Why is anyone using zoom? After the encryption and Chinese key server debacle shouldn't zoom be on the permanent ban list of an company taking security and confidentially even the sightliest bit serious. I mean that was bad behavior, intentional not accidental, to a degree where I would say there is no way to ever regain the trust as long as you don't completely replace every person with influence in the company.
I would love to use another product if one could even compete in the same league. Try using Teams, for instance, and you won’t wonder anymore why people use Zoom
Google Meet used to be pretty bad a few years ago but it is totally fine now. I use it every day for work. I trust Chrome's hardening more than most other apps including Zoom.
Edit: Ok actually some Meet complaints: Weird useless white space in the UI. Doesn't put people's faces at the top of the window closer to the camera (will push them to the bottom and put screen share above). Very annoying settings UI. Generally doesn't work well when the window is small. No floating window option. No option to rearrange participant tiles. Probably 100 more like that, but it's still tolerable.
Meet was better when it was just a wrapper around webrtc with optional login.
It has steadily gotten worse ever since they started aggressively pushing users to log in, and also have phone browsers force redirect to the app (which is worse than the mobile web version was…)
You mean “Meet (original)” with the green camera logo, not the new “Meet” app with the multicolored logo that’s nearly visually identical to all the other GApps apps making it hard to discern which does what anymore? And also not “Duo” (no, not THAT Duo as in the 2FA thing), the other video conferencing app they replaced after replacing Google Talk with live video with Google Plus Huddle or wait was it Hangouts or actually both at one point?
I had the opposite experience, I tried to attend a Google Meet recently by using my Linux PC and Firefox, and could not get it to work at all. So I changed quickly to my iPad and Safari, also no go. My friend using Chrome on Windows on the table just next of mine could attend just fine.
I treat it as Chrome-only (or Gmail app on mobile), just like Zoom effectively only works in the Zoom client. It seems like in typical navel-gazing fashion Google only tests in Chrome.
Tangential but it's not just Google. Firefox is my daily driver but I am routinely pushed into Chrome, especially for work-related things (janky ass third party sites, HR sites, etc.). Very frustrating experience!
Ah, the good ol' days of enterprise apps only working in IE6. We never left it apparently. (I say "ol'" but I was dealing with the IE6 thing as recently as 2011)
Meet is barely usable - I don't understand how Google can make such a garbage product when their other products are actually decent (Pixel, Search, Android etc.)
I use google meet and haven’t had any problems personally. People complain about it but it has always worked better than zoom for me personally and every team I’ve worked on.
None of the other solutions mentioned in this thread (meet, jitsi, bluejeans) can even be described as barely functional in an area of poor connectivity. Zoom somehow still works when you’re on a cell phone with two bars driving through hills
But why are you on a (presumably) work call when you're driving over a hill with two bars? Put the work down for crying out loud. I'd love it if people like you were forced to just turn the god damn thing off when you can't actually attend a meeting instead of setting unrealistic expectations for the rest of us... It is just not that fucking important.
> Try using Teams, for instance, and you won’t wonder anymore why people use Zoom
IME, Teams is better than Zoom for meetings.
Its worse than alternatives at everything else (at a text-centric asynchronous multimedia group communication tool, its far worse than Slack, for instance).
I guess it depends on region. I've been using Google meet, zoom and teams and by a large margin teams provides the best conference experience(best audio quality, less interruptions etc). Shitty web app and lack of desktop app on Linux notwithstanding.
Did they discontinue the Linux app? In 2020, I was using a first party Zoom app on my Linux workstation, but I haven't regularly used Zoom since I left the company I was working for then.
they do have a Linux app, but it's basically a outdated (!) version of the web-app bundled with and outdated version of electron and some custom code which doesn't add anything the web-app already supports when used with chrome (and pipewire).
I've been using Teams on my intel macbook for years, it works "fine". (It's a massive battery drain and CPU hog, but other than that it works)
Not sure what you're on about. I'm all for shitting on Teams, as the chat and specifically group chat functionality is horrible, especially compared to slack (that has its own issues).
That’s odd. I’ve been using Teams without problems for years on two Intel MacBooks (currently on Monterey). In my experience it’s always been my PC colleagues who’ve had problems with audio and video.
>My experience is with windows and browser, both work fine.
That's not helpful when you're trying to chat with someone who for whatever reason is stuck with a MacBook. This is why Zoom is so great: you can actually count on it working with everyone's computer. With everything else, there always seems to be some combination of hardware+OS+browser that just doesn't work. That's completely unacceptable for a video chat platform that needs to be usable by everyone. If you're just chatting with one or two friends, one of the others might be fine since number of different platforms isn't very high and you can pick something that works for the 2 of you, but for something that needs to be usable by anyone at any time, it won't work.
In most corporate environments there is uniformity in platforms used so if windows is used which is the case with most corporations it's a non issue and especially because teams is included in the office 365 subscription those companies just use teams.
Does the browser version work well on macos? I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work on chrome.
>In most corporate environments there is uniformity in platforms
Not if you're interviewing candidates using video-chat. What's the company supposed to do, FedEx overnight a company laptop to the candidate just for doing a video interview?
I'm pretty sure it was a configuration issue at my last company, but I would constantly get massive >90% packet loss for audio, on my laptop but could call in through wifi calling just fine. Others also had issues with audio or video randomly dropping, roboting, or acting poorly. Screen share also seemed to be extremely slow to start and sometimes desynced. Teams also ate a ton of memory which got annoying every now and then.
There are some awesome features with teams that other apps lack, meeting chat being integrated into the rest of teams, and getting notifications for when recordings are available. the key features leave a lot to be desired though.
Not OP but in my experience it’s more likely to Just Work with fewer glitches and at a higher video resolution. I’d like to get away from Zoom but with consulting work it’s the only thing I’ve found that typically works with clients on the first try and with the fewest artifacts.
I have not had the same luck with the video calls as you. People have mentioned “new Teams” which is perhaps better and more stable. When I used Teams last year it was not at all comparable to Zoom
Because ”it works” trumps ”it’s ideologically sound” for most users.
Zoom is a really great product, they’ve really worked hard on the basic ”join a meeting” user experience. At least a few years back they provided every meeting with a custom installer(!) that deployed Zoom, then automatically whisked you into the right meeting.
The competition has improved by leaps and bounds, but most products used to be either super enterprise-y, requiring seven MSI files and two reboots to get you to a meeting - or super open source, bleeding you to death via a thousand paper cuts
Whereby used to be no login no plugin, it was awesome. Nowadays it requires a login and tries to milk 12€ a month, which I pay because it’s still no-plugin.
(And before you say “zOoM wOrKs iN tHe BrOwSeR tOo”, yes, but Zoom still asks _my_ partners to install the heavy client and uploads files to the Internet. That there’s a dark pattern that allows you to run in the browser is irrelevant).
> Zoom is a really great product, they’ve really worked hard on the basic ”join a meeting” user experience. At least a few years back they provided every meeting with a custom installer(!) that deployed Zoom, then automatically whisked you into the right meeting.
This is a horrible user experience -- and impossible to do in most enterprise IT environments today. Take a look at other platforms: get a link, click the link, join meeting in already installed browser. Done.
Zoom on the other hand annoys you with user hostile shit to get you to install their client. I wonder why! Their only saving grace is that they are an equal opportunity annoyer, even Linux users are not safe. /s
Because it works. I had to run and attend a lott of big online meetings involving people from dozens of different companies each time.
Anytime someone tried to host a meeting with Teams, they were never able to get/keep everyone connected. After having tried to exhaustion, I just got a GoToMeeting subscription and used that.
Skype used to work fine before Microsoft merged it into their Link abomination. Later there was Zoom that just worked.
Yes, there was lots of MS sales collatoral and infomercials in the press around Zoom insecurity. That was until MS themselves were found lacking in that same department. Later they both cleaned up their act.
I thought windows still had mostly mandatory telemetry, and as far as I know, they haven’t walked back the thing where engineers can pull arbitrary files off your machine “for diagnostic purposes only”, which means they’re legally obligated to service all sorts of sketchy warrants against machines they don’t own.
From their perspective, they practically own them.
I realized this when I first noted a process started by Chrome called "software reporter" that wasn't started by me, I had no knowledge it started and if I knew, I wouldn't let it start. The web was full of tips on how to permanently disable the thing from running. So yes, from the point of view of these companies, they can do whatever they feel is reasonable, and we as users have no say in this.
Things (and their combinations) that come to mind:
- latency+quality, even with > 10ppl
- works in challenging network conditions
- tons of tunables to make it fit one's use case
- no-account meeting join
- ability to dial in via phone
- n:p webconf/webcast mode (with p vastly > n)
- subroom breakouts
- live closed captioning
- recording (incl. chat replay + transcript)
- non-GSM-quality audio (stereo, no echo cancellation, no passband filter, high bitrate encoding)
- conference room mode with automatic presence (via ultrasound or something) and individual face extraction
- many platforms and OSes support
- Noise cancelling that will mute the sound of a German Shepherd who's just spotted the mailman (though, granted, nobody will hear *you,* either, if it's your German Shepherd :)
- Sensible defaults to the extent that if you get invited to a Zoom meeting and just download Zoom to open the meeting link, generally what you want to happen will happen (this being the other half of your "tons of tunables" point)
- A pretty decent web client you can use if you don't *want* to download Zoom
One bad marketing message and one security mistake that could have very well been accidental are enough to entirely ban list software for you? I'd love to hear what sort of software is in your allowed list, because I can't imagine it contains many "Enterprise" vendors.
Before the pandemic, I feel like the norm was to leave your home at whatever time was necessary for you personally to get into the office at the time that meetings are generally happening (at my company this was 10am, usually for standup).
One thing I've noticed on my team as we talk about returning to the office, is that now ICs seem to think about the commute as taking away from their total working hours in the day. Whereas before, they thought of being "on the clock" (so to speak) when they arrived at their desk, now, in the minds of a lot of folks, the clock starts when the commute starts.
Interesting that they only realize it now. That is why i never wanted to commute. Saw it as a waste of life. Nowadays it is a good time for me to read (sitting in a train). Commuting by car would still be stolen time i guess.
Legally in many countries commute to work is working. If you have an accident while commuting it counts as a work accident. Not sure what is the status in the USA.
but its not on the clock. So if I have an accident on my commute I am insured via work, but regardless the time spent on the commute will not be coming from my 40h/week time account but cut into my free time.
Everybody in Germany and most of the rest of Europe, too. There are exceptions but generally not for your run-of-the-mill techy. And even if you work whenever you like, your employer is obligated to show that you worked no more than is allowed by law. (That's the purpose of time recording, protect the worker from too much overtime.)
How you do that differs, but there are companies that run clock-systems for that -- many of them are coupled to the access control systems of your office/factory, so when you use your ID card to enter the building, you automatically clock in. Others require you to maintain timesheets in one system or the other.
How reliable these systems reflect how much time you actually worked is up to debate, but as employer you get into serious trouble if you don't have them.
I've seen it in France, because there are two types of contracts here - week (you get paid for 35h/week or up to 39h/week with bonus time off to compensate for the extra up to 4h on top of the "maximum" legal 35h) or day, where you get paid for 200-something work days in the year, regardless of hours worked (2 or 10, as long as the work is done and the maximum work hours in a day/week/month and the minimum rest periods are followed, all is good), which comes with a slightly different tax regime, more days off to compensate for the higher workload, etc. If you're on the first type of contract (as I was at my previous job), you have to keep track of your hours, you get overtime, etc.
In the US and in the tech career field but outside of the tech industry (and maybe even inside it in places that aren’t paying top dollar) in places like California which have a higher-than-federal salary floor for wage/hour exemption in the field, even if nominally reimbursed on a salary basis, plenty of people at junior levels, because they are subject to wage/hour/overtime rules.
Probably also a lot of people in places that have stronger worker protections than the US (which covers, well, most of the developed world.)
It’s used for in office work as well as for remote work. Essentially the company has to be able to provide a time sheet for legal reasons. This is a legal requirement for employees in a non leadership position, but even team leads are required to do time sheets , so only department leads are at a level where the legal requirements are relaxed.
This means overtime is always compensated either in pay or by taking days off and frankly I would not work any other way anymore in an employment situation (unless self employed)
I worked for a small software company in Canada. We were hourly. Had a specific start time and end time and they shoed you out the door at 5pm to lock up. If you ever had to stay late, you filled out an overtime sheet. No clock in/out but if you were late frequently you'd get a talking to.
It was annoying. I'd often be 'in the zone' at 5 and they felt the need to interrupt productive work. Not sure why. Eventually they gave me a key.
Also required in public sector jobs here. When you are on a contract with compensation time off for overtime, and it's sometimes even computed with >1:1 compensation on average hours over some time window, you kind of need to track it.
Personally this is my biggest resistance to in-office work; if the commute was recognized as part of the working hours, I don’t care if I spend some of my workday on the road (although I might feel that time could be better spent, but my employer gets to make that tradeoff).
That was one of the reasons I chose my most recent employer to be a company that doesn't have an office within 2500 miles of where I live. There's no way they could reasonably demand that I come in to their office on more than an every few months basis. Incidentally, they're also pushing an RTO for people who live within 25 miles of their office -- unsurprising, since they just rented a brand new, 16000 square foot space a few months ago. I feel sorry for those who are averse to RTO and couldn't see it coming.
Are you ever concerned you might be an easy person to chop for layoffs? My employer is moving to full-time RTO and the rumor mill is that most people outside of that (similar, 25 mile) boundary will largely be in the first round of layoffs.
Well, I live in the Bay Area, so it's not like it'd be hard (relatively speaking -- I am aware of how truly insane the job market is right now) to get another remote or hybrid gig with a more local company.
I wish some of these companies doing a return to office could share the data driving their decisions - and follow up with the impact. I suspect, but have no real data to prove, that an in office culture could enhance collaboration - within teams, across teams etc; my intuition is that there is more overhead to get the same people in sync when working remotely, than in an office - but I wonder if data anywhere shows that (and for what sort of return - very easy for these 2-3 day a week returns to not achieve all of the benefits). All these articles reporting about return to office never have any data to share though.
The collaboration thing isn't as simple as it seems though. Yes it becomes easier to reach people, but that means it also becomes easier to disrupt people.
If I am disrupted 5 times with 5 small things in an hour, that will slow me down significantly more than if I am disrupted by one big thing in that same hour.
For a tech analogy (we're on HN after all), being in the office reduces latency but in doing so can also reduce throughput.
For the kind of work managers do latency can be critical, so from their perspective being in the office is extremely helpful. Other can be most productive when given large amounts of time to focus on a single task in which case latency is far less critical.
>> If I am disrupted 5 times with 5 small things in an hour, that will slow me down significantly
But those 5 people who interrupted you are no longer blocked. If they had to schedule a call with you tomorrow or the next day then the overall productivity of the team could very well drop.
Companies care less about your individual productivity and more about the productivity of the entire organization.
Or more likely they could have sent me a message and still received their update within the hour, all without interrupting me.
If you don't have anything else you could be doing for that whole hour you probably aren't that busy anyway, in which case waiting won't hurt you too much.
The office I worked in pre pandemic had a pretty clear "don't bother people wearing headphones" etiquette. With a variation of that it seems like you could be fine?
And even if there was they would never include ALL data, e.g. you have to weigh paying rent in Hong Kong, New York, Sydney, San Francisco, London etc etc expensive places for an office building that a remote-only work place doesn't need.
Being 5% more productive in office might not make up for billions of dollars in rent and overhead.
I know for me, I solve problems much more quickly when I can walk over to my co-worker's desk and talk it over. Or have someone walk through a problem with me on the board. Or just random stuff I learn from water cooler conversation triggers thoughts in me that help me move quickly on a problem.
But it's very difficult to quantify these things. If these things were tickets, I would track their time to close, but they're not.
>I know for me, I solve problems much more quickly when I can walk over to my co-worker's desk and talk it over. Or have someone walk through a problem with me on the board.
Why don't you just give them a call? What's the difference?
For everyone who misses being able to have a quick chat with a coworker, there is another person who is glad that they can get in a work flow without random coworkers coming over to talk about something they aren't currently working on.
It’s fundamentally different. Barring the fact that it’s lower friction to approach someone in person because you can read if they’re busy (you can accomplish the same with a online status but they have to trigger it or you have to send a chat message asking is now is a good time to talk), calling someone is way more intrusive.
It’s also lower bandwidth in terms of communication. Losing the ability to gesture and point and to write on a board in real life is significant. It feels like it shouldn’t be, but it is.
> there is another person who is glad that they can get in a work flow without random coworkers coming over to talk about something they aren't currently working on.
In corporate life, you lose a lot cumulatively if you’re not generally aware of goings on. People who keep their head down and do their work do ok for a while but over a lifetime they lose out on new ideas and don’t work on important problems. Richard Hamming (of Hamming window, Hamming distance fame) noted this in the 1980s and wrote about it in “you and your research”
Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, "The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind." I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing — not much, but enough that they miss fame.
>It’s fundamentally different. Barring the fact that it’s lower friction to approach someone in person because you can read if they’re busy
I remember being approached all the time while I was busy. I don't think most people are "reading" anything. They are just interrupting."Lower friction" in this case means its harder for a person who is busy to ignore an interruption when it is standing at their desk.
>In corporate life, you lose a lot cumulatively if you’re not generally aware of goings on. People who keep their head down and do their work do ok for a while but over a lifetime they lose out on new ideas and don’t work on important problems.
I'm not sure how this relates to what we are talking about. You can be "generally aware of goings on" without being interrupted every 30 minutes.
>Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, "The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind." I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing — not much, but enough that they miss fame.
This reads as generic corporate leader woo. I regularly have discussions with my coworkers and i know what's going on.
The 'stop by chat' crowd just doesn't understand how to communicate effectively and is upset that they can no longer use inefficient channels to get information.
I see where you’re coming from but I just have a different view borne out of a different experience. I’m not one to tolerate interruptions well either but it’s not corporate leader woo to entertain unstructured serendipitous conversations (low signal to noise but the occasional fortuitous signal is worth the pain).
Weren't those surveys already done around 3.5 years ago when the pandemic first hit? I seem to recall companies like Microsoft reporting increased productivity when going remote. The same sort of thing happens when you start looking at 4 day work weeks as well.
(Sorry, I don't have links to any of those surveys/survey reports/data, so if you want to call me out, I'm just going to plead the 5th on being a little lazy.)
I never understood this line of reasoning. If you want to shed staff, don't you want to control which staff you shed? A RTO mandate just means your best staff leave because they're the ones with real options.
Maybe. But if I’ve learned anything from the layoffs I’ve been a part of or adjacent to, it’s that executives don’t share an engineer’s understanding of who might be a valuable engineer.
At the size of these companies they couldn’t possibly hold that understanding in their head. So they’re thinking more about budgets and strategies, assured by their peers that we’re all replaceable in the end. They’re not entirely wrong.
Of course, later (once the economy recovers and hiring resumes) they’ll cry that new employees aren’t picking up context or contributing fast enough, things seem to be moving slower, coordination is lacking etc.
I agree. But my current employer is having a hiring freeze for this reason. So good, employable, overworked, smart staff are leaving. And those that we don't really need are staying. It's basically the opposite of what any decent manager should want.
So I think senior management see these things differently...
Upper management just wants people that can be easily controlled, that will follow orders, and that don't create problems or complain. Middle management might care more about performance/skills, but the higher you go the more those things become irrelevant.
For the average company a "good employee" doesn't have to be a skilled one, but just one that obeys the boss.
This is also true for engineers unless you work for a totally meritocratic PhD led 4 people startup that builds quantum-enabled crypto-agnostic vacuum cleaners.
I guess the more employees you have under you, the more you just view them all as average and accept that they will just be average. That actually makes sense statistically. I'm just surprised it's the dominant model with about 100 people...
You can find this mentality in companies of any size, even if it's probably more common in medium to big sized companies.
Point is that in general people that are upper in the chain are usually pretty self-important and see themselves as indispensable, while everyone below is seen as disposable, so as soon as you drift out of their simpaties and their plans they don't care about you anymore.
Obviously there are senior managers/bosses smart enough to know about those 2 or 3 people that they absolutely need to keep for reasons(they know secrets, they have some super rare skills, ...) otherwise the company will just disintegrate.
Humans are selfish, as simple as that, almost nobody goes up in the company ladder for virtue, more for greed and convenience usually, so it's not so strange that things are like this.
In part, I think it's because numbers are all they can see and control. So if all you have is a hammer... On the other hand I also think it's because they are a bit stupid.
Ridiculous considering they want people to use their app.
Goes to show the app is not useful enough then.
BTW there is nothing dumber than hybrid work. Either have everyone go to the office or have everyone work from home.
There is nothing stupider on this planet than having 3 folks sit in an office, 1 in another office, 4 at home... The office microphones only half-ass pick up voices so you can never really understand some people.
Hybrid work is totally fine, most big companies are globally distributed anyways so it can't be avoided, my team for example in in other parts of the world so what do i get by being 100% in an office where i don't know anybody and nobody cares of what i do since i'm not i their team? Let people organize as they want, we are not babies.
Agreed that graduates or super juniors must spend some time in the office with other people, but mostly to understand how to behave in the work-centric society.
Jokes aside. Them being remote could be a huge selling point for them. Building software for remote workers, tried and tested by everyone in the company who makes it.
Remote work has been implemented successfully even before the pandemic at even large companies like IBM. Sure there was a strange eb and flow cycles of flexibility vs coming back to the office every few years but a large company like that already works “remotely” due to the vast number of people working there and all employees end up having to work with people outside their office every day if not very often.
It’s pretty clear that any directive to force people back into the office at that point is either a petty power move or a way to force voluntary attrition before having to do layoffs.
