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Comment by add-sub-mul-div | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there's also a "Zoom apathy" that many feel. The idea that it's harder to care about what's going on at work or what your company even does when you primarily interact with it online. Many people may not care about their company to start with, that's fair. But I wonder if there's an unspoken loss of engagement from interacting with something that suddenly feels less real and tangible.

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I think maybe it's easier to realize you don't care when working apart from a company structure. I suspect most people don't care nearly as much about the company as the company would like. There's a constant push for "Corporate Family" and what not, which at large scales stops being a two way street and def becomes more indoctrination. Being separated def allows one to start viewing their relationship with work from a third party perspective, and often can show the unhealthy lines.

But of course companies that implement these indoctrination practices really don't want that, and will do whatever it takes to keep that control in place.

It's something I noticed at the start of the pandemic. Since we no longer had in-person social events or do simple things like get together for lunch as a team, work felt far more transactional to me. I had less connection to people I worked with since I wasn't in the same physical spaces and couldn't communicate in more human, non-verbal ways. The fact that you had to plan meetings or phone calls added even more to the transactional nature since now you could track when and how often you were communicating with others.

I also felt like I had to over-emote on Zoom to make sure people saw my reaction since I was just a tiny box on their screen.

On the whole, I think remote work made it clearer to employees that their relationship to their job was truly transactional, and I think companies recognize that and that's probably one reason why many want people back in the office.

I think there absolutely is. I haven't actually met a single coworker at my current job of over 3 years, since the nearest office is almost 500 miles from me, and it absolutely feels less "real" because of it. I do my job well enough, but it and my employer feel more like an abstract concept than anything else. I'm not one to care too much about a specific job in the first place, but I feel much less connected and engaged, and the job feels even less important to my life than when I was working retail/restaurants, even though I know that's objectively untrue. It doesn't help that I'm on a very small team and only really talk to a handful of people a few times a week.

Depends on your role. When it exists _only_ online, it can be difficult to get a grasp of what the company IS.

That may not be important if you're a developer with a tightly defined role, where "turn up and do as you're asked" is the order of the day. For a soft-skills role, Product Managers and so on, it can be harder.

Slack/Discord/etc can help there, but often you'll get some departments who are active there and some who don't participate. Water coolers work better because everyone drinks water!

What I’ve learned is this is entirely about how you show up on the call and what the group permission/culture context is.

I’ve done dance parties, group therapy, and family events over Zoom. They were emotional and built relationships.

I don’t think it’s a substitute for in person interactions, but “in digital” interactions can be far more meaningful if we are willing to risk it.

How do you engage emotionally over Zoom? I prefer WFH actually, but every time I try anything else it feels really empty. It's fine if there is no alternative (e.g. talking to friends abroad), but I really can't imagine how to have a dance party over Zoom.

i personally cant take it seriously, when someone tries to be professional, using adolescent methods like webcamming.

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