Why do remote meetings suck so much? (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Why do remote meetings suck so much? (2018)

chelseatroy.com

24 pointsadrianhoward44 comments

They don't but they do if you have too much of them. In my experience, the amount of meetings only increased when working remotely. I would welcome a meeting budget ... how many time one is allowed to spend in meetings over a certain time window ... once consumed you cannot be invited to, organize or join a meeting anymore.

Great idea. Wish I’d heard it years ago.

I am cofounder of Jamscape, a startup that is trying to replace as many video meetings as possible with short ad-hoc face-to-face conversations that you can then share with others, and with actual eye contact. Perhaps a tool like this could help cut your meeting load.

you used more words but it sounds like your product is a video meeting product. I'm not sure having more meetings with your product will cut down on the number of meetings I have, but I understand why you would rather I have meetings on your platform

sure, but if it's meaningfully better then people should know about it and try it out and decide for themselves. I don't care that Google wants me to use their product because it makes them money. I search there because it's better than the alternatives I've tried. If this meeting product is better then by all means, let's hear about how it's actually better rather than dismissing the product owner for wanting you to use their product because it makes them money.

we're all well aware of how zoom/meet/teams meetings suck by this point. a product that manages to make them less onerous so I'm less exhausted at the end of a day off then would be a godsend.

Thanks! Jamscape is free to download and use, at https://jamscape.com. Currently only for macOS & Windows, but we are working on broader platform support. Very happy to help you test if it is something for you and collect your feedback.

How does Jamscape enable short ad-hoc face-to-face conversations differently than existing video meeting platforms?

It uses real time face recognition to give a very accurate presence indicator, so you never risk calling people when they’re not actually in front of the camera, it crops your face tightly with AI so you don’t have worry about what you are wearing or your surroundings before accepting or making a call, and it uses an AI video codec that boost eye contact and facial expressions even over low bandwidth and long haul connections. When the call is over it creates a transcript that is easy to share with others, and that others can use as a base for follow up calls or discussions, thus reducing the need for everybody to be in every call to stay on the same page.

So my camera always has to be on?

It is optional and not on by default. If not it falls back to mouse and keyboard activity tracking. The advantage of using the camera is that it works even if you are not touching the computer, like when reading or watching YouTube, using another device, etc.

I'm not sure if you know this but if this is marketed at businesses, the employees are gonna hate it

That is actually not the feedback we are getting. And as I said the way it is configured by default does not divulge and more information than e.g. the green dot in Slack or Teams, the rest is up to you.

What feedback are you getting? The implication is that you have users that are constantly surveilled by video and input device monitoring, and that they are telling you they are enthused.

The users we talk with are tired of meeting overload and some also feel lonely working remotely. They appreciate that we are trying to cut down the time they have to spend in meetings, and that a Virtual HQ tool like Jamscape make them feel more like a part of a team, as in the good old days where everyone were in the office together. Some dislike having the camera on all the time, both because of privacy concerns and for practical reasons such as this conflicting with other apps (this is only a problem on Windows, macOS allows the camera to be shared by multiple applications), but after we added the option of using keyboard/mouse event monitoring* instead nobody has complained about feeling surveilled.

We are developers building a tool that addressed the problems with remote working we have experienced ourselves (I have personally worked remotely since 2011), and we are not trying to build a surveillance tool, as none of us like to feel surveilled. We have tried to make everything tit-for-tat, so that you only get out as much information as you yourself is willing to give. For instance, you can show live video of your face, and if you do that will be able to see live video of others, but if you turn off your own video you also lose the ability to see others.

*) this monitoring, as provided by the underlying OS, does not let us see individual keyboard events, only a monotonically increasing events counter, so there are hardly any privacy implications.

I, personally, would very much resent and hate a system like that. It would encourage people to interrupt me randomly even more than they already do.

It has a do not disturb mode and an async “ping” mechanism that protects your focus time while still allowing others to indicate that they would to talk when ever it is convenient.

I actually assumed it would have a DND mode, as that's a standard part of other software in this genre. However, at least in my experience, do not disturb modes don't really resolve the issue unless it's acceptable to just keep it in that mode all the time. I don't know in advance when I will be in a state where disruptions will be problematic, so I can't plan ahead. And when in a flow state, I certainly don't have the level of external awareness required to know that I should enable DND.

This sort of thing is still an issue in-person, of course, but in-person has the advantage that when you're in person, you can tell at a glance if someone shouldn't be disturbed. That mitigates the issue a little bit.

It is a tough problem, really, and I doubt there's a technological solution to it.

And that's not even getting into the issue that such a system means you can't ignore the fact that you're constantly under surveillance. If I can't ignore that, then being under constant surveillance has really terrible effects on my mood and ability to concentrate.

Nothing prevents you from having the DND setting on all the time.

There may be no technical limitation to not setting dnd all the time but it effectively means you either have this app for some reason other than the main pitch or you're forced under this apps surveillance/interruption mode by the org. In either case the thing solved in this scenario is not reducing meeting interruptions for the user.

I think I lean with the others that the problem this app aims to solve is not really a technical problem. That said it doesn't mean there won't be lots of businesses interested in the app.

In the workplace, being DND all the time is not a thing that can realistically be done. It's not socially acceptable and I'm quite sure that your boss will sooner or later demand that you stop doing it.

Good point. It seems that since the advent of remote work, meetings have become cheap, and we are now overloaded with them.

Informal "meetings" became impossible and got replaced by formalized meetings. What could be resolved with a quick look over the table to the two other devs I need to talk with, and everyone else on the team was nearby and could hear or join the discussion, now must be a formal calendar invite because otherwise we built an information silo.

I had an example of that just this Friday (but really every day). A peer review got so complex that chat wasn't nearly enough, the PR comments were getting repetitive, and it resulted into 3 full draining hours of calls full of misunderstanding, stuck shared screens, "please can you zoom your editor I have a much smaller screen than you", etc. We used to solve issues like that with a quick look on the display next to us, maybe 20 minutes of on and off discussion while doing other things, few more quick looks and it was done. Same team, same people, less senior than now (before covid).

I love the flexibility but hate everything else about remote work.

Let’s not forget that in some ways remote meetings are superior to in person (this is not to ignore the problems with remote meetings).

One thing I like is that remote meetings can have automatic transcripts and recordings which in person ones don’t. We have those for all meetings I attend, using some tool that also tries to extract things like agreed action items. So if I missed one or forgot something I can easily review without wasting everybody’s time on a slack post or email.

I’m sure there are a few sociology PhDs waiting to be written and some killer tools to be invented.

Personally I prefer remote to in person for the same reason I prefer the Mac: “sucks less than the alternatives.”

(I have found that it has paid off to travel to meet in person some of the remote people I meet with the most. This isn’t scalable, and also means our current tooling is grossly inadequate).

My top 3 reasons are:

1. Audio delay makes everyone feel like they're interrupting and being interrupted. And the audio quality is still abysmal. I get serious misophonia from this.

2. I talk with my hands a lot, so I feel I can't express myself properly when sitting in front of a camera. If I had the space I could maybe make it a presentation floor, but I feel that would be weird. In a similar vein I don't see my colleague's body language making it harder for me to gauge their interest or opinion.

3. I get really hot ears from on-ear and over-ear headsets. In-ears also cause discomfort after a while and the microphone sucks, too.

I work fully remote, the suckiest meetings are internal to the company but not because the meetings are remote, it’s because the company sucks.

The external meetings are always superior because most of those companies don’t suck.

I feel like 60% of the points in this article relative to the problems with meetings in general that remote meetings make worse are entirely solved with judicious use of the "raise hand" feature that Teams has, and while I've never used any other software for meetings, I would be utterly gobsmacked if Zoom and the others didn't have a similar feature.

The rest of this is a lot of complaints about meetings in general that are kind of, maybe made worse with someone's bad A/V setup, but I'm always trying to avoid meetings for all of those reasons anyway.

Maybe some of people's problems with meetings have less to do with the meetings and more to do with the apparently extremely adversarial relationships they have with coworkers. I don't find many of these issues in my workplace at all, and I think unavoidably a big reason for that is we have a very solid company culture that encourages mutual respect and pro-solution attitudes. I think that's a better answer by far than anything to do with your meetings.

The raise hand feature actually makes these problems worse. There are usually a few more senior and loquacious folks who at some point start to ignore the raised hand queue. They will freely chime in like it's a normal conversation. Once that happens, the raised hand queue is nearly forgotten. This problem is even worse in a mixed meeting when the loquacious folks are all present in the meeting room and the more timid rule-following folks are all remote.

I've been in a couple of meetings like that. Fortunately, the person running the meeting shut down the loquacious people and redirected to the people who followed the rules. That of course was a public reward, so everyone else followed the rules, too. It worked well.

This is one of the thing you pay engineering managers for - someone should jump in and ask the senior people to pause while we go to others’ points.

In my opinion, remote meetings suck just as much as in-person meetings. The problem isn't whether or not the meeting is remote, it's that meetings themselves tend to be done badly.

I find remote ones tend to suck more because of the ease of scheduling them. In person meetings need a venue, they have to double check if offsite people can get there in time and they often have a fixed endpoint because other groups need to use the venue. Remote meetings don't need all of that and they often can last literally hours because of it.

Isn't it just a special case of why remote communication sucks in general? We're primarily built and optimized to live our lives in person.

I like them better then in person meetings.

I do as well. The cost/benefit of online meetings is, to me, a bit better than the cost/benefit of in-person ones. But 90% of all meetings I've even been in have been bad in some way (usually that they're wastes of time), online or not.

Yes, but if online meeting is bad or long, I can at least walk around the room, exercise a bit, read HN. With in person meeting, you are stuck.

They don't, because even if forced to attend one you can tune out and work on something else.

Some places make remote meetings work really well for themselves. You can get automated transcripts, easy sharing of stuff like slide decks, low barriers to pulling in people if you realise they have something to add, etc etc.

But if your company has a shit meeting culture I think remote meetings can make it worse. People zoning out and working on other stuff is a symptom of that. I have found online meetings hide the costnof adding too many people and people are less diligent about meeting minutes etc. So you get a pattern of meetings with lots of people who are sitting there zoned out but who can't just skip it completely because there's no other way of finding out what's going on.

They don’t suck.

(2018)

They don’t.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

"The adage does not apply to questions that are more open-ended than strict yes–no questions." -the first paragraph of the linked Wikipedia page

But there is not a yes or no answer to the headline question, so Betteridges law does not apply.

From the wiki link you provided, here are examples of where the law applies:

"Is This the True Face of Britain's Young? (Sensible reader: No.) Have We Found the Cure for AIDS? (No; or you wouldn't have put the question mark in.) Does This Map Provide the Key for Peace? (Probably not.)"

Those examples are terrible. Other than the AIDS question, a real discussion of the other two is likely to start out "no, but ...", and much more open-ended in practice than perhaps the author wants to admit. Just like the answer to "Why do remote meetings suck so much" is likely to be "they don't, per se, but..."

wh-questions are different than polar questions, and in particular, saying "no" is infelicitous in most cases, and denying presuppositions is also different than answering a polar question with "no".

From the Washington Post: Does sister need to know her abusive husband is why they stay away? Do landlords have to provide AC? Is your lamp the right size?

The law also doesn't seem to work quite as well when the verb is a modal (e.g. should, can, could, ...).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com