering code" is not the same as "writing code" after all. It's very likely that half the meetings are with product, and higher ups, to discuss what the dev team can deliver, and the other half are with the dev team to discuss what they're going to deliver.

The way to avoid those meetings is to write documents instead, but you'd still not be writing code.

For the first quote maybe. But for the second ("I'm also responsible for delivering code and 50-75% of my day is meetings"), not really.

Technical Managers and Tech Leads need to participate in meetings but some also need/want to keep their coding skills and codebase knowledge sharp. A compromise is spending only 25%-50% of the time coding.

Some people are good with both and prefer to keep doing it.

There's no one-size-fits-all solution.

I think your description is sound, but only for people managers of some kind. I burnt out pretty hard trying to meet similar expectations as an IC twice though. The first I was just trying to get code written when I was constantly being dragged into bureaucratic agile planning meetings, or talking to the PM about why my thing isn't done yet, or joining an "all hands". The 2nd had very little of the former, but I was responsible for fixing customer reported bugs, communicating with them in a timely and asynchronous manner about those bugs, and then also delivering features. It didn't help that they put me on some incredibly mundane React project near the end, but I reached a point where I'd sit at my computer and just feel bad about the day. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be in meetings all day, but I don't know that coding is what I'd want to be doing with the time in between, at least not to try and meet deadlines. To me, that'd be a recipe for deep depression.

Yeah, it really depends on the kind of management, kind of programming and the person. It's definitely not for everyone or for every situation. But when it works it's much better than the alternative.

It's an incredibly common one. Somehow, despite Peopleware being almost 35 years old, and pg's Maker Schedule, Manager's Schedule essay being twelve years old, we haven't learned anything and still have this incongruity that will not be reconciled in a direction which leads towards more productivity.

At times it feels like managers like to schedule meetings in such a way as to make it impossible to get any engineering work done on the clock. I particularly hate the the 10:00 AM, 2:30 PM meeting stack for it's ability to slice the day into chunks that are difficult to use productively for deeper work.

Another thing I don’t like is managers sending you a notification for a meeting in 30 minutes, which throws your concentration out of the windows. Then finding out the reason of the meeting was because they have not read your status report. Or something that could have been answered in a couple of slack messages. And then it’s already 4pm and your work day ends at 5pm.

> and are too impatient to be helped over Slack.

Slack is not a panacea. Sometimes, you need to share a screen and have a fluid discussion, which Slack does not provide.

All-slack communication is definitely not great. It is ok for some communications that can be asynchronous and don't need a support, but that's definitely a small subset of the work communications needed for an engineering context.

Check out slack huddles, they actually work fairly well now.

Was not a fan initially but have grown to like the fairly fluid transition to fully sync comms (for the kind of interaction where I used to go to a co-worker's desk before we were full remote).

Same context, but I keep my camera on to help others do the same. I spent the last six months with an org that had a strong remote culture but held meeting on phone conference call. So I've worked with some of my teammates long enough to hear their children but I never saw their face.

It really helps to connect with the person you are talking to when you see them when speaking.

My only exception is when I do large conferences where only the PM is speaking or when I'm doing something else and not listening. In that case cutting my camera is more polite.

> It really helps to connect with the person you are talking to when you see them when speaking.

I don't feel the same way. I connect with my colleagues fairly easily, video or not. I was also raised in a world with gaming and IRC, so having to pay better attention to tone and phrasing inferences is second nature to me.

One difference between meeting people in MMORPGs and IRC vs meeting people while working remotely is that you rarely had to pressure someone to do something in the first context. At work, you need to do a lot of -sometimes unpleasant- things to make people go in the same direction. You can think of it like preventing all deaths in your team of a 40vs40 battleground.

> Developers who can't figure something out from documentation and are too impatient (or sometimes critical) to be helped over Slack.

Maybe it's a symptom they miss human contact.

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