Hacker News Reader

Comment by astrea | Hacker News Reader

> Microphones and video were not muted by the organizer upon joining.

We are decades into videoconferencing software, and 3 years into heavy usage of it by everyone from CEOs to my grandma and we're still fucking up the fundamentals? This is why the government is a joke.

View on HN

Every week we go through this at work STILL. I sit there with my system working perfectly. I can hear. I can talk. They can hear me. They can see me. It's fine. But there are 3 other people in there that are muted and can't figure it out, someone is called in and on their computer, echo everywhere, someone can't hear, someone can't get their mic to work, someone just gets frustrated and screams that we should "do it in person".

I just don't get it anymore. I can't figure out how any of this is challenging for anyone. Especially when they've all done it 50+ times now.

Oh, and the team member who only has her forehead in the shot? Or the person who constantly changes their background through the whole meeting? Or the person who just gets up and walks away in the middle.

Can you feel it? It's Sunday night here for me. Monday is quickly approaching and I just can't stomach the thought of doing this all over again.

I have problems with being muted when I join with Google Meet in Safari desktop that goes away when I re-join without doing anything else at all. Many times it's really just bad software and not just user incompetency. The worst part is that it doesn't happen all the time or to all the users, so the engineers don't care or don't have enough steps to reproduce the bug.

Every virtual meeting in the non-tech world is like this. Zoom is way easier for people than its alternatives but in a world of fools nothing is foolproof.

I don't think this had much to do with the govt. This was a conf hosted by a random bank association and one of the speakers was a Fed governor. Fed had nothing to do with the setup, infra, etc.

The government? Everyone screws it up.

Let’s not talk about projecting/displaying presentations either.

It has nothing to do with "government", except I suppose that it is "of the people" and the people, in aggregate, are "dumb" (actually: people know about the domains that matter to them, and not others).

That being said: almost every day at least one meeting causes me to wonder just how much of the GDP is lost in these teleconference handshake failures. That's something I'd like to see an economics paper on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com