Ask HN: Does it matter if development team members have the camera off?
Do you think it matters in software development if certain team members have their camera almost always off?
What difference does it make?
Are you camera on or off?
What difference does it make?
Are you camera on or off?
I can participate in a meeting when I have to, but there's a cost.
I can be on-camera in meetings when I have to, but I have to focus more to interact in that kind of setting and I feel far more drained afterwards.
I can understand that a manager might want to see their team and have frequent video meetings and try and read body-language, but I hope managers understand there's a wide variety of personality types and being in that kind of social setting isn't using a lot of peoples' strengths too wisely and might be reducing the effectiveness of some of their team members.
As a new joiner I’ve found it much harder to build relationships over audio only, especially with peers who are remote. This may just be a personal flaw that I have.
I have definitely noticed that the audio calls are more prone to people interrupting and talking over each other. This is often eliminated on video calls because you can see visual cues that someone would like to speak, or that someone is thinking about the question prior to responding. Video is a much higher bandwidth medium for collaboration, imo.
Personally I’d prefer meetings to be video first.
I’m not sure how useful this is in larger teams where i guess you can’t have your whole team in a single window, but at least for smaller teams it’s really useful as to gauge the overall team sentiment.
The importance of understanding how people work (and what mood they are in that day) can not be underestimated if you want a team to be productive.
Some of my team leave an open video link on between each other as they do their work so they can grab a coffee together or chat about their plans for the weekend.