Now imagine working on an assembly line on your feet all day versus your office day job. The people on the assembly line would look at you like the most spoilt people in the world.
I personally hated going into the office, but the morale effect is real.
I think the main thing is people cannot be trusted to honestly tell you if they work better from the office. It's a nicer life working from home but whether you get more work done is debatable. And there is always too much to lose by speaking the truth.
> The people on the assembly line would look at you like the most spoilt people in the world.
It's not a matter of being spoiled or not. I'm talking about what is necessary to get the job done and the elimination of redundant rules that serve no purpose.
You can make that point about literally anything. People in X situation have it worse than people in Y situation, therefore Y situation is actually fine. It's a deflection without any actual merit.
If this were a widespread attitude surely the office workers would be paid less than physical laborers (and, frankly, they probably should be). I do a lot of physical work (that's my two primary jobs) and people don't spend their time fuming over people with soft hands—that's kind of a "loser" thing.
At the same time, that office worker has to take time out of their free time to get exercise while the Amazon driver gets paid to exercise on the job. There's a lot of health risk with not getting daily exercise.
The morale effect might be real for you, but for a large group of workers, their morale has improved since WFH. On my team of 24, only one chooses to work in the office...
Individual morale and team morale are separate. I have no doubt that their individual lives improved a lot (e.g., being able to freely do personal chores), at the expense of team morale (feeling like a part of a team at work).
>>>> The people on the assembly line would look at you like the most spoilt people in the world.
That's been part of workplace culture even when most people were in-office. The "office" and "factory" people had noticeably different working conditions. Moreover, the remote workers were largely invisible -- if we dealt with them at all, it was through their boss, or some kind of ticketing system.
> The people on the assembly line would look at you like the most spoilt people in the world.
And farmers working hard manual labor from before sunrise to sundown, in heat and UV exposure would look upon factory workers as spoilt. So what? Are you against progress? You aren't one of those "I had it hard, so these damn kids should too!" boomers are you?
My issue with every piece of commercial software I’ve used is the lag. Slack, Google Meet, Zoom… All have noticeable delay which make conversation unnatural and painful.
I’ve been using FaceTime Audio to communicate with family on the other side of the world and it’s incredible. Zero latency and great audio quality. It’s an extremely underrated piece of tech. Not sure about FaceTime video as I’ve never used it, but I bet it’s equally impressive.
Amazing that no one else was able to solve this problem considering the demand for such software during the pandemic. Not my area of expertise, but I assume it must be quite difficult.
I can't speak for FaceTime, but I've found much better success with all of these platforms if everyone in the meeting is wearing headphones. A lot of the latency is from echo cancellation, and that turns off if there's no echo.
At my last company, I let everyone on my team expense comfortable headphones with a boom mic, and it made a huge difference on Google Meet. I've found Zoom to be similar. I can't speak to Slack's latency issues.
I'm also a big fan of Tuple[0] (the pair coding app) for extremely low latency screen sharing / pair coding and that was a huge advantage too.
I’ve used these tools on all sorts of network configurations and there’s always lag.
One thing I will say is that this was all within Australia. Surely the packets aren’t going overseas, but perhaps whatever servers they use in AU just aren’t optimised for ultra low latency.
Lag is one of the issues I've never had with any of those services. I think they all have their CDNs built up enough so thats not a real problem for the vast majority of people.
I agree totally. It makes having conversation between multiple people very awkward with many pauses, then suddenly people all talking over each other, then again awkward pauses. It feels like online meetings are way more "centralized" in the sense that only a couple of people speak, and most other people remain silent. There are other technical problems to video conferencing, but lag is one of the biggest.
Agreed, people keep trying to push Teams, Zoom, WebEx and others, and everyone complains about how rubbish video meetings are. Google Meet work, and it works well every single time.
Not that I enjoyed using Google Chat much, but it did have one awesome feature: Click and the you where having a video meeting/call with the people you where just chatting to. The absolute simplicity of either planning or just setting up a spontaneous meeting using Googles solution is fantastic. I really don't get why more aren't using it.
I worked at Google for 4.5 years. If you are video calling into a meeting from MTV where other people in MTV are in person, you are probably not doing real work. It's not seamless and it's orders of magnitude less productive. Meetings take longer and rarely produce useful follow-ups if you're remote.
Mind you, I didn't say it was the same as in person. Just many common frictions of video conferencing -back then- were already eliminated. The room knew which video conference to join, noise cancellation was good, screen sharing was trivial...
> But not being in-person for collaboration/morale is miles apart.
I do agree that collaboration is much more productive when remote.
Nearly all of my exciting office "collaborations" end up feeling great then they're happening, but in retrospect, almost always fizzle out after a small window of time. I like onsites for the energy and socialization, but even then I always find most of the work happens back in the hotel room at night, and real planning happens after everyone is back at home. I can't imagine working that way all the time.
Whereas all of my remote collaborations are well documented while they're happening. Typically we have some kind of shared note taking, and writing code collaboratively, etc. Doesn't feel as social sometimes, but tends to be a much larger impact.
Likewise Open Source software has been largely written by remote people since long before the advent of even video conferencing. Git was originally written with the design intention that kernel hackers could work on a plane (per airplane wifi) without requiring a centralized server to communicate with.
> Video conf still sucks. It's literally the same as 10 years ago.
I still marvel at this. I've been working remote for nearly 15 years now and I honestly don't feel that video conferencing has improved noticeably.
My brother is looking at a new position that does 2d/week hybrid. He is thinking of laying it out this way:
* * W R F
M T W * *
So that he has wed to wed where he doesn’t go in.
Also some workers stagger their schedules and share rent on an apartment that is a “crash pad”, so they can live farther from the metro and then just commute for the two day office visit in one trip.
Pretty interesting seeing how people adapt to this.
Audio calls also still suck. Commercials in the 90s advertised "crystal clear audio quality" - they stopped talking about it but it never materialised.
> Audio calls also still suck. Commercials in the 90s advertised "crystal clear audio quality" - they stopped talking about it but it never materialised.
So this is a funny one because its definitely solvable but it's kind of a classic principal agent problem. There's a number of things that are going into 'clear audio quality'.
1. Receiver's audio output quality - This is rarely if ever the problem. People usually use their speakers/headset to listen to stuff besides corporate meetings, so they're motivated to have something at least good enough that they can enjoy their music, talk shows, whatever.
2. Bandwidth allocation - This... this really shouldn't be an issue, but it is because the user isn't paying for the bandwidth, whether that's classic cellphone calls, Teams voice, whatever. And so its in the company's best financial interest to compress the audio as much as is tolerable. This isn't really an issue if #3 isn't a problem and the user is in a place without too much background noise, but with open-plan offices, it is a problem if there's a lot of people talking.
3. User's mic quality - So in gaming communities, people will generally tell you if your mic sucks, because you're just some random stranger. And if your mic sucks and you want people to listen to you, you will probably buy a good mic eventually, tweak the settings etc. In a business context, my experience has been that the audio quality has to be pretty bad before anyone even says anything to the speaker. And then it's up to that person to either try to get it replaced by IT or pay out of pocket for a good quality mic. And this is assuming that they're technical enough to be able to pick out a good mic to begin with or even realize that its something they can solve.
I dabble in live audio. There's a huge amount that still could be done in the audio input space. Mic quality could be greatly increased for not much money, but most manufacturers stuff the cheapest component then can find into any headset <$150. Also, there's a lot which could be done with DSP (digital signal processing) before the mic even hits the computer.
You do see high quality mics and signal conditioning on the higher end systems, usually north of $250. And even then, it feels like that's a knock-on of paying for more headphone quality.
This is all overkill, solvable with the cheapest trash <10EUR pre-covid, setting up Mumble, and using push-to-talk. With moderation this even works for a few hundred people. Otherwise it's perfectly usable for about up to two dozen people, which should suffice for most meetings?
They did get crystal clear on landline. Then we moved to cell phones where quality is still abysmal and the phone app barely works... It's aggravating to me
More like it de-materialized. Unless there was a physical line problem, regular old phone calls over copper lines ("POTS") worked well. They were circuit switched, not packet switched. You essentially had a dedicated path provisioned, end to end. Today, POTS is all but gone. Almost nobody has a real landline. Most phone calls are transported over IP. I converted my landline to VOIP almost a decade ago. It's fine.
You are right, but at least the quality was reliably poor! Today, you'll spend several minutes ask someone to fix their microphone. Eventually they realize it's not even connected to their computer.
I don't understand why audio quality is so bad on every device.
Phone calls are hit or miss whether it'll be clear or not. This happens alot with places like call centers, the whole point of its existence is to be on the phone communicating with voice and the quality is to the point where it's hard to understand.
AIUI, one of the worst cases of interoperability legacy I've ever seen. If even one thing in the pipeline is compatible with POTS ("plain old telephone service", i.e., land lines in all their 3KHz glory), the whole call degrades, and since the whole call is going to be degraded anyhow, almost everything written to handle voice calling just drops straight to the POTS lowest common denominator. Which in a digital world can be even lower than POTS due to our ability to just set a number on our lossy compression codecs with all the regard for how much money bandwidth costs and no regard for quality.
This includes hardware too, e.g., microphones that work fine in the POTS frequency regimes but don't produce high quality audio, speakers chosen just to work well in the old frequency regime, etc.
So, despite the fact I have to imagine the odds of a call hitting the actual physical POTS system approaches zero today, and that in general in 2023 a high-quality phone call wouldn't actually be that expensive, the odds of a call traversing something that lazily fell back to POTS-level standards for whatever reason is still quite high.
One could write a brief sci-fi story in a Star Trek-inspired universe in which galactic war is started because the video call to High Command in the year 2642 is still running on POTS audio quality standards and some words are fatally compromised....
To be fair to POTS, it at least made up for frequency response with near zero latency. What you describe is worst of both worlds -- latency of commodity packet switching plus bandwidth of POTS.
Personally, I'd always choose zero latency over audio fidelity in a two-way communication medium.
Audio calls are fine on FaceTime and Teams (and, I suspect, most other products). But if you and (especially) your team are still talking to your screen instead of using a real headset, then yeah, the quality is going to suck. One doesn't need use the pricey headset and mic I normally use for music production, just something that doesn't have the software DSP constantly trying to filter out background noise while still picking up your voice.
But if you're referring to cell calls, yeah, we lost a lot of quality when we ditched landlines.
Encoding is fine now. Microphones are bad though. Megacorps cheap out on providing some semi-decent headphones to the employees, that's why audio can be bad.
> I wonder if employees would personally cover the cost of a one week meetup once per month if their other option was move city and office all the time.
Nah employers paying out of pocket makes so much more sense for this arrangement, just pay the remote worker less and make it clear they need to come in for one week a month. It's basically the same thing.
One week per month in-person is probably too much. Either have short monthlies or longer for a couple times a year.
It doesn't really make sense to have the employee pay because some who are fairly close by will come in and cut the day short and those who have to pay for a flight/hotel will either shrug it off as essentially a commuting cost or will deeply resent it.
Some people make enough and are mostly fine with the mental accounting to pay for certain business expenses out of pocket but a lot of people absolutely are not--especially if it's required.
I know this is personal preference, but in the past 10 years I've used Google Chat, HipChat, Slack, and Teams, at 3 different companies, and I honestly feel they're all "good enough" to collaborate and get work done. Not once have I thought, "We'd be more productive if this screenshare were higher resolution."
Video conf indeed sucks sometimes. That's when that "video" part is mandated. Actual work meetings where people look at someone presenting something or simply listening in background and working meanwhile are just fine. As long as some lowest rung PM is not mandating turning on cameras, "video" conf is great :)
Really? Video conferencing seems dramatically better to me than 10 years ago. Zoom is pretty great and various tools for screen sharing are much more prevalent now. And the one thing I really missed about working in an office (being able to whiteboard something) is mostly solved now with an iPad + Apple Pencil.
If you work for a company where your whole immediate team are co-located it can be great. In my experience I end up spending most of my time working with people in disparate offices so I get the worst of both worlds, constant in-office video calls (and all the meeting room shuffling that goes with it).
Proprietary telepresence systems have been around for a long time and they are good enough for keeping international relations going between country's governments, so they probably would be good enough for your company. They are more expensive than you might think they should be until you get into the engineering and understand what it takes to make it seamless and reliable.
The question is, does your organization actually know the value of communication between remote parties? Companies that actually run the numbers on the value of remote collaboration can pretty easily figure out if it's worth it.
We had a Cisco conference setup for two joined conference rooms back in 2014? It was like $500K per site. It was terrible, picture quality was 1080i with bad sound, but something an exec would love cosplaying as a member of the NSC. The thing couldn't easily handle conferees using webcams etc. Got torn out when the support contract ended and converted into a traditional conference room.
Is your contention here that the technology to make this seamless and reliable experience doesn't exist, or are you agreeing with me that it's not trivial to implement?
I think that unless you're a nation-state with huge budgets, creating a seamless and reliable experience is relatively non-existent. We've tried all the major vendors for conference rooms, and they all have sharp edges that give you continual paper cuts. The same is true for tech for remote users (Teams, Slack, etc etc.). That doesn't mean they're not good enough, but they definitely still suck.
I agree it sucked Pre-Covid, but now it just works. We mostly use Teams. We are RTO 2 days a week, but most work meetings are still in Teams. Demoing is way easier because you can simply share your screen rather than carrying your laptop to the various meeting rooms.
Why do so many want to video conf specifically when audio is all you need? Hell, of these, text chat is all you need and is more practical most of the time.
Because audio-only or, worse text-only, is throwing away >90% of the bandwidth of human-to-human communication. Studies show that relatively little of in-person communication is the words themselves. I don't think emojis solve this.
FYI: You can put a low-profile mechanical keyboard on top of your MacBook built-in keyboard and it works great.
I use the Keychron K1 Pro with Brown Gateron switches. It's an 80% (ten-key-less / TKL). I needed this one because I use the right shift key a lot and it has a full-size one whereas the 75% is shortened.
You get used to the slightly different layout very quickly. You might swap back and forth a bit but when you go to bed you will start dreaming about typing on it. You will even enjoy doing typing races just to press the keys.
Another new one just released is the NuPhy Air75V2.
Love the Keychron. I wanted a mech keyboard without getting lost in the whole world. My one requirement was bluetooth and the Keychron was the cheapest, non-ugly option that had it. TKL, with F-keys but no numpad, is the ideal size for me. Looking at the NuPhy now...
I've been very happy with my Keychron K3 pro so far. I'm quite surprised there aren't more options for low profile mechanical keyboards (besides Keychron and Nuphy) as I always though the portability of a keyboard as 1 of the most important features for modern day usage and commuting.
I think there is a cultural component that has transferred throughout history whereby people need to signal their level of education to others.
You've probably had it happen yourself without realizing.
You hear someone explaining something in a simplistic way, and notice yourself wondering how deeply they understand the topic. Then when you are explaining the topic, you don't want people to question your own knowledge level like you did to the other person, so you use techniques to signal the depth of your knowledge.
This might be fancy words, or skipping over simplistic things.
And I think this just becomes second nature.
You can see it with programming languages. If I told you to rate a Rust dev vs JS dev, you are thinking Rust is harder to learn so they must be smarter.
It can also just be a challenge to imagine how you thought about a concept when you were initially learning it.
English is pretty terrible for explaining a lot of math too. Math is better understood visually, but back in the day you couldn't exactly share an interactive diagram.
Agree. Our math is convenient for us humans living in our universe.
But how much of our math is just a poor approximation of our universe? Like Newton's gravity was.
If our math only _approximates_ the world, if we discovered something that explains things better, it would all be irrelevant.
There are a lot of hints that something big is missing in our maths as a means of explanation. Like the mathematical constants Pi and Euler repeating infinitely, quantum randomness...
A good line of questioning is to explore the constants that arise in physics, of which there are nineteen[3].
E.g. "Why is the speed of light what it is?".
~300,000,000 meters per second. But the definition of a meter is actually defined by the speed of light, so this number is very human-math-specific.
So instead, you want to look at the speed of light in terms of other physical constants to find a "dimensionless" constant.
This leads us to the fine-structure constant[1], which is a single number that pops out when you relate a few of these experimentally measured constants to each other.
0.0072973525693 ≃ 1/137
This is a number that if any different would mean the universe would not exist in the way it does.
Something very human is the notion of "1". Counting things is very important to intelligent life.
I was thinking the other day, about the world from the perspective of a tree. It doesn't care about counting things. So "1" is irrelevant to it. It's an invented concept by humans.
And most of our mathematical thinking is based around this.
There could be an infinitely deeper and more complicated maths to explain things.
It's like looking at a leaf without a microscope to figure out biological processes. Until the 1600s, biologists could only study what their eyes could see.
All this quantum randomness feels like we are still just looking at a leaf with our eyes.
