Four causes for 'Zoom fatigue' (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Four causes for 'Zoom fatigue' (2021)

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34 pointsrzk54 comments

I never liked video calls. Or even phone calls for that matter. I put up with them because most of the rest of the world wants to be remote these days. I'm very much an “in person or in writing, not comfortable with the middle ground” sort.

Seriously considering a change in career (away from dev & related tech) to something where I and colleagues have to be in the same place by necessity at least some of the time (perhaps some sort of lab work?) but that means a drop in salary temporarily as I'll likely have to start much nearer the bottom than I am now…

I'm ok with video calls, but likewise, I've been wondering about a change of career if every dev job is going to be sat at home staring at the same walls every day.

Phone calls are the ones I find hardest. There's no body language to work with, but also it's instantaneous. I never insist on people having their cameras on at work, especially for group calls, I know many people don't like it. But I'm always a bit sad when cameras are off for a one-to-one call, I just find conversation much harder like that.

I don’t like video calls either, but I greatly prefer them to in person meetings with groups of people.

It’s kind of like how mp3s are worse in many ways to records but are cheap and convenient.

Of course zoom meetings are worse than being with people. But the overhead saved from a zoom meeting is amazing compared to making people walk to a room and sit together.

I’d much rather use that shared time for a walk in the day. Or better yet a productive walking 1:1.

join amazon or JPM

That adds a complication: I like my home location and would rather that DayJob didn't move far enough away that I can't conveniently commute to it from here.

For the time being putting up with where I am is probably to be optimal. But I'm still giving it serious thought…

TBH I am somewhat burned out ATM, from personal & family issues at least as much as work, so the negative feelings are likely exacerbated by that. There was a point where I considered just buggering off and going to stack shelves at Tesco, or something else “physical task based” requiring relatively little mental energy, but that would mean a huge drop in income!

I never turn on my camera, and minimise the video feeds of everyone else (as in, tab away). Problem solved.

I find some people are very pushy about wanting “everyone to have their camera on”, but I just make various excuses (I lost my camera, the laptop is upside down for better cooling, etc). 5 years now, top of the tech tree (to explain that this has not been a CLM), but still making those same silly excuses ;-)

You’d think someone might have guessed by now.

I used to have health issues that made sitting for long periods of time near impossible. As my team was aware, pretty much all meetings I had my camera off as I used the opportunity to walk around the house with wireless headphones.

My health issues are fixed now, thankfully, but I intend to continue doing that if possible, as it makes the experience far less tiring and I feel much more focused. I think the lack of video is as important a factor as the physical activity.

Your coworkers run a pool on which stupid excuse you will come up with next.

It would bring me great joy if this were true.

One thing I have noticed is that regular meetups (such as standups and the like), everyone keeps cameras off. Gatherings of people who know each other less well, cameras are more likely to be on.

I suspect this fatigue thing is why, but I’d never thought about it before.

Our company thankfully doesn't demand video enabled, but on one of the semi regular meetings a low tier manager kinda half-jokes half-demands video enabled under pretext of teambuilding. Even in such conditions out of almost 100 people joining it, camera is enabled by at most 20-25 of us, sometimes less. This is the real amount of highly extroverted and plus highly hierarchical people. Others don't give a damn.

PS: I turn on camera if it's 1to1 or similar meeting about me. But on any other meeting with more than 5 people video is only a distraction. Personally I don't even look at the video gallery and keep zoom in the background, working meanwhile.

> I lost my camera, the laptop is upside down for better cooling

It’s funny because I wonder how some coworkers can be so incompetent. And I work with programmers so it always seemed weird that someone who is generally competent would have continual tech problems.

I’m not a fan of radical candor, but I’ll say “I just don’t feel like being on camera right now” as I think that’s better than feigned incompetence.

> I think that’s better than feigned incompetence.

Strategic incompetence.

I just say "no". And if they ask why because "I don't want to." The truth is; I move around a lot and I probably called in on my mobile anyway. But I don't owe anyone a reason. Capitalists tend to have unhealthy wordviews around selfishness and entitlement and expectations on other people. I don't participate in that.

I value my cognitive capacity. Finding the email, joining, adjusting my environment, approving all the prompts, sideloading the app.... just no. Don't be pretentious. My time is valuable.

Get me to the page with a phone number and lets make this easy. Then I can go about my day and we can have this conversation at the same time.

> Capitalists tend to have unhealthy wordviews around selfishness and entitlement and expectations on other people.

I find it funny when people make such sweeping generalizations. You think this is unique or more prevalent in capitalists? That’s curious. Especially since I think most individuals can’t even be classified into “capitalist” or something else. I don’t think I have a market theory as part of my identifiers.

I characterize capitalists as folks who consistently and enthusiastically put the needs of an organization before the needs of people. You can call them businessmen if you like. My personal favorite is bootlicker.

I'm with you. We tell children: "no is a complete sentence". Many can be noxious, filling volume like gas. Capitalizing!

I will choke the next person who reminds me, a middle-aged adult with responsibilities, that humans are social creatures. I know all too well. I either don't want the company they're offering or owe mine elsewhere, thanks. Don't make it weird.

It's often not out of genuine personal interest, but business :/ Also, finally: living here has required more capitalistic behavior than I would have chosen.

I strongly suspect 'outreach' personnel have quotas for booking meetings, regardless of outcome. VC backed infra projects will have full teams with no real customers, just a promise of future profitability. At least some of those seats are dedicated setting up meetings. When they are successful, it is often one VC backed startup trading funds with another VC backed project. End users who pay are less important than the hype. The merry-go-round continues.

An annoying waste of time when you are self-funded and their offers assume you have a huge budget. I'm fatigued. The "B" in B2B implies at least one party is doing business with users.

Worse yet are the self-styled "marketing experts" or managers of "influencers" who balk at commission structures, insisting on upfront payment.

Forgot the most important thing: the 150ms to 400ms variable latency in the video/audio feed.

what would it take to get ultra low latency audio over the internet? wired ethernet at both ends, no starlink, peer to peer, small packets, no bluetooth. Probably no javascript and possibly dedicated hardware for the mic/speaker, given how shitty the latency of some sound cards is

Yep pretty much as you described. You'd have to experiment with compressed vs. uncompressed audio to see which is faster. Obviously compression adds latency, but also results in less packets which are quicker to send.

Was very surprised it wasn't mentioned

the delay is just too much you have to pre-empt an interrupt, you can’t slip a point in, you have to wait over 2 seconds for someone to respond.

It’s a small difference that isn’t noticeable at first but it makes it impossible to have a creative flowing discussion with remote workers also makes interacting with them at all inherently draining.

FWIW in person meetings mean you cannot tune out or do other work without everyone noticing. I started humorously sliding out of meeting rooms when it became obvious I was no longer needed. (And I'm not a big fan of talking soccer)

No one has a problem with people doing that IRL unless it's a bad workplace and it's more honest and polite than pretending to listen on a remote call.

I work remotely. Didn't think about these causes before, but they make sense now. Having a separate laptop for Zoom would solve all these at once.

But besides that, I feel like there are more meetings than before. Maybe it's because the bar is lower now that people can join remotely. I would probably be more exhausted if all these were in-person.

Maybe this is also why introverts and similar people have difficult times in person. If able to function that way it's more taxing / draining.

Interesting that I have almost always done item 1 from the beginning of using video calls (which was before covid hit).

I generally shrink the window so that individual video feeds are no more than a couple of inches high on my monitor, which is about 3 feet away from my face. Any bigger feels uncomfortably close. There's nothing more offputting that a call that fullscreens the other single participant, especially on a large display.

It amazes me that after all this time the various video conferencing systems still have default behaviours that make their products less pleasant to use. You would have thought they would have at least made an effort to get people to customise the behaviour to their liking. Instead they persist with defaults that people hate but don't realise they can change. I don't think I've ever met someone who likes to see themself through an entire call, but this is the default on all the ones I've ever used and I have to turn it off.

A lot of focus on the video part or hand waving. A simple reason: one is many. Since the pandemic, the quality of calls has dropped. They generally lead to more; resolution is a rarity. Slogs are indeed exhausting.

My peers and I haven't bothered to use a camera in a decade, it's not applicable in my experience. The tiring factor is more recent

The reason Zoom calls drain your energy — https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200421-why-zoom-video...

Neuroscience Explains Why Video Calls Are So Exhausting — https://www.psychiatrist.com/news/neuroscience-explains-why-...

> But on Zoom calls, everyone is looking at everyone, all the time

Does anyone else's colleagues not do this? We look away, ponder etc all the time

I tend to get intense staring from more senior people who try to weaponise it, which immediately makes it not tense for me as I know they're insecure and playing games

Though there's definitely a few with the belief that intense staring is conveying intense empathy, missing the mark somewhat

People are generally uncomfortable with being watched.

I hate looking at myself. I hate seeing myself and my dumb face.

I can spend hours upon hours on a Discord call discussion whatever, working on a collaborative project etc. But every second I have to spend on a video call looking at myself drains my soul.

I get it if it's some investor meeting or whatever, but if it's a call for a team where we all know each other, what's the point?

I show myself to subtly remind the team that I'm a real person. Most of them see each other in-person each day, while I'm remote. But it'd be nice if they didn't see such a zoomed-in view of my face.

I relate completely. I usually solve it by sticking a post-it note on the screen so it covers my face in the call. It makes the calls feel a lot more natural and less awkward.

Are you able to / have you tried turning off the video view of yourself? I do this on some calls and it helps a lot.

You can turn off self-view by default.

The day I realised this, was the day 75% of my zoom fatigue disappeared.

We use Google Meet and this is one of the big things I miss from Zoom, there appears to be no way to turn the self view off. On every call I have to turn it off manually.

I find that a lot of people who say they turn their camera off say they do it because they don't like watching themselves on screen, and don't realise this is optional. Personally I think all the video call systems should turn it off by default, I've never understood what purpose seeing yourself all the time is supposed to have. It would be like having a meeting room full of mirrors.

Cameras unintentionally left open would be much more typical if this was not the default. I agree that it still should be possible to have it off in every meeting after changing some setting, though.

True. Meet always shows you your camera view before you start the call, it would be nice to have two buttons when joining, one with your camera on and one off.

Either way, it would be nice if they put a bit more effort into these things. Video calling could be much nicer for a lot of people with a little bit of effort.

These are all true for me, but you know what's worse? In the office I have to hear everyone's meetings all the time. People feel compelled to tap me on the shoulder and interrupt the work that was supposedly so important to get done this sprint.

And you know what? In office, half the team's on video anyway because why hire locally when you can hire nationally or internationally for the best people?

I'll take a few video calls, then some actual privacy for 5 minutes to decompress, so I can actually focus for more than 45 minutes to do my work. The tradeoff is still worth it for me.

It's not really video (although the nature of video does annoy me too), it's the audio: poor latency, poor quality handling of multiple talkers, dropouts.

The number of different clients is also annoying. zoom, cisco, microsoft, home-grown in-app, etc.

In meatspace conversations, we use non-verbal cues to signal intention to speak. In Meets space it's a lot harder.

Camera helps with this. I hate video but leave my camera on so people can see when I want to speak or am reacting to what they’re saying.

I think VR for meetings is the way. It should solve all mentioned problems: you can walk around, you can choose eye contact and distance, you don't see yourself. Also it should handle concurrent speakers much better due to spatial sound

The Fridman - Zuckerberg VR interview really convinced me of this, if you haven't seen it, check it out, it's incredible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVYrJJNdrEg

At the (current) expense of strapping something big and bulky to my face.

After a long day of wearing glasses sometimes they fatigue me out slightly, just having to wear something on my face. I can't imagine what that would be like strapping a VR headset on.

Well there are already lightweight options like xreal air and it seems like full scale VR that you can wear all day is going to happen very soon

vr will do nothing for the latency, which is killing natural conversations

Actually I disagree, see previous comment re: the Fridman/zuch interview.

The genuinely cool thing about that though... They aren't sending the video.

Instead, they convert both people's faces into skeletal meshes and only send the transform data over the wire, recreating the other person at the other end as a 3D model that is being animated using the transmitted animation data.

The bandwidth requirements are reduced by like... 100x

I'd settle for the surround sound from Horizons on Quest headsets. Something about how they did it feels so much more present.

This is the line for me, if Im asked to strap something to my face to attend a meeting i’m out.

And another mandatory TOS agreement, now with biometrics

Throwback to that time

I wish there was a way you could know you’re in the good old days, before you’ve actually left them

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