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Comment by bipson | Hacker News Reader

So much vitriol :(

I can say from personal experience that people tend to drift off more easily if their cameras are off, no manager present. My team even just agreed themselves to enable the cameras during refinements.

Is the main problem boring meetings? Of course it is! But you won't get people involved by not having any team meetings at all... Sometimes the spark needs to catch first.

VR ping pong table??? Not every company here can and will afford VR headsets for everyone just for kicks. And it is beyond the point. Trust is built by sharing, not by playing VR games. It can work, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient. This statement is so cliche SV.

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> But you won't get people involved by not having any team meetings at all...

Having worked from home for decades now, back in my day the connectivity wasn't good enough for meetings. I never found it limiting in that way. In fact, it was easier to get involved as you had time to get involved, not wasting away in useless meetings.

In my experience, the main problem is that most people working remotely were thrown into it during the COVID age and never took time to develop remote working skills, leaving their office skills they had built up to lean on, with everyone hoping they would carry over. But it doesn't work like that. Being skilled in one thing does not mean you are skilled in all things.

Likewise, my career has been spent working from home. If you threw me into an office, where I have no experience, I'd equally be a fumbling around disaster. They are entirely different skillsets.

That might all be true.

But working together efficiently means acting as a team, being a "human" (sorry all cooperative animals, you're human too)

To act as a closely connected team that is able to sort things out and deal with the unforseen, helping each other out and understanding what the other needs, it is simply not enough to be a genius with chat and mail and a todo-list.

It might work, but then you either rely on others to deal with the chaos for you, making you a drone, or you remain well under potential - what you could achieve with a good team.

> To act as a closely connected team that is able to sort things out and deal with the unforseen, helping each other out

To a point, but it is generally understood that unskilled members of a team will bring down a team to unsustainable levels. A team can only compromise so far. If you have a medical team, for instance, you're not walking the streets to see the first hobo join. If you have a sports team, you carefully ensure the members are skilled at the game.

Same applies here. COVID brought extenuating circumstances, of which accommodations were made, but those who haven't developed the necessary skills at this point can go back to the office. They are not a good fit for these particular teams. And that's okay. There are many different teams for them to find a good fit.

If your meeting is so long, boring, and lacking my active participation to the point that I could fall asleep, your meeting should have been an order of magnitude shorter, the presenter should learn some basic speaking skills, or I should not have been in that meeting, and an email should have been sent instead.

Yes!

And wouldn't it be preferable if you were so connected to your coworkers that you could say that (maybe not in these exact words), and either have better meetings, or be free to leave this particular meeting?

Do you really prefer sitting for hours in anonymous meetings, working on something else, just so you were "there", but not "there"?

You could work significantly better without all that nonsense in the background, right? Maybe even discussing important things?

And idea what is holding you back?

I'm not held back. I'll happily tell people, most of the time after the fact, but in some more egregious cases in the moment, that I don't belong in this meeting, or ask that we get back to the topic at hand that required me in the meeting.

You don't need to be buddy-buddy with your coworkers to tell them things that are directly relevant to our job at hand. In fact, I'm much more comfortable pointing out to my coworker that we've already talked about this subject, take it to a sidebar, than I am telling my friend that he's told the same story about his whitewater rafting trip 3 times. Because my friendships are based on enjoying each other's company, and I don't want to associate negative emotions with it. My coworkers are all here because we get paid. We get paid because we achieve goals. We achieve goals by actually doing productive work, not sitting through snooze-fest meetings.

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