Zoom’s CEO thinks Zoom sucks for building trust, leaked audio reveals | Hacker News Reader

Zoom’s CEO thinks Zoom sucks for building trust, leaked audio reveals

arstechnica.com

76 pointsctoth59 comments

Are they wrong though? Is this not like a tobacco CEO getting caught telling his own kids not to smoke?

It's funny. Before Covid, Zoom was first and foremost a sales and marketing tool - collaboration was an afterthought. The idea that it's a replacement for in-person teams was kind of thrust upon them. And ironically, it was their marketing department that ran with it.

I'm an avid WFHer, but I must admit that there is a LOT of stuff that has gone out the window. Not enough for me to want to fight traffic in a coastal city again, but I completely see everyone around me checking out on their jobs.

> Before Covid, Zoom was first and foremost a sales and marketing tool - collaboration was an afterthought. The idea that it's a replacement for in-person teams was kind of thrust upon them. And ironically, it was their marketing department that ran with it.

All the way back in 2016 my employer was using their service, including the "zoom room" portal service which paired a large display and a small tablet in every meeting room to let you join any meeting ID and integrated with our calendars, you would just walk in to a room you booked and click "start meeting" on the tablet. It was a godsend for distributed teams or teams who needed to collaborate with folks in other offices. Hard to believe this was just an after thought

Sure, I am familiar with them as well. (Although we never actually used the cameras! We thought they were a waste of time!)

But again, they were more successfully selling it as a way to enhance existing in-person meetings rather than eliminate them entirely.

> but I completely see everyone around me checking out on their jobs.

Yes without the panopticon people realize the majority of their job is bullshit song and dance to make the PHB happy.

> Yes without the panopticon

Zoom IS the panopticon.

I knew of a company that would make junior employees keep a Zoom window open all day with their manager. Can you imagine?

I think the headline is a bit sensational, reading the article and seeing the statement in context made it less of a hot take.

More than the trust factor Yuan highlighted:

> to drive innovation that he claimed results from having more heated conversations and debates that just don't happen as often over Zoom. Yuan said that instead, to the seeming detriment of the company's ability to generate new ideas, "everyone tends to be very friendly when you join a Zoom call."

He's not wrong IMO.

Sure. You could perhaps have your "ill tempered" behavior recorded and if you have a dedicated space, or not, not wanting to associate it with "more heated conversation." Looks like a bit more separation is ideal.

I guess it's time to pitch my new high temper b2b messenger, Angr.

Slap some face and voice filters onto the call that trigger anytime someone is yelling. Make them smile and change their vocal intonations to be pleasant, then the recorded minutes wont be a big deal if they're leaked.

Heated conversations and debates to drive innovation was fine in the Oppenheimer and AT&T Bell days . Today it takes one wrong word to get called up by HR or a recording that can sabotage your entire career. I don’t think the tech industry or the country’s work culture suffers heretics anymore. I am fine with the lack of passion and lack of innovation on Zoom if it helps my anxiety and ADHD better and allows me to work without offending anyone . I just want to keep a steady income .

I'd say this is nuanced? Heated can certainly mean elevated to a point of being argumentative but the way I interpreted it in this case is more about being impassioned?

I'll regularly get into these types of scenarios with colleagues and find them to be considerably easier to have in person versus over Zoom or Slack. It's very difficult to fully read someones body language or intent when remote but for me it's easier to go have this type of debate in person and then walk away on good terms or maybe just heading out for a walk together to cool off and rebalance.

I've had many a heated argument with the older bloke on my team.

I'm very much a "I need to come back to this in 12 months, do it properly" kind of person, while he just gets stuff working.

I've rejected PRs and spent many an hour bashing my head against the wall trying to explain these things to him, but at the end of the day we still have a beer after work and generally enjoy each others' company. Heated doesn't necessarily mean unfriendly

I think its due to the format.

In a normal meeting your eye is not forced to look solely at a matrix of faces.

Your can focus on someones face if you wish but otherwise you are looking at the person normally from the waist up.

Looking at someones face forces you to make eye contact which has an emotional effect on the parties involved. Extended periods of eye contact is used in couples therapy to increase empathy and intimacy.

Does he think Zoom sucks for building trust, or conferencing tools suck for building trust?

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Like, what's next...a pastry chef thinking that pastries suck for eating healthy?

Don't ruin perfectly good clickbait with reasonableness!

It's more like being a pastry chef and telling your employees to stop eating pastries because they will all get diabetes

I wouldn't find that shocking and it wouldn't devalue the product. Pastries are a sometimes snack food. They aren't healthy, and that doesn't matter if you consume within moderation.

Glad to see the Zoom CEO can be honest about the product. It's good for a lot of things, but it isn't a complete replacement of human interaction.

Or stop eating pastries every day

The reason you can't have a heated conversation on Zoom is the audio is half-duplex, which is an engineering decision taken by Zoom.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37252141

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37252110

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37242545

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37235310

HN looooooooves working from home

> "You and I can sit at home. I can sit anywhere. Let’s say at the local Starbucks coffee. I shake your hands. You feel my hand shaking. I give you a hug, and you feel my intimacy. And even if we speak a different language, we can understand each other. And get a cup of coffee, enjoy the smell remotely. All those technologies will be part of our offering in the future."

Paging qDot.

More seriously though, won't it be nice when someone is like "everybody turn your haptic and smell interfaces on!"

Sorry my HP smell-cartridge ran out

When the smell-cartridge runs out, the audio and video mute too.

Jeremy, can you please mute your smellaphone? I'm getting some background odors from you.

Outstanding move. Why do so many people record stuff they should keep to themselves online? It is so easy to record and leak those things. Same with Sam Bankman-Fried, they found six million pages of evidence [1]. Delete your stuff if you do illegal things!

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230726205404/https://www.nytim...

The ceos and other c-suits don't have access to their little harems in the office. Bill Gates would never have met his wife or harassed his female subordinates. Same with Sergei Brin and others.

> Over the past several years, we've hired so many new 'Zoomies' that it's really hard to build trust," Yuan said

Fast growth no preserving organization culture. Remote or face to face.

Nothing to be ashamed of, I'd be disappointed if he thought that zoom was perfect as is. There's probably a lot of things that can be done to the product to change that.

Personally I don’t think offices are good for collaboration either. The way people work together is fundamentally broken because it relies too much on synchronous communication.

Asynchronous communication is good for tasks where there is a long gap between decisions. But one of the reasons I hate working with IT is that the typical change request procedure requires multiple days for each individual change. If failing is even remotely possible (as, IMHO, with every complex system) this can be stifling.

Synchronous communication is where serious deals are made. Ask any broker in the pit on Wall Street.

Early career employees will benefit a lot more from an in-person work culture. There are exceptions to these rules but they are simply exceptions, it takes a lot of work to have a viable remote culture and most companies that accepted it by default during the pandemic and have continued it have not made significant effort to embrace a remote culture. Honestly, moving more towards a hybrid model in my current company has been a godsend.

Hard to enforce 996 with WFH aint it?

You could look for the output that you expect from 996 instead of caring about time in seat.

I mean, it kinda does and always will. But I do feel like we can do better than zoom/slack/loom

and you damn right Eric

> I shake your hands. You feel my hand shaking. I give you a hug, and you feel my intimacy.

Yeah, no thanks bro, I'm good. I can do my job very well without feeling anyone's intimacy, thank you very much.

When I think of the office I think about intimate hugs. Can't get any work done over all the intimate hugs around the water cooler.

Maybe try the intimate hug next to the water cooler instead?

or just intimately hug the water cooler.

It's going to leave you cold.

The water cooler is infinitely warmer than any co-worker because the water cooler will never screw me over.

I don’t know why they think only good things happen when people see each other in person.

In person you can be sexually harassed. Or if there’s a bad meeting, you might feel intimidated by my simmering rage. What if someone goes postal?

Without any sort of stats or reference I'm confident saying far more sexual harassment happens online. The vast majority is not physical contact.

>> What if someone goes postal?

The LACK of intimacy (and the empathy and trust that it's composed of) is what leads to "going postal", often driven directly by remote interactions. This is why the thin piece of glass in a car windshield allows otherwise civil people to experience road rage.

Your reply makes it seem like you're allergic to intimacy. There are upsides to compartmentalization but fundamentally we work with humans.

So no, if your job is with humans, I don't think you can do it _better_ without intimacy. I'm not trying to be pedantic either. Maybe you just care about "good enough" and that's completely fine. But not better. I'd disagree.

no thanks. intimacy is a minefield when you have trouble reading people like me. especially in an office. some people get uncomfortable if you get to close. some don't like it if you aren't close enough. With women its even worse! I've had my body language be misinterpreted one too many times and it stresses me out.

Give me remote where I can keep a professional distance where I don't need to worry about making anyone uncomfortable.

Intimacy is not just about close physical interaction, it's about building trust, empathy and understanding. It helps us assume the best and not jump on any comment assuming the absolute worst... you know, kind of the opposite of the entire internet.

Work is where we go to be professionals.

If I need to be personal in the workplace, that is plainly unprofessional and I am quitting because I like a clear line between my personal and professional life.

> Your reply makes it seem like you're allergic to intimacy.

This is a good point. If a person doesn’t enjoy intimate hugs in the workplace, where on earth would they enjoy any sort of intimacy?

I'm guessing this is sarcasm?

For me, I use the number of intimate hugs I get during interviews to get a feel for how many I should expect during mandatory team lunches and stand-ups (I mean hug-ups). If I don't get a single hug from the interviewer or any other staff, I know it's a low-intimacy place and won't expect more hugs down the line.

Open concept office design has been a godsend for team building cuddle puddles. I hated having to go cubicle to cubicle giving out back rubs in the 90s

Intimacy is definitely the wrong word but even as someone 100% in favour of remote work I will admit that in person bonding and teamwork is superior to remote.

I think it's remote work, not specific to Zoom. What happens when you have a Zoom call, something is committed upon, an ETA is established (potentially ASAP/by EOD, etc), etc. The asking party is then left waiting and wondering whether they'll actually get it, correct and in time for their own deadline. So, in that case, you may be wondering; are they actually acting with the appropriate haste? Is it something that could have taken 10 minutes but is taking 2 hours because the person decided working out/walking the dog/etc took precedent. In an office, I can see that they are actively working, they're more likely to give me an update if they need to go grab lunch first or something, and generally I feel more trusting that the person is making an effort to accomplish my goal/task. When outside the office, I'm left to wonder and that erodes trust especially combined with the communication hurdles of a quick checkin/huddle/status updates. Even if we agree to an EOD ETA, earlier is always preferred and so often the feeling is 'why did it take all day'. It's also a general feeling that due to this, people are breaking more internal commitments that they used to. They said they'd do one thing but then was not able to, or it took much longer, or they are doing the workload prioritization when perhaps a manager should be, etc, etc.

Im going out on a limb here. Sounds like you have trust issues.

I wrote it as what I’ve observed in others more than myself but did use “I” for simplicity of authoring the examples.

But I do work in a fast paced quick turn around time environment, and a lot of people do this even instead of being transparent about deadlines and importance of urgency; they wonder what’s taking so long. It’s felt at the executive level and why the RTO thing is decided upon by those.

I honestly also think framing it as a trust issue as the zoom ceo did was weird. I don’t think that’s the right word, but I’m trying to analyze the meaning of someone else’s words like everyone here.

So agree to an earlier time of delivery if you need it earlier. Don’t agree that EOD is compatible with the business objective and then hold a grudge because people went to work out or walked their dog or picked their kid up from school.

But glad to hear that you generally find lunch an acceptable reason to temporarily delay the pace of progress. Brings a tear to my eye knowing that the sacrifices of the labor movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wasn’t for naught :’)

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