from Hacker News

Why do remote meetings suck so much? (2018)

by adrianhoward on 7/13/24, 1:10 PM with 44 comments

  • by smetj on 7/13/24, 8:50 PM

    They don't but they do if you have too much of them. In my experience, the amount of meetings only increased when working remotely. I would welcome a meeting budget ... how many time one is allowed to spend in meetings over a certain time window ... once consumed you cannot be invited to, organize or join a meeting anymore.

  • by gumby on 7/13/24, 10:11 PM

    Let’s not forget that in some ways remote meetings are superior to in person (this is not to ignore the problems with remote meetings).

    One thing I like is that remote meetings can have automatic transcripts and recordings which in person ones don’t. We have those for all meetings I attend, using some tool that also tries to extract things like agreed action items. So if I missed one or forgot something I can easily review without wasting everybody’s time on a slack post or email.

    I’m sure there are a few sociology PhDs waiting to be written and some killer tools to be invented.

    Personally I prefer remote to in person for the same reason I prefer the Mac: “sucks less than the alternatives.”

    (I have found that it has paid off to travel to meet in person some of the remote people I meet with the most. This isn’t scalable, and also means our current tooling is grossly inadequate).

  • by carlmr on 7/14/24, 10:50 AM

    My top 3 reasons are:

    1. Audio delay makes everyone feel like they're interrupting and being interrupted. And the audio quality is still abysmal. I get serious misophonia from this.

    2. I talk with my hands a lot, so I feel I can't express myself properly when sitting in front of a camera. If I had the space I could maybe make it a presentation floor, but I feel that would be weird. In a similar vein I don't see my colleague's body language making it harder for me to gauge their interest or opinion.

    3. I get really hot ears from on-ear and over-ear headsets. In-ears also cause discomfort after a while and the microphone sucks, too.

  • by smackeyacky on 7/14/24, 6:37 AM

    I work fully remote, the suckiest meetings are internal to the company but not because the meetings are remote, it’s because the company sucks.

    The external meetings are always superior because most of those companies don’t suck.

  • by ToucanLoucan on 7/13/24, 9:16 PM

    I feel like 60% of the points in this article relative to the problems with meetings in general that remote meetings make worse are entirely solved with judicious use of the "raise hand" feature that Teams has, and while I've never used any other software for meetings, I would be utterly gobsmacked if Zoom and the others didn't have a similar feature.

    The rest of this is a lot of complaints about meetings in general that are kind of, maybe made worse with someone's bad A/V setup, but I'm always trying to avoid meetings for all of those reasons anyway.

    Maybe some of people's problems with meetings have less to do with the meetings and more to do with the apparently extremely adversarial relationships they have with coworkers. I don't find many of these issues in my workplace at all, and I think unavoidably a big reason for that is we have a very solid company culture that encourages mutual respect and pro-solution attitudes. I think that's a better answer by far than anything to do with your meetings.

  • by JohnFen on 7/14/24, 3:37 PM

    In my opinion, remote meetings suck just as much as in-person meetings. The problem isn't whether or not the meeting is remote, it's that meetings themselves tend to be done badly.

  • by add-sub-mul-div on 7/13/24, 11:35 PM

    Isn't it just a special case of why remote communication sucks in general? We're primarily built and optimized to live our lives in person.

  • by watwut on 7/14/24, 4:34 PM

    I like them better then in person meetings.

  • by _rm on 7/14/24, 4:58 AM

    They don't, because even if forced to attend one you can tune out and work on something else.

  • by hcfman on 7/14/24, 6:07 AM

    They don’t suck.

  • by ChrisArchitect on 7/14/24, 5:21 AM

    (2018)

  • by JSDevOps on 7/13/24, 7:02 PM