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Comment by Buttons840 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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).

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.

> 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.

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