We got accustomed to it, but it never stopped feeling super weird, I think, somewhere deep in our heads.
A wall of faces staring at your neck is not what any real in-person thing feels like. A wall of facings looking in your eyes isn’t, either, for that matter, but the constantly-averted-gazes do add even more to the weirdness. You don’t feel so constantly watched in person, unless you’re doing a presentation.
I did a little work with one of the Big 3 management consulting firms about… oh, four or five years back, well after everyone cool and most non-cool had adopted Zoom or some other video chat for work calls. They favored actual dial-in conference calls. At first I thought they were dinosaurs, but the more I considered it the more I thought they had the right idea. Nothing to download or permissions to allow. Doesn’t tie up your laptop. Don’t need a laptop out at all, in fact. Phone number and code digits are all you need, can record that on a napkin.
Mass video chat’s so weird that I’m not sure the video’s adding value anyway, if you’re not screen sharing.
I always found the audio on phone calls awful. In addition, I cannot see who is on the call, there is no indicator who is speaking, no visual cues who is getting ready to step in. No ability to read the room because you cannot see anyone. It's just awful.
Since one of my friend groups now resides primarily online due to general diaspora, I'd say there are adaptions that make VoIP a lot better. Right off the bat, good quality VoIP calls are vastly better than phone calls, because the compression on phones combined with typically rather shitty audio equipment creates an environment where subtle tonal queues are completely absent. Discord's audio is fantastic, but so is Mumble's, a FOSS VoIP solution, so I have no idea how big companies like Microsoft can't figure it out.
Secondly, there's some etiquette rules that people eventually pick up on: Leave pauses in your speech so that people can butt in, shut up if no one's responded verbally to you in while, and understand that there is an appropriate amount of talking over each other that is acceptable.
I enjoyed working at a place that used teamspeak as the tool for conference calls, it showed who's talking. Announced joiners etc. Kept me from needing a long distance plan, kept out of the way, was snappy. It reminded me of my early days playing video games with friends, maybe the nostalgia added to the charm, I'd recommend it!
It really is like missing half the inputs when mirror neurons are not engaged. I mean this in a pop-sci understanding, not sure if its relevant. I do like to watch people's body language, although its the waking equivalent of lucid dreaming in the sense I have to be very deliberate in taking noticeof it to the extent I rely on it more than to tonality and diction.
Yeah, while I don't love videoconferencing I love the shift to it from audio conference calls. I was never able to stay focused without the visual cues and would wind up drifting off pretty quick.
> A wall of faces staring at your neck is not what any real in-person thing feels like. A wall of facings looking in your eyes isn’t, either, for that matter, but the constantly-averted-gazes do add even more to the weirdness. You don’t feel so constantly watched in person, unless you’re doing a presentation.
Maybe I just watch wayyy too much CNN, but this has never been weird to me and its fatigues me vastly less than bullshit commuting/travel
Edit: I like how any time normies start having access to rich people shit like Zooming for work, the rich do AnimalPlanet type documentary-style media campaigns about how the lower among us simply can't handle it and it needs to be gently but forecefully brought to a smooth transition until closure or the point at which they can massage through enough pointed legislation/social pressure
I absolutely hate calls. WFH works well when you just need to grind out something solo, but it’s awful to communicate.
Personally I go in the office 1-2 days a week. If you want to talk to me, do it in person those days. If you add me to some 10 person video call. I’m just going to zone out.
I feel like you need to compare a 10 person video call with a 10 person in office meeting. And of course, a hallway chat vs a 1-1 zoom call or discord exchange.
I absolutely love calls, you don't have to type and you have the other person's (relatively) undivided attention. Plus cajoling, browbeating and instigating techniques work better and if called out you can put things down to 'tonal misunderstanding.' Also a lot of people these days can't truly understand written content because they don't grasp nuance and only interpret things literally. When you actually talk to them they tend to be a little less robotic and start inferring more so you don't have to spell things out so elaborately.
At my job we use Teams and very few people ever have their camera on. This situation is perfect for me since a lot of my meetings are relatively irrelevant to what I do. My wife’s work uses the Google video chat equivalent and the majority of her meetings have most people on camera. It just looks so strange to have a wall of people nodding in agreement at whatever the speaker is saying.
Two companies Ive worked for since the pandemic have never had video meetings, voice is all you get. One was entirely remote, so id never actually see my coworker’s faces and my current one is still pretty distributed but we meetup occasionally. I like it very much, I feel like one has to be more at-attention on a video call than actual in person meetings.
+1. I’m looking forward to it becoming more commonplace as Apple get Vision into more hands - communicating in XR is way less fatiguing for me as there’s more spatial cues and body language. You can look at the speaker, it’s easier to tell when you can butt in, you can split off easily, etc. It’s much closer to the feeling in chatting in person.
I just hope Zuck doesn’t continue to make it look unpalatable - that’s why I’m hoping Apple will build a consumer-acceptable solution that will force Meta to get their act together.
I'm typically looking at the top half of one person's head, the side of a few other people's, and probably up someone's nose. Any time there's eye contact, it's extremely bizarre/unsettling.
The idea that having cameras on will convey body language like in person conversations seems patently false, partly because of the above and partly because most people moderate their expressions to an extreme while on camera.
Zoom was great when everybody was working from home. Audio quality was never a problem. Everybody on my team are on high end macbook pros and in some cases had personal higher end podcast/streamer equipment. Your not squinting at a TV on the wall 15 feet away when someone is sharing their screen. Everybody was far more prompt for meetings since they where not physically changing locations or waiting for the people who had the conference room before them to vacate.
Its the hybrid mix that I can't stand. I remained a remote employee when everyone else was forced back into the office. Now I have no idea who is talking or who is in the room half the time. The AV setups in the conference rooms pick up any background conversations and amplify them. The cameras randomly are zooming in and out at the wrong person. Nobody is ever on time to the meetings anymore because they have to move between physical locations. There tends to be a conversation in progress when the conference room finally joins the call.
The biggest thing that leads to this, I think, is bad audio. Listening to shitty scratchy laptop microphones -- or even the comparatively-excellent Apple array microphones -- is deeply fatiguing. I notice a distinct difference in energy expended when I'm on a call with people who have low/zero background noise and decent-quality microphones, and others have noted that about me (as I'm also an audio engineer in my spare time and tend to have pretty good audio and video in teleconferences).
During a job interview I was asked to teach something off the cuff. There were two interviewers in the meeting, so I decided to show the difference that a good mic with good placement can have on call quality. Switched from my nice mic that was one shaka[0] away, to the laptop mic that was about two arm lengths away (maybe 8 shaka’s). They were shocked at the difference and one asked “is that what I sound like right now?”
I went on to discuss how sound intensity is inverse to the square of the distance, so double the mic distance and it’s 1/4 the intensity. So the distant mic was picking up ~1/64th the volume. When there isn’t much of a difference between my voice and room echoes it becomes hard to listen to.
They started a discussion about how much it would cost to outfit everyone with external mics after that haha. For anyone wondering, even a cheap lapel or broadcast mic that’s close to your face will sound much better than a distant laptop, due to the comparative volume of your voice verses the environment.
[0] One shaka, or one “hell yeah” is a unit of measure an audio engineer shared with me once. Extend your thumb and pinky, and get your mic about that far from your mouth for good sound. One or two shaka’s is generally very good.
All you really need is a proper headset with boom mic. Either USB or one with a proprietary dongle because 2-way bluetooth audio sounds terrible. I would think it's pretty common for companies to issue everyone a headset these days.
Throwing in probabilistic latency and some occasional distortion and I think the fact that it almost works well enough some or most of the time makes it _worse_: instead of just getting used to a certain base rate of distortion like one might with a walkie-talkie or lossy landline, you end up constantly on edge, uncertain if you're going to fall out of sync and start talking over someone else, asking people to repeat things again and again-- it's punishments on a randomized reward schedule, a slot machine that deals out miscommunication that the communicating parties can't control or mitigate by changing their behavior.
I'm going to lose control and smash my macbook one of these days.
No one should be using built in audio IO on their laptops. A proper headset, with a relatively nice attached mic should be considered minimum viable equipment for VoIP calls, and companies should as such supply them, just like they do laptops.
What’s sad is that the relatively expensive and high end apple Bluetooth headsets also sound awful.
Blame Bluetooth blame whatever, but AirPods Pro and AirPods Max should sound incredible at their price point. And they just don’t. They sound obviously filtered and robotic.
Absolutely. My office is in a basement. The walls are all 5/8" drywall with 3.5" of rockwool inside, plus 6" of rockwool in the rafters above the drop ceiling. And that's before I get to the sound treatment on the actual walls.
People lose their minds when they hear the raw recordings from the vocal booth that's directly behind my work desk. And it was just a closet before, outfitting it just wasn't that expensive.
Eh, it's somewhat forgivable. How on earth are you going to get a headline like "Zoom Fatigue Is Real, According to My Experience" to work? If I posted that onto HN, I'd get 100 people telling me that actually, remote is fine and just as good as in-person, if not better.
There is something that I noticed quickly:
The fatigue depend of the quality of the call.
If someone in the call have a lot of background noise, have noisy environement, or a bad microphone, it takes a lot of mental energy to process what they say.
I just sat through a 3 hour french class that got moved onto teams last minute since the instructor is sick. 20 people who can barely communicate in french, unprepared, with crappy laptop microphones... I wanted to jump out the window then entire time.
The problem is most companies seem allergic to working asynchronously. During covid, they moved to Zoom calls but didn't bother changing how they work.
Sounds like my regular in-person communication experience. I wonder if this is why I don't notice any difference between zoom and in-person?
A big thing that I like about zoom vs in-person is the knowledge that I can turn the camera and microphone off, and that as soon as I end the call I'll be instantly, blissfully alone.
The truth is a modern office is based on hacking fundamental components of humans and their desire for tribal membership and signals + rewards there of. The tricks don't work as well over a zoom call.
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A wall of faces staring at your neck is not what any real in-person thing feels like. A wall of facings looking in your eyes isn’t, either, for that matter, but the constantly-averted-gazes do add even more to the weirdness. You don’t feel so constantly watched in person, unless you’re doing a presentation.
I did a little work with one of the Big 3 management consulting firms about… oh, four or five years back, well after everyone cool and most non-cool had adopted Zoom or some other video chat for work calls. They favored actual dial-in conference calls. At first I thought they were dinosaurs, but the more I considered it the more I thought they had the right idea. Nothing to download or permissions to allow. Doesn’t tie up your laptop. Don’t need a laptop out at all, in fact. Phone number and code digits are all you need, can record that on a napkin.
Mass video chat’s so weird that I’m not sure the video’s adding value anyway, if you’re not screen sharing.
Secondly, there's some etiquette rules that people eventually pick up on: Leave pauses in your speech so that people can butt in, shut up if no one's responded verbally to you in while, and understand that there is an appropriate amount of talking over each other that is acceptable.
Maybe I just watch wayyy too much CNN, but this has never been weird to me and its fatigues me vastly less than bullshit commuting/travel
Edit: I like how any time normies start having access to rich people shit like Zooming for work, the rich do AnimalPlanet type documentary-style media campaigns about how the lower among us simply can't handle it and it needs to be gently but forecefully brought to a smooth transition until closure or the point at which they can massage through enough pointed legislation/social pressure
Personally I go in the office 1-2 days a week. If you want to talk to me, do it in person those days. If you add me to some 10 person video call. I’m just going to zone out.
It's just so hard to convince others before them having tried it. You can't tell someone what the matrix is, you have to see it for yourself.
I just hope Zuck doesn’t continue to make it look unpalatable - that’s why I’m hoping Apple will build a consumer-acceptable solution that will force Meta to get their act together.
I hope there will be a way to convert voice into a realistic behaving VR avatar, no equipment needed other than a mic.
For example if I say "ok John, I like that idea", my avatar automatically faces John and locks eyes.
For most of the meeting I'm not speaking anyway so my avatar could just look at whoever is speaking and look interested.
The idea that having cameras on will convey body language like in person conversations seems patently false, partly because of the above and partly because most people moderate their expressions to an extreme while on camera.
Its the hybrid mix that I can't stand. I remained a remote employee when everyone else was forced back into the office. Now I have no idea who is talking or who is in the room half the time. The AV setups in the conference rooms pick up any background conversations and amplify them. The cameras randomly are zooming in and out at the wrong person. Nobody is ever on time to the meetings anymore because they have to move between physical locations. There tends to be a conversation in progress when the conference room finally joins the call.
I went on to discuss how sound intensity is inverse to the square of the distance, so double the mic distance and it’s 1/4 the intensity. So the distant mic was picking up ~1/64th the volume. When there isn’t much of a difference between my voice and room echoes it becomes hard to listen to.
They started a discussion about how much it would cost to outfit everyone with external mics after that haha. For anyone wondering, even a cheap lapel or broadcast mic that’s close to your face will sound much better than a distant laptop, due to the comparative volume of your voice verses the environment.
[0] One shaka, or one “hell yeah” is a unit of measure an audio engineer shared with me once. Extend your thumb and pinky, and get your mic about that far from your mouth for good sound. One or two shaka’s is generally very good.
I'm going to lose control and smash my macbook one of these days.
Blame Bluetooth blame whatever, but AirPods Pro and AirPods Max should sound incredible at their price point. And they just don’t. They sound obviously filtered and robotic.
And also the latency they add is a problem.
People lose their minds when they hear the raw recordings from the vocal booth that's directly behind my work desk. And it was just a closet before, outfitting it just wasn't that expensive.
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A big thing that I like about zoom vs in-person is the knowledge that I can turn the camera and microphone off, and that as soon as I end the call I'll be instantly, blissfully alone.