People have been writing about it for years. This is why we have child labor laws, work week standards, etc except in white collar and tech work we've been tricked into thinking we don't need those things
In my experience, a lot of the time the people who COULD be solving these issues are people who used to code or never have. The actual engineers who might do something like this aren't given authority or scope and you have MBAs or scrum masters in the way of actually solving problems.
People need to learn manners, nobody should be using video calling without headphones. It's insane whenever someone joins and we hear all their background, feedback of whoever is speaking, etc as if nobody has ever told them to mute or stop using speaker in their life.
> People need to learn manners, nobody should be using video calling without headphones.
OK? it still sucks even with headphones. Imagine the following scenario: You are in a meeting using your headphones as you suggest. A coworker a few seats away from you are in the same meeting using their own headsphones. When they talk you hear their real voice reach your ears first (this happens with even the best noise canceling headphones to some extent) and then you hear their voice with some delay from the meeting.
This is not about manners or headphones.
Better meeting software identifies when this is happening and they suppress the streamed voice of your coworker just for you.
This is a great answer. But I would add that while a technical solution is welcomed, an organizational one could help too: why are multiple people in the same meeting joining from nearby desks instead of a conference room?
There's a downside to the conference room angle; the camera is far away, and the image of the room occupies the same amount of space on my monitor as the seven other heads in the call who are calling in remotely.
So unless I know the voice of everyone in the conference room, I have no idea who's speaking at any given point unless they're also gesticulating wildly.
I was in such a meeting yesterday where multiple participants were required by law to be each in same meeting from different computers in same room and with their mics and speakers on, and same law prevents use of conference room camera speakers and mic. There was a constant and annoying audio echo for everyone.
My org hosts it on prem, and while I don't like the way pages are organized for projects, I only really interact with the PR page and that is laid out well. Most of my interaction with git is happening from my terminal anyway so ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
Not to be anti YC on their forum, but the VC business model is all about splashing cash on a wide variety of junk that will mostly be worthless, hyping it to the max, and hoping one or two is like amazon or facebook. He's not an engineer, he's like Steve Jobs without the good parts.
reply