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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

> In my experience, there's also far less participation when everybody has their camera off.

I feel this is a blessing in most cases.

Remembering in-person meetings, half of the “participation” was asking to get back one slide before to check a point that went too fast, questions on points that are dealt with two slides further, people getting asked questions as a punishment for being visibly bored to death, and facts that could be checked by a 10s document search but would seem rude to be looking for right now.

Forcing people to share their documents, everyone free to get back and forth in the slides on their side, and just able to cut the camera/mic and look for whatever they feel they need to look for, do whatever they need to do just helps tremendously to cut down on unneeded back and forth, and improves a lot on efficiency.

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> get back one slide

This is all even worse if you try to carry over the same process to remote work. I feel like virtual meetings increase the emphasis on slides too much. In person, the presenter can be up front, gesturing, pointing, really bringing animation to the slides. In virtual meetings it's just the screen share of the slide and a talking head. It's a horribly unengaging experience.

The easy fix to this is sharing presentation files before the meeting so everyone can follow along however they want. Meetings should mostly be to discuss the information that you already have, not to be surprised with brand new information.

Couldn't agree more with this, however it's hard to make happen in practice. A lot of times people are so caught up in their own tasks and responsibilities they don't set aside time to read up before a meeting, not to mention slides/docs are rarely laid out well enough for people to inform themselves completely.

You can't make your coworkers do anything. But if you're the boss, you can create whatever type of meeting culture you want. Some companies do read-aheads very well, which I really like.

The point isn't to come completely informed. Just enough to prepare some thoughts and questions.

> But if you're the boss, you can create whatever type of meeting culture you want.

If only. Bosses can really only mess things up. Leadership sets expectations, but employees as a group have to keep each other in check, and propagate the culture to new hires as they come on board, or things deflate pretty quickly.

While I sympathize with your point, I kinda wonder how much it really helped to have a charismatic peoples deliver meh information.

More and more I see meetings that stop for 30s~1min because the presenter raised a point that hit us and we take a few moments to digest/double check. On the other end basic reporting meetings got a lot shorter.

Basically, if there is nothing to be said, it just ends up with that unengaging, really boring feeling. If there was any interest in the subject, time goes faster as we’re also checking a lot in the background. I kinda see the default boringness as a feature really.

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