What we lost

I don't buy it. I remember real meetings. They were far more exhausting than any zoom call. Completely draining.

I guess the novelty of shuffling rooms every 45 minutes is enough to keep some people feeling "active". Or perhaps some people find it "exciting" to frantically have everyone check if there are any other nearby conference rooms with space since we're getting kicked out of this one because, unlike with a video call, the fact that everyone was "running 5 minutes late" cut into an actually scarce physical resource.

But here's my hot take: that feeling you have in video calls? It's you realizing for the first time what a meeting actually is: a waste of time. Without the chit chat and running across the hall, or the sky-high concentrated CO2 clouding your judgement, the meeting is distilled to its purest form. Since you're at home, "going to the meeting" isn't an excuse to escape your current surroundings. And since you're not walking there, the calories being burned aren't there to make you feel artificially productive when nothing meaningful took place. You're just finally seeing those 45 minutes slotted haphazardly into the middle of your day for what they really are. A waste of time.

> A video conference is a sterile dehumanizing experience. A good in-person meeting is pure jazz. Its elegant sparring between those who care deeply about the things they are building, and watching and participating in this banter is one of the joys of my professional career.

This gave me a chuckle. After 20+ years in the business, the "pure jazz" in-person meetings vs "complete waste of time" in-person meeting ratio was, I don't know, 1:100. I can think of maybe 2 or 3 out of the last several years before the pandemic that were really consequential.

There are great reasons to meet and hash things out, but honestly, if everyone's in the office, I've found that it's a green light for lazy managers to work out communication and team build by... having more meetings. Not running them well, not writing any actual decision down, just having a meeting and thinking it's progress.

My main hope is that people use this remote-first time to really learn how to write and share writing. But, if I end up just getting people to learn how to start a Slack DM with a question instead of just "Hi! Are you there?", well, that will also be progress.

I'm struggling to write this in a way that doesn't sound nit-picky, but I think what Loop isn't saying is that his career is, uh, running meetings. His blog is chock-a-block with high-level coordination managerial material. And I guess in that context I can feel sympathetic to the notion that something has been lost _for that kind of worker_. It's not my job to keep tens or hundreds of humans coordinated so the loss of in-person has also meant the, beneficial, loss of commuting, open office interrupt driven working conditions and has meant the ability to expand my timezone working cohort +/- 9 hours, since stuff is async by default. Loop's kind of work is important for large organizations but, having shied away from the kind of work he's gravitated toward, I really can't tell if Loop is just _used_ to a certain way of organizing method and can't adapt as the world shifts or if being in the same room as other people managers is actually more effective for high-level coordination work. The argument here sure does feel shallow.

"A good in-person meeting is pure jazz. Its elegant sparring between those who care deeply about the things they are building, and watching and participating in this banter is one of the joys of my professional career."

This is a manager's view of meetings.

There's a lot of "we have to get people back to the office" right now. Some of it is fueled by the commercial real estate industry, which is terrified that business will discover they don't really need much office space. There are a lot of office leases not being renewed. Some of it is fueled by managers who are terrified that people will discover they really aren't doing much. Some of it is just power-tripping.

There is a real concern, though. There's a comment that working alone gets more done in a day but less done in a decade. Lack of irrelevant input may have long-term consequences for both individual careers and organizations. Too much focus on internal goals.

To me this conflates "I am not used to X" and "X is worse".

I've been working remote for the duration of the pandemic. Is Zoom kinda terrible? Sure. But in-person meetings were often a different kind of terrible. Open office plans were a definitively worse kind of terrible for me. I was previously used to the various bad things of working in the same space. I'm now reasonably used to the various bad things of remote work, and I keep getting more comfortable with it.

I expect that if I end up going back to in-person work, I'll be able to write an article exactly like this one about what we've lost by going back to the office. That is less about the relative merits, and more about my ability to find a cloud for every silver lining.

This is all true, but incomplete in some important ways, I think.

The losses can be somewhat mitigated. As mikewarot’s comment here hints, you can slow down the meetings and take care to encourage everyone’s thoughtful participation. It requires a lot of intentional awkwardness, but I actually hope I carry this skill back to in-person meetings. “Let’s give folks a minute to think about that before we move on,” and “what are your thoughts Sally and Bob?” are useful phrases.

There are many important positives to virtual meetings. I work with a couple of new parents whose lives are greatly improved by being able to attend meetings while keeping an eye on their littles. Meetings can be much more casual and that can help us open up to each other. Meetings are often taken outside when the weather is accommodating, which is just incredibly refreshing. Folks are less able to randomly interrupt my workday just by walking by. Most importantly, time lost to commutes is returned to us and our families.

There are also negatives he left out. The biggest, by far, is just how many more meetings everyone is scheduling. Without the added back pressure of commutes, conference room availability, and real lunch breaks… everyone has gone meeting-crazy. It’s really hurting my office’s productivity.

On balance, though? Remote wins. By a mile.

My company has been back in the office for 18 months. We followed all the rules but we were also clear that as a company this is how we prefer to work. We hired and retained “office people” who like to work with smart people in real life.

I think this pool of people is growing. It still takes discipline to turn away great candidates who insist on remote first, but it’s worth it to keep this culture that works for us.

Since we are in Chicago, we all went remote for January. Work from home or from anywhere you like. Then we all got together in Austin for the last weekend of the month. I’ve never seen people so excited to see colleagues, and never heard tech workers so adamantly tell me they don’t want to work from home. (We’ll still do it again next year, because Chicago winter. But I want to make it easier for people to co-work if they are in the same place as a colleague.)

I find articles like this where people casually say they have been at home for 2 years so depressingly dehumanizing. Of course if you truly want remote, that’s great, and I’m truly happy for you. But if you don’t, you shouldn’t feel like no alternatives exist and that maybe one day if you’re lucky things will change.

(We are hiring if you are in Chicago, London, or Brisbane. Email in profile.)

I usually love rands but first 2 paragraphs were pretty bad, and sadly the "ceci n'est pas une pipe" vibe kept going back to the first image. This IS Leia, and not Carrie Fisher - Leia is a character, and it could be animated afaik.

Also, I mean, "How does our brain know its CGI? It doesn’t." - then it proceeds to list the ways our brain knows it's not a real human.

Point remains, rands is way smarter than I am, but this sounds like a stream of consciousness turned into an article to hit a quota. I also prefer meeting humans IRL than over zoom.

Somehow trying to turn a critical comment into a positive, do watch "VFX Artists React" from Corridor Digital in YouTube (and their own website) where they list the specific oddities of a scene and why our brain can't quite parse CGI as human yet.

I find both sides of the "remote vs in-person" argument rather exhausting and ridiculous.

Of course, both formats have issues. Personally, I like a hybrid remote/local work life.

I thought I wanted fully remote, but it was simply too isolating for me. I like being able to shoot the shit at work with some semi-friends. I think it connects us and adds some value to the whole operation that makes it more than about work, but caring about the people you work with.

That being said, that's just my personal experience. What is good for me might not be good for you.

I too often see people say, "Oh the only people who like in-person work are managers who want to schedule pointless meetings" like hey maybe some people actually just have different needs than you and you shouldn't insult people who may have different experiences.

For personal life, I agree that in person time is better: I spent five hours of 1:1 time today with two friends and watched streaming media with my wife tonight, more 1:1 time. That is personal life.

For work life, I think zoom is fine. Information is shared, business gets done. Zoom is good enough for work.

Am I the only one who thinks the Carrie Fisher CGI looks pretty good? I appreciate the metaphor but my brain has no problem with the deepfake version of Leia.

> That’s more familiar. Humans staring in random directions. Many clearly not listening. Camera off for one participant. Here’s the question, how many humans are on this call?

> Zero.

Now show us 14 people in a room together and tell me that all 14 are engaged. This was also a fiction. I’ve been working remotely since 2007. I spent the first ten years of my career in pointless meeting after pointless meeting. Part of what motivated me to work from home was all the time lost in the office shuffling between meetings, engaging in chit chat I was socially obligated to do but didn’t care about. Friday-afternoon beer bashes when I just wanted to be home with my wife. Ridiculous off-site team-building exercises.

I have a life outside work. I want my colleagues to be competent professionals. I’ll have a collegial relationship with a few I work closely with. But do I care what everyone did over the weekend? I do not. In a meeting of 14 people, how many people really had to be there?

I’m not saying that teamwork isn’t sometimes a lot easier in person. Some things are. Some things aren’t. And I understand that many people enjoy the company of their coworkers as friends.

Fine. I didn’t, except for a few.

I’m engaged on Google Meet just as much as I ever was in person when the meeting calls for it.

I understand some people can’t work this way. But Rands is projecting here. He clearly values being physically around his team. I get that.

But it isn’t for all of us.

I hope this pandemic ends and that those who want to return to the office can do so. But I also hope companies remember that some of us really prefer to work from home, and we’re more productive in doing so.

FWIW, I’ve worked for companies as big as HP and Verizon, and startups as small as a dozen people, and mid-size companies in between. I’ve worked for and with college and post-college friends. I have over 25 years of professional experience. We’re not all the same. Different strokes, man.

Oh and about that screenshot of Leia… I obviously knew Fisher had passed away before Rogue One was made, but didn’t realize it was computer generated. I thought it was somehow pieces together from old footage. It fooled me.

Really frustrating to read articles like this having been through 2 years of making remote working super productive.

I think some people just have an aversion to making it work, or a power trip, or need for bums on seats.

For example, our team amazingly left our business in a much stronger position "post"-pandemic than pre-pandemic. But as soon as there was the chance, our boss pulled us all back in.

Given the sacrifices made, 80% of the core team that achieved these results were gone within 3 months, and the last 20% will be gone by the next 2 months, including me.

I really believe in remote, however I/we weren't even asking for that. Just the flexibility and trust to choose what worked best at any given time. Sometimes that meant hooking up and meeting in person; or, for focused work, staying at home using all the commute energy on a great piece of work, then having dinner with your spouse.

Articles like this are a joke. Yes, I'm very frustrated about it as these kind of views directly led to the break-up of our great team, and has left me looking for another job.

Hot take: conference calls are superior to zoom meetings in every way, because they don’t give you the false sense of presence. Everyone else is a disembodied voice, and you don’t have any option of pretending otherwise so you have to figure out how to understand and be understood without the benefit of your other senses. Also, longwindedness is, in my experience, much more difficult because people that like to talk a little too much don’t get the feedback of head nods and smiles, so they tend to get to the point.

So… what we “lost” was meetings and commuting? What will we lose next, world hunger?

I know I miss out on some things with video meetings instead of in person meetings, but I consider that a small price to pay to live in a more rural community that I love, and where I can afford to buy a house and yet still work with an absolutely kick-ass bunch of humans spread across the US and Canada. Yeah I miss some of the watercooler chat, but I'll lose that to save 90 minutes of commute every day. Sure, it'd be great to just grab the key people I need for something, dive into a meeting room and hash things out on a whiteboard for 30 minutes, but at the weekend I can enjoy spending time in the workshop that I definitely wouldn't have if I lived in the nearest big city where the tech jobs are. Sure, remote means some things are worse. So what? So much else is so much better.

To the author I would ask: what did we gain? Freedom is the answer. To set your own schedule and focus on getting real work done.

I would argue that videoconferencing provides way more information than just the written medium. Like email, or postmark before it. This is a natural form of doing business. An East India trading output way out in Siam is not going to travel all the way to London for a meeting with the leadership.

There are good points to be made as to how fake CGI looks in movies, but the parallel with an actual video feed is lacking.

Meanwhile Linux has been successful beyond description, despite its development being entirely remotely. So - what's going on?

Meetings, while sometimes necessary, are a tax on productivity. They are the worst kind: they feel like real work but often aren’t, and they often generate visibility for the organizer in a way unrelated to how useful they they are.

Anything that can be a task (or diff, or Figma, or CAD artifact, or deck, or whatever) should be: tasks have a chain of custody, they have a clear owner/POC, they can change hands, the can have artifacts attached, they are searchable and durable, leaders can consult them asynchronously so that 1-on-1 meetings are: “how can I solve or help you solve this thing that seems to be in the way?” and not “so, whatcha working on? how’s that novel coming Bryan?”

A focused voice or video chat with the minimum number of participants, decent audio gear, a clear agenda with clear resulting action items, and everyone deeply contextualized via durable, discoverable subject matter media is a net win. Personal charisma loses some of its effect, being prepared becomes the name of the game: this is a good thing.

Yes it’s higher friction, yes it raises the stakes on getting the agenda, participant list, and actions items really tight. Yes it forces leaders to read diffs (or whatever work product artifacts) and understand them. in order to be part of the process or run a sane performance cycle. Yes it cranks up the volume on the question: “do we really need a meeting here?”.

As a manager who ruthlessly suppressed fluffy meetings by running a tight ship on tasks and diffs and knowing the subject matter deeply: forced remote work is the best thing that ever happened to knowledge work.

Sucks to be a manager who can’t code, but we’re better off without them.

Real meetings, zoom meetings, most of them are a waste of time and resources. I’d rather have my time wasted in the comfort of my home.

My computer club, APCU, just had the best zoom meeting ever....after almost 2 years of less than stellar results. we had flipped to the new mode that only shows the speaker in a big window, so you could see their face, and we all respected the silence. Letting things go quiet while everyone was thinking felt awesome. It was a slow, thoughtful exchange.

I can't imagine trying to use Zoom for work. If you aren't able to let the pause happen, and slow the pace of discussion to allow for interruption without talking over people, it's just going to be a waste of time. Can people slow down on work calls and let this happen? I don't know.

"Lost" is too heavy.

We "traded" some aspects of reality in favor of distributed communications and the capacity to "resurrect" characters.

It's not as though Star Wars, itself, is any more "real" than a CGI Carrie Fisher.

What's concerning, and what is in danger of becoming lost, is the certainty that misleading others is immoral.

It's one thing to create some entertainment and suspend disbelief about characters and plots.

It's another thing to abuse such tools and pass the results off as historical facts.

Some people lost human interaction, some people gained working in remote companies for x times larger salary and potential to work on something big.

I don’t know what is the sentiment in the US snd SV specifically, but Europe-based talent won’t return to offices or work in local companies or apply for work visas and migrate to US any time soon. If companies want to reach all these talented engineers they will have to operate remote-only, even if they hate zoom meetings.

Zoom calls are awful, but we really do make it worse than it needs to be.

First by having too many, thinking that more of them will make up for the terrible quality. Instead, have as few as possible, keep them on topic, short, and try to limit the participant count so people can actually converse without all the awkward interruptions.

Then, companies should send all employees really high quality microphones, monitors, real office chairs, etc, and pay for the highest quality internet connection available. They're going to save all this money on real estate for office space, they can damn well afford to appoint employees' home office with good hardware.

I'm especially sold on the microphone part. Much of what makes zoom calls tiring is the constant effort you spend trying to decipher what someone just said when their audio is cutting in and out, and even in the best case they're using the earpods that came with their phone. A low latency connection and a basic $100 podcast microphone would be a big improvement for most people.

The idea that not looking directly at your webcam means you aren't paying attention is deeply ignorant, but probably understandable for a laptop-class manager.

I've been kind of impressed by the inability of the verbal-only types to adjust to remote working. They refuse to read, they refuse to write, and in the absence of meetings, they just sort of wilt and pine away.

> Yes, I spend an excessive amount of time looking at myself. It’s ridiculous.

One of the best things I've started doing in Zoom calls is hiding my "self-view" when I have my camera on. It feels so much more natural to converse with others without seeing and monitoring my own face--I find it helps reduce Zoom fatigue.

My workplace is returning to the office, but at the same time our headquarters is being split into suburban satellite offices. Teams are being spit strictly by geography, where pre-pandemic we were all in the central office.

Satellite offices will be great for many commuters, but it means that even though we’re “in the office,” we’ll eventually be in three or four different offices, and every meeting will be a Zoom meeting (except for one-on-ones, if your supervisor happens to be located in your office). It’s too early yet to see if this will be any better than working entirely remote (except that my chair at the office is much better than my chair at home).

> You are quite literally built to sense an infinite amount of subtle bits of signal from your fellow humans.

Some of us are less able to do this, and remote work levels the playing field for us. In theory, it would be even more level if we went all-text.

100% agreed with OP. I learned to turn off my camera and not look at the screen during these meetings. Live video is simply not there yet. Live audio however has existed ever since the early days of AT&T. I treat it as a group phone call.

If I am forced to turn on my camera the same thing applies, I don't look at the screen at all, unless if I need to quickly look something up. All my notes go on physical paper.

Ever since I made this adjustment (along with exclusively using email and refusing to use slack unless absolutely necessary) my workday has become much more pleasant.

Also, wow, this comment section is a trashfire.

I quite literally have trouble believing that any of this article is particularly accurate with specific regard to work and workspaces, and mostly represents wishful thinking by manager-types who believe that the interpersonal bits are the most important bits? (which of course, might be, but perhaps not frequently?)

I don't know, anecdotally, my faculty meetings seem pretty much the same, and my other freelance IT work has been all Discord all the time (and is significantly more efficient AND has more cameraderie?) You can probably assume a bunch of other factors here of course...

>That’s more familiar. Humans staring in random directions. Many clearly not listening.

They are all starting at their screens. You can tell because of the reflection and glow. That in no way means they are "clearly not listening."

>Here’s the question, how many humans are on this call?

>Zero.

>There are no humans on this call. Yes, there are 14 participants with their video on, one with their video off, and someone dialing in.

And they are all human.

>You have five base senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Bonus fact: you actually have seven.

There are a lot more, like a sense of danger, a sense of being manipulated, etc.

>Every single of these senses, yeah, even vestibular and proprioception, are limited in a video conference call. You do not see the entire person; you see them from the chest up.

Unless you are crawling around or peeking under the conference table, you can only see people from the waste up in a regular meeting. Please don't peek under the conference table.

>when someone attempts to insert a vital fact only stomped by the current speaker who hasn’t heard the interruption yet.

People interrupt other people all the time in face to face meetings. It's not great there either. At least on a conference call, I can mute someone if they get overly obnoxious.

>I’ve been looking for cracks. I’ve been looking for leading indicators of future doom. The Great Resignation seems like a proper crack, right? But are people quitting their jobs because they can’t work together or because their current job sucks and all this terror in the area has given them a new appreciation of what really matters?

From what I can tell many people are quitting shit jobs that require people to be at a location (like a restaurant) with shit pay and no benefits. I suspect they are sick of paying for childcare and commuting too. They aren't just quitting to sit around in their underwear, they're going to better jobs with better benefits like healthcare, and the ability to work remote, which doesn't require childcare. Childcare is friggin expensive too and probably not great for their upbringing either.

>A video conference is a sterile dehumanizing experience.

So is going to meetings and commuting to an office every day. I'd pick a conference call 7 days a week and twice on Monday.

This is obviously an emotional sell to get people back into the office. It's pretty weak on actual reason other than the author likes to smell people and look under desks perhaps.

People who had more positive feelings about in-person meetings think that video meetings are a poor substitute. People who had more negative feelings about in-person meetings think that video meetings are a fine substitute (though usually still stop short of actually liking them). Introvert vs. extrovert or engineer vs. manager are too simplistic, but there are definitely different types of people when it comes to meetings. Maybe Michael Lopp (a.k.a. Rands) needs to learn that not everyone is like him and that's OK.

I wonder how much of the Princess Leia evaluation is coming from a place of “my brain knows the background of this situation, that one is a promo shot of Carrie Fisher and the other is from Rogue One”

> I suspect this is a staged Zoom call for marketing purposes. How do I know this? Everyone is smiling.

Oh come on, everyone is smiling because there's an infant in the leftmost 2nd from top video. Or a picture of an infant. Someone did "hey look at my cute kid" and everyone loses it because that's what people do.

Pretty sure whoever wrote this is an extrovert. I am much less sure whether he actually knows introverts exist. We do.

What does it matter what the video represents? The point of meeting is to communicate thoughts. As long as the idea gets across, who cares if they have video enabled or what the video looks like compared to real life?

There is a great opportunity for a good essayist to write a counter-essay titled "What we gained." It's not nearly so doom and gloom as he describes, not even with his chosen CGI example.

Yeah , people have been lamenting the end of horses for a while, too.

I much prefer attending a talk in person versus through zoom.

The interaction is better, you can interrupt the speaker more politely, and the speaker can look at audiences reactions and adjust or pause.

> A good in-person meeting is pure jazz.

I've never had this meeting once.

Pointy-Haired Boss laments losing his ability to waste your time smugly in unnecessary, humiliating meetings, news at eleven.

It lost me in the first paragraph, because I honestly couldn't tell it was CG, even after looking at it closely.

He may have good ideas - or at least presented well - about management.

But he's totally inexperienced in working remotely.

maybe the managers can go to the offices alone and have meetings between each other to feel more productive

Screen sharing is much easier over zoom. Others can add annotations too.

I’ve just started going back to the office and for 1:1s especially, being in person is wayyyyy better. Most are usually taken as a walk around the block and you come back energized and connected to the person. The random run-ins and lunches and coffee chats make work fun and not just feel like a job. It’s hard to say that about a Zoom call.