Hacker News Reader

Comment by gardnr | Hacker News Reader

This is the real advantage. Any crapbox with 16GB of ram is good enough for most things (unless you work on JVM microservices), the main benefit of the new laptops is the unreal battery life.

That, and USB-C charging is handy if you spend a lot of time on the road.

View on HN

It's worth it to note: When doing interviews for a new role, the camera quality really does matter.

To whom does it really matter? How do you know?

Thanks for asking. I should have mentioned this is based on anecdotal personal experience. I used to have an ancient laptop with a bad mic and a low res webcam.

I noticed much higher callback rate after upgrading. This is admittedly a small sample size.

I agree with you that if you're doing a lot of remote interviews having a decent camera is worth the investment. I have no doubt that people will subconsciously judge people who have meet through a potato.

In my experience audio is an order of magnitude more important than video.

In my experience working in a remote team, what matters is the audio. Ideally a headset (so that your voice does not get cut while someone is talking) with a decent mic. Not understanding what the remote person says is very frustrating.

Any webcam does the job as long as you can recognize the person. Anyway most people use this blurry background thingy, I really don't believe that the video quality matters.

You can also get a USB webcam for like 15 bucks. Coming from the integrated 720p cam my laptop had, a 15 buck webcam was wonderful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com