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Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

One person has a barking dog, the next a screaming child, the next a jackhammer. Several people have no headphones, so there’s brutal echo cancellation. Someone else is on Bluetooth, so there’s half a second latency. At least three are connected by potato.

Each word exchanged with a remote team is excruciating. I cannot imagine smalltalk or banter ever being a reasonable thing to do on Zoom.

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If a year into this thing, you can’t manage to get headphones for the whole team, I have no idea how you manage to release software.

It’s not really in the company’s DNA to be so paternalistic as “you must use wired headphones when connecting to a company Zoom meeting” although perhaps it would help. I’m sure everyone has headphones, but a lot of people choose not to use them or choose to use Bluetooth headphones that are great for music but wreck conversation. Only a few audio nerds have an inkling that this matters, let alone the boldness and clout to change others’ behavior.

I'm sorry, but your employer is incompetent if they are not working with their remote staff to make sure their equipment is functional and high quality. That doesn't mean they must decree that everyone use wired headphones. It means that they need to proactively make sure each staff member has a solution that actually works. I'm a manager and throughout COVID, whenever I noticed a team member with equipment issues I've worked with them to get it sorted out in a way that pleases them and helps everyone else communicate with them.

Being able to communicate is part of the job. If you can't do it for social or technical reasons, I'm going to work with you until you can.

Using push-to-talk goes a really long way, too. Everyone should be muted by default and unmute when they need to interject or respond.

We bought our whole team Plantronics Voyager Focus UC headsets. They cost around $250 each but are well worth the background noise cancellation and have excellent sound quality.

I looked around and couldn’t find the latency for these in the manufacturer’s spec sheet. Do you know what it is? Bluetooth does not bode well - usually hundreds of milliseconds, which is enough to interfere with conversation turn-taking.

closeparen, you're majoring in the minors.

I watch a group of twenty kindergarten students (5 and 6 year olds) every day who have figured out how to have effective remote meetings (turn taking, mute by default, etc) and most don't use headphones.

Bring up the issue with your team. Pick some norms to try, and iterate until it works. You got this.

That’s the argument. You need something very much like elementary school classroom management norms to make remote meetings sustainable with current technology. These norms are great for lectures but a serious drag on the kind of interactive, spontaneous conversation that is possible in person (or theoretically on higher quality, lower latency links).

Remote work partisans are reduced to arguing that this kind of conversation isn’t important to the work we do. Which is certainly possible! But does not match my intuition. Or my CEO’s intuition. Which is why we’re going back to the office. Maybe a remote competitor will beat us anyway. Time will tell.

I suspect that the remote dream is correct but early, and better telepresence technology will get us there eventually.

From your responses, it doesn't seem like your company is putting forth even the bare minimum effort to make it work.

I say this is a failure of management more than anything else. Tough pill to swallow if you have company pride, but a lot of people have figured this out many months ago. Doesn't mean it's perfect or a replacement for in-person meetings, but many teams are far ahead of what you guys seem to be doing (which is essentially nothing?).

I wouldn't go that far. The feeling I'm getting from their responses are of someone that appreciates the nuance and details of social interactions. As someone who lacks that detailed appreciation, this stood out for me.

It was like reading an audiophile describe what I previously thought were a perfectly serviceable set of headphones in less than stellar terms, while realizing they're probably right, but still cognizant that those short-comings did not affect my use of those headphones, in particular.

Except that your conclusion is that those meetings are useless while at all managed to make them useful.

Maybe the issue is your unwillingness to change habits and adjust to different situation.

If audio quality is so critically important for communication, then yeah, maybe send your employees headsets and make it a requirement.

It shouldn't be a matter of audiophiles trying to convince their co-workers to change their habits. It's a management problem if hardware problems are preventing effective communication.

Bluetooth headphones are perfectly fine for home work situation. Oir team members have them and there is no issue.

Any headphones work, even crappy. Muting microphone works. Technical side of these meetings is really not difficult.

But if something is a disaster, like you describe, then they need to figure out a basic effective strategy for making it not be a disaster. Like headphones or turn off your mic if not expecting to talk. It's not exactly Rocket Science.

eh. I've been doing remote work for nearly 8 years now. It's always painful.

The problem isn't fancy headphones. That's just flippant. It's that mute/unmute and everything has latency. You can't just chime in like in person. It's awkward. "Sorry, what did you say James?" "Oh, I was just going to say..." Talking over each other is much more painful virtually than in person. Jokes land flat. No one laughs because they are on mute. Or possibly didn't hear it due to packet loss or other network/audio issues.

I like remote work and can't imagine going back to an office, but I don't go around pretending there aren't serious downsides.

It is funny becouse I agree with your points but I don't recall having those problems when gaming with friends over self hosted Ventrilo.

Is it a modern SaaS issue?

I work remote with people in Europe, South America, North America, and East Asia. The zoom meetings are amazingly good.

It really depends on if everyone has a proper remote working setup or not. If your team is remote, that should be a top prority in your company.

I mean thats kind of sad that the team is so helpless to not be able to enable a very low bar for sound quality. How hard is it to buy a headset or a headphone and a microphone to everyone on company dime? At least on all of our teams people are very capable of saying "hey X can you freaking plug your microphone in, we can only hear your neighbors dog"

Haha. Just last week I posted in the intranet about exactly this. The response was telling. Pandemic bad, so cut those poor parents with screaming kids some slack. You cannot understand me because the birds outside are too loud? Please tell me :). I think we should all just communicate. Blah blah.

Everyone has decent company-issued headsets. If the company policy is to waste time in meetings, so be it. I get paid either way.

I think smalltalk is fine until everyone has finally arrived though.

Mute is the problem. Or ignorance of it.

Part of this is because most meeting software (Webex, Zoom, etc) deprioritizes it.

The single most important 2 functions of any meeting software should be: (1) Am I currently muted? (2) Can I toggle my mute status?

This used to be solved by a devices called an LED, coupled with a button, back when we had physical phones. Thankfully, we've moved on to more effective solutions. /s

Zoom is usually acceptable with a single presenter and everyone else muted. The problem is that a true conversation requires several speakers unmuted and sometimes exchanging turns very quickly, with overlap.

Muting doesn’t help if the person with background noise has to talk, unfortunately.

I believe that most of the time, background noise can be avoided. Using good microphones, separate rooms, RTX Voice, …

Just have your office administrator ship them good audio gear.

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