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Comment by ebiester | Hacker News Reader

It's not as different as you think it is.

Most people got used to zoom meetings and async interactions, and they too liked it more than open offices. Big companies have it worse - they have the cubicles/open offices and their coworkers are in other offices throughout the country. This is all too common, and WFH made life much easier on everyone.

This was less true for executives, who were suddenly on 10 hours of zoom calls a day, and whose jobs are most affected. I truly think they forgot that ICs have a very different life than them.

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Perhaps the problem for execs is their focus on meetings. I would bet that at least 25% of meetings don’t have to be live, multi person events.

Async communication can be more effective when it causes people to think a bit before talking.

There are a few tradeoffs.

For executives, they are trying to gather more information. What are the power dynamics? Who is deferring to whom? Where is the unstated conflict that isn't on the page? Is there obvious dysfunction? Do people actually understand the problem to be solved in the same way as the executive, and how do these need to align?

(Is the conflict between the sales team director and the vp of engineering a personal conflict exposed as a business one? Is the sales org selling more than what the engineering team has delivered? Is the problem really that the wrong things are being worked on? All of this may be contextualized within something as simple as a status meeting.)

They are also usually brought in for conflict resolution. Conflict resolution has the same dynamics that show up off of the page. Sometimes, it takes a few sharp questions to cut through the stated conflict to find the real one or to align people on the greater business objective.

Finally, it is quicker to read than a meeting, but it is much longer to write. If you are being asked to talk with sixteen different groups in a day, you cannot write all of that.

I think your second point is largely correct, but one of the big problems it exposes is that a big chunk of execs and even employees don’t / don’t want to think much before talking. I’ve experienced many people who appear to make careers off of shooting from the hip, who will never respond to text based communication that is longer than one, maybe two sentences or maybe even not at all.

10h of zoom calls per day sounds like absolute hell, from that perspective I can really understand why leadership is pushing for RTO

10h of meetings per day in person sounds worse

As someone who has been in 7 hours of zoom meetings averaged over a week, I promise that it is not worse in person. Your eyes start getting really tired when focusing on a screen.

In person you also have to worry about your stomach, your nose, your back, your BO, and in some cases, you still have to stare at some screen or whiteboard. Letting your eyes rest during a meeting seems a lot more manageable.

I dont think anybody really likes zoom meetings more. They just like the perks of WFH 10x more than they dislike zoom meetings.

Yep. I like working in an office. I prefer it! Just the working part, though.

I don’t like it as much as I like not: having an extra 30-60 minutes of (risky-to-life-and-limb!) driving 5 days a week, thousands in gas and wear & tear on a car, having to own more than one car (more expenses, takes up more of the garage), getting sick more often, not being home when my kids get home from school, not being able to do any part of starting dinner until 5:30 or later, not being nearby if a kid gets sick at school and needs to be picked up, not being able to listen to my own music without headphones, having a shared bathroom, and a billion other things that come with working at an office but are purely bad.

I do.

There are a very few circumstances where I find it more beneficial to be meeting in person. For everything else, I find Zoom (or other online video) meetings much more beneficial.

I don't have to plan extra time to get to wherever the meeting is.

I don't have to worry about the meeting room being too crowded, or noisy, or whatever.

I can have my headphones set to noise cancel, so any noise that there is in my space gets filtered out, and all I can hear is the meeting.

I am guaranteed to have my computer right there with me to take notes on or look up anything I need to reference.

In general, I get to take the meeting in my own space, with everything I need ready to hand.

I don't have to worry about the other people in the meeting spreading COVID (remember that? it never stopped being a thing).

Etc.

So unless the "meeting" is, for instance, an attempt to troubleshoot a tech issue on a computer that can't easily allow me to use Zoom's built-in Remote Control feature, tell me why, exactly, I should like Zoom meetings less than in-person meetings...?

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