from Hacker News

Ask HN: Does your company Zoom or nah?

by psmithsfhn on 7/1/20, 3:18 PM with 2 comments

Why or why not?

For my current job, the answer is 'nah'. I think the reason is: because we are technologically incapable of doing it, even if we wanted to do it.

(Don't shoot the messenger.)

We do audio/screenshare-only meetings -- i.e. we do not use Zoom or other software to put our faces/bodies/apts/houses/dogs/children/significant-others/furniture/books/social-class/personal-lives on camera.

I have decided I really like this, and this is the best way to work remotely.

Sometimes we do audio-only meetings without the screensharing, and vice-versa.

There now seems to be some counter-momentum to the Zoom/video-is-better (because non-verbal communication is everything*) narrative, but I'm curious if my company is unique in this no-Zoom regard.

I don't have a "Zoom Shirt".

I consider the ability to work without video on me to be a major plus of my current work situation. I would even like to search for a new job with this as one of my primary criteria -- pretty close to a prerequisite.

  • by jetti on 7/1/20, 3:22 PM

    We have moved to Zoom for our team meetings but as a company we use goto meeting. My team used Slack for our standup but we were having a bunch of issues and a teammate has a paid Zoom account and was pushing for that. We are happy about Zoom compared to Slack for video calls. We are a normally distributed team so the video chat is an important aspect for us.
  • by verdverm on 7/1/20, 3:25 PM

    We prefer Google Meet because we already pay for it and multiple people can screen share at the same time. Really great for dev collab / standup.

    Zoom seems to have security risk, so we've started asking vendors to use our links instead of their Zoom links. A little harder with clients...