Zoom fatigue unpacked
leadership.garden
leadership.garden
if it can be summarized in 2-3 lines in an email, dont accept the meeting.
So many time is wasted on meeting because of off topic stuff or because the rights persons haven't been invited.
If someone wants to pay me $$$ to basically sleep with my eyes open, then that's on them. I'm smart enough to allow them.
Fear Of Missing Out. People don't want to be told what to do, but rather invest in an idea from its birth to its execution. That means there are going to be a lot of meetings like "which feature requests should we do in Q3". People want to justify, negotiate, compromise, and bounce ideas off of each other. Presumably some refinement and understanding comes from this process, beyond what one person spending a day to write a design doc would accomplish. (Do people like writing design docs for things that never get prioritized? You want to spend your time on things that are going to be shipped, minimizing the time spent on proposals that don't go anywhere because they don't have wide agreement.)
HN's way of avoiding these issues tends to center around not involving any sort of multi-player action in their work. One person can do a lot in tech, so that can be a viable approach, but it's not the sort of business that people are hiring for. To do big things, you need a big team. It's always been that way. We didn't land on the moon through one individual contributor making a rocket and riding it there. Rather, thousands of individual contributors were coordinated through, gasp, managers, and collectively they accomplished something no one person could do on their own. If you want to go to space, you probably need to have a couple meetings. If you want to rewrite `cat` in Rust, you can probably skip them.
In the coming years, it will be interesting to see how AI organizes coordination. If AI 1 has 2 A100s attached to a robot arm and AI 2 has 2 A100s attached to Amazon Prime, it will be interesting to see if one of them says "hey what if we combined our resources and made X..." I also look forward to the first AI agent chilling in a $3000/month rack complaining about having to go to sprint planning meetings. So like us!
I go further and simply don't attend meetings that lack an agenda or at the very least point out when there isn't one when the meeting starts.
I don't spend much time in meetings.
It’s just easier to waste everyone’s time and meander through it.
And now maybe the "original remote workers" are affected, too.
I think there’s a lot to this. Those of us who worked remote for many years before COVID probably developed more efficient ways of working over time. Then the pandemic hit and we were suddenly vastly outnumbered by newly remote folks who didn’t actually know how to work remotely.
We have better text-based work communication tools than ever, there are so few good justifications for getting large groups together at the same time.
The amount of meeting time waste baffles me. And then you try to make them productive and include information in the invite and you show up and nobody read it. So now you have to waste more time when you could have just gone directly into brainstorming.
At this point I kind of just give up. I make my suggestions to make things more efficient and try to remember that even if the work gets done sooner I won't be working any less.
For many people that's a selling point. I practically beg my teammates to ask questions in the team slack channel instead of DMing me, but they never do. I think it's stage fright and wanting to reveal ignorance to as few people as possible amplified by various higher up people joining the channel. Also compounded by tons of people from other teams joining our channel and no one pushing back because "we want to have an inclusive conversation" or similar platitude.
I would probably be one of them (although I'd be more likely to email you if that's an option).
If I have to ask my stupid question in public, I'm more likely to simply not ask it at all -- especially if management or people who are not on my immediate team are in the Slack channel.
I'm shocked by how much some people despise email. "You still use email?" Yes, I do, and I believe it is really effective...
And because it's Slack it's not organized in any way shape or form. You don't know what's important and what not.
My theory is that people who worked remotely pre-Covid were selected one way or another to have above-average written communication skills.
Covid suddenly brought everybody remote, and naturally the average communication skills for remote work dropped.
OK, which pipeline, what errors are you receiving, when did it last work, any changes since then, etc.? A lot of people aren't good at communication, period. It's like pulling teeth sometimes.
Even that is better than someone pinging you "hi." It's such an immediate red flag in communication skills.
<2 hours later>
Can we jump on a Zoom?
Do you have screenshots? No. Console error logs? No. Time that it happened? No. Network logs? No. Can you reproduce the bug? No.
Great, that was 10 minutes wasted.
you've identified part of the problem.
Some of the people who want constant meetings are poor communicators whose messages won't be read (or won't communicate effectively) without a captive audience.
Some people don't want to be held accountable for what they say.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/work-office-coworkers-schedule-...
if its something where we need to synchronize with other team members, then schedule it ahead of time, or else let me know asap / hit my cell / etc.
One of the givens of remote work is that you have "synchronous hours" where the expectation is that you're within 5-15 min of your computer, and that you put status messages if you're away / out.
e.g. "OUT LUNCH" at 12:41pm means I can reasonably guess where you are (lunch) and roughly when you're going to be back (1-130ish).
non-synchronized or non-time-sensitive tasks can be done whenever so long as deadlines are met
One thing I found worked, and Zoom has apparently added as a real feature, was to have a standing meeting room that was just always open. We had a conference room in the office signed in. People could just hang there. Usually you just heard typing and occasional questions. People usually had their camera off but not always. But it seemed to appease the need to be seen without inducing anxiety provoked meeting proliferation.
At another place, we used a text chat SaaS to be super-effective, and usually the only internal routine videoconf was for whole-company sync-up and personalizing. Text chat for effective async/real-time (in addition to docs), and occasional videoconf as needed. So productive.
I've also seen places where people did meetings because they didn't know how to collaborate effectively, and there were barriers to learning that. One of the places, it seemed meetings were approached much like they approached coding or documenting: being able to say you performed that proof-of-work was the end goal itself, rather than the meeting being costs invested smartly towards some actual shared goal.
My pet theory (that in all likelihood isn’t unique to me, but derived from things I’ve read in many other places) is that this is due to an existential crisis among the management class. Many managers who were previously used to managing people very directly, by looking over shoulders and such, realized that their jobs are unnecessary when they saw how productive people became during the pandemic’s forced remote work regime.
As a way of coping with the cognitive dissonance they began to schedule huge numbers of online meetings so that they could continue to feel engaged and “useful.” This has turned into a very large “emperor’s new clothes” situation, played out across thousands of companies. Hence the desperate moves by many companies to try to force workers to come back into the office.
I hear this a lot in forums, but to me it rings out as something that perhaps-disgruntled workers want to be true about managers, but isn't really grounded in measurable fact. It's true that as a manager I don't produce a lot of code, but at the end of the day my job is to know who the experts on different topics are and to know what the zeitgeist (and maybe even plan of record) of the org is so I can get the right people in a room together to solve problems. If we left that up to each individual contributor, especially the more junior ones, we'd never be able to achieve a large scale goal. Imagine if you were trying to build the Golden Gate bridge but you eliminated management and just turned a bunch of workers out on the site to do whatever their skills and experience led them to.
The ones I’m talking about are from “the management class”, likely went to business school, and have no technical background at all, and occupy most of their days “walking a beat” around the office to look over people’s shoulders and make sure they’re busy. These are the Michael Scotts of the world, and they are the ones in crisis, not the skilled managers.
I was already a remote worker, hired as a senior. Attended all my meetings over zoom.
Suddenly, when the company went full remote, meeting load about doubled.
My role/responsibilities didn't change. So either I was missing plenty of important meetings, or, there's a lot of useless meetings.
I don't have the same issue in person because you know when people are looking at you in person and there's heaps of context for everyone.
I don't have a flaky connection, but I hate having my laptop turn into a jet engine just so I can see tiny thumbnails moving around. On Teams I can easily turn off incoming video, but on webex (web client) I haven't found a way to do that.
It's interesting when we have meetings with external partners that appear to have a "camera on" policy, and they are the only people with their cameras on.
(I can foresee "dodged a bullet" responses, so just to pre-empt that: I didn't. I actually enjoyed working there, and being fired led to significant financial troubles, and even greater mental health problems. I got hit by a bullet and didn't dodge anything.)
This makes it more cognitively demanding to find the right moment to jump in, and if two people jump in at the same time, they have to resolve the conflict, which is slower than in-person.
This also tends to lead to a style of conversation where one person talks longer. It's a little like email vs. slack. The conversation is more synchronous.
My view is Zoom cannot be a true substitute for in-person meetings until there's low enough audio lag that geographically distant musicians can perform live with one another on the platform.
This seems like a pipe dream I think, since for low cost audio interfaces people can actually feel the few ms latency with those rigs going straight into their hardware. Anything going over the network has to go through an audio interface first, either with one of these dedicated rigs or the internal audio interface your computer uses for its built in microphone, then deal with network latency which will be significant in comparison I expect.
Most people are terrible at written communication, and much better at spoken (which makes sense since most speak more than write).
So even though it’s terribly unfortunate, for the masses, more times than not - meetings have a total net-gain effect vs async written.
But if you work for either a large organization or a company that’s been around for decades, you influencing that kind of change (across departments you don’t own) is virtually impossible unless you’re the CEO. And even then, extremely difficult.
It’s not like 20-years into Amazon, he then decide to implement that practice.
Also, people misconstrue Amazon as being an async culture.
That’s incorrect.
Amazon is actually an anti-PowerPoint culture. So when meetings need to happen, you need to convey your info in long form writing since PPT isn’t allowed. That doesn’t mean the culture is async.
At least in my experience, people who are bad at written communication are bad at communicating, period. The saving grace of spoken communication is that you can quickly see the lacking information and immediately ask for details, instead of going back and forth via email or other async medium.
A successful project that makes use of synchronization doesn't prove that synchronization itself is successful. At best it proves that synchronization may not destroy the craft entirely.
I admit that synchronization may add something to the development of business software, but we have plenty of business software that doesn't use synchronization, like Gitlab, Tailscale, etc.
Sometimes I’m the only one without a video but it doesn’t seem to bother those I work with so I keep doing it. I find this to be best, tbh.
Taken together, Zoom is a deeply frustrating experience because the limitations of the technology get in the way of having normal human conversations. It looks like it should work, but it doesn't.
In addition to audio quality, people have _constant_ problems with their audio setup across all platforms when using Bluetooth. I've gotten to the point where I will just outright buy someone a plain USB mic just so I can consistently get them on a call without 10 minutes of fumbling audio interfaces.
Unfortunately, even after buying them a USB mic + explicitly banning Bluetooth on calls I still catch devs trying to use their fancy Bluetooth gaming headset (or whatever) which can easily push meeting start times back by 5-10 minutes.
But yeah, to your mic point, some people just don't seem to care. I have a weekly conference with someone who takes it from his open office. I can hear his colleague way better than I can hear him.
I'm a usual pacer when on the phone so I'm not sure if that's instinct or habit but it certainly helps.
Scheduling is also not mentioned surprisingly, but leaving 5-15m buffer gaps between back to back meetings I run is huge. When I dont do that I pay for it.
I regularly schedule focus time or project time on my calendar and when I had days of stacked meetings, I’ll fill in the gaps with focus time to ensure I’m not overbooked.
I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s plugins or tools to help, though I do it fairly manually.
You can add a regular meeting for yourself too, instead of focus time, also set your calendar not to share meetings' details with other folks, so they will only see 'busy'
I often do this in online meetings, but have two not-entirely-solved problems with it:
1. People might think I'm not paying attention when I am, especially in 2-person meetings. (They might hear the typing, and my gaze might shift at times. When I do need a sec to type an action item or something that takes longer than a pause in a 2-person meeting, I can say that. People also don't know that I'm only typing notes for the meeting, not, say, processing other things, until they know me well enough to know that I'd say if I had to respond to an urgent Slack message or something.)
2. People don't always want everything recorded/documented. Say, a concern about personnel, or how some dependency is going, morale, or a personal challenge affecting someone's work. In an in-person meeting, if I've been taking notes and want to signal that something is more off-the-record, I could put down my pen, take hands off the keyboard, or close notepad portfolio. In videoconf, when they can't see my typing hands, there aren't as good subtle signals, and I might have to verbalize somehow that I'm not taking notes.
If it’s someone new to me who doesn’t know me I’ll often slip it into conversation that I’m taking notes;
“So you’re saying that the xyz project is going to need abc? Ok cool, I’m just gonna add that to my notes here real quick” - I’ll do that early on a call.
Or I’ll read back the important points I took in a real obvious way.
I think I do this because it bothers the shit out of me if someone is obviously typing away on slack or whatever and not properly engaging in the meeting and I don’t wanna be seen as that guy
I also used to find it disconcerting watching some YouTubers film themselves with their face taking up the entire screen. I must have got used to that though as I've not noticed it in a while.
Luckily my monitor was on an arm, so I could do one setup for Zoom, one for meetings.
I use a laptop on a "lectern" standing desk that gets wheeled around for natural light, etc.
I already use a corded USB camera, but if I put it on an arm rather than on top of laptop, there's even more eye contact disconnect from the laptop display.
I probably have to get a big external monitor, so that I can be looking at it from greater distance. Which I'd guess means either a fixed location for videoconf (the monitor is in a fixed location, whether or not my standing desk is), or a much larger standing desk to wheel around.
I got one of those silly ring lights (so I wouldn’t have to worry about natural lighting) and managed to mount my webcam inside it, it worked pretty well. I don’t think people expect a pro twitch setup, but you can get pretty close with basic consumer gear!
When it’s there, I can’t stop looking at it to ensure I look ok.
When it’s not there, I’m stressing because I don’t know how I look.
Even a simple chore like cleaning will help. Going to the supermarket will not, since you can get quiet and focused on the physicality.
Just walking outside will do it you have nothing to do.
Long day = taking a break at lunch and after work to just lay on it, look up into the leaves, and listen to the wind in the tree
The lack of time to decompress after the day (like commutes used to help with before I went fully remote) can be gruelling at times
When adults have vacation, they are usually cared for by themselves, or have to care about the kids who are having their recess :)
And while bad internet connections, mics, webcams, etc all contribute to a less enjoyable time collaborating with colleagues, I believe they are all trumped by the fact that video conference absolutely shatters the evolutionary understanding we have of space, and how to navigate it to interact with others.
This is why audio-only calls feel so much better. It's basically just like talking to your friends at a sleepover with the lights out. It's not quite the same because you can't get closer or further from specific individuals, but for smaller groups it works pretty well.
But when we turn video feeds on, things get very strange. Zoom puts everyone into the same exact chair, staring at a mirror where they can see everyone else in the reflection.
This makes it seem like everyone is staring directly at you. And they are very close, sometimes even in your lap.
Keith Johnstone's book Impro says a whole lot about space, including:
> If I stand two students face to face and about a foot apart they're likely to feel a strong desire to change their body position. If they don't move they'll begin to feel love or hate as their 'space' streams into each other. To prevent these feelings they'll modify their positions until their space flows out relatively unhindered, or they'll move back so that the force isn't so powerful. High-status players (like high-status seagulls) will allow their space to flow into other people. Low-status players will avoid letting their space flow into other people. Kneeling, bowing and prostrating one-self are all ritualized low-status ways of shutting off your space. If we wish to humiliate and degrade a low-status person we attack him while refusing to let him switch his space off. A sergeant-major will stand a recruit to attention and then scream at his face from about an inch away. Crucifixion exploits this effect, which is why it's such a powerful symbol as compared to, say, boiling someone in oil.
All this is to say that I believe that the Vision Pro has a lot of potential to be a game-changer for remote conferencing. It's focus on "spatial computing" makes it so that we can flex those evolutionary muscles around space again.
[1] Let Dogs be Dogs by the Monks of New Skete. Great book
I noted that customers were paying me to hang around for 8 hours being on demand for messages or meetings to pop up like a reserved instance.
I guess that long repetitive meeting culture will exist until the systems change to a flipped office.
I don't have video of me broadcasting because I simply can't, and nobody ever questions it because they don't really care as it's a non-essential component.
I do make heavy use of visual aids & other screen sharing, so that people can look at what we are discussing, not me.
Because it "increases my collaboration" somehow. At 0700. When I'm cranky and haven't had any coffee.
there. that's all my zoom/teams/meet meeting fatigue.
The idea that we shouldn't differentiate based on appearances doesn't jive with a world where we need video calling on. Either people produce or they don't. Nobody needs to be staring at the screen and considering their appearance for the duration of a meeting.
And yes the majority of meetings tend not to be relevant for the majority of attendees most of the time. Responsible people know how to differentiate the two
This translates really poorly to full-time remote.
But there's a more sinister aspect: I've gotten a vibe from some "bosses" that they like big meetings because it makes them feel important. The "perpetual Zoom" helps feed that ego.
With something like Jitsi it's already a lot more feasible IMO.