What we lost(randsinrepose.com) |
What we lost(randsinrepose.com) |
I've been kind of impressed by the inability of the verbal-only types to adjust to remote working. They refuse to read, they refuse to write, and in the absence of meetings, they just sort of wilt and pine away.
One of the best things I've started doing in Zoom calls is hiding my "self-view" when I have my camera on. It feels so much more natural to converse with others without seeing and monitoring my own face--I find it helps reduce Zoom fatigue.
Satellite offices will be great for many commuters, but it means that even though we’re “in the office,” we’ll eventually be in three or four different offices, and every meeting will be a Zoom meeting (except for one-on-ones, if your supervisor happens to be located in your office). It’s too early yet to see if this will be any better than working entirely remote (except that my chair at the office is much better than my chair at home).
Some of us are less able to do this, and remote work levels the playing field for us. In theory, it would be even more level if we went all-text.
(that's not to say there won't be discussions and clarifications required as work progresses -- and those could involve replanning and nearer-synchronous realtime conversation -- but those can often be handled using text as well)
If I am forced to turn on my camera the same thing applies, I don't look at the screen at all, unless if I need to quickly look something up. All my notes go on physical paper.
Ever since I made this adjustment (along with exclusively using email and refusing to use slack unless absolutely necessary) my workday has become much more pleasant.
Also, wow, this comment section is a trashfire.
I don't know, anecdotally, my faculty meetings seem pretty much the same, and my other freelance IT work has been all Discord all the time (and is significantly more efficient AND has more cameraderie?) You can probably assume a bunch of other factors here of course...
They are all starting at their screens. You can tell because of the reflection and glow. That in no way means they are "clearly not listening."
>Here’s the question, how many humans are on this call?
>Zero.
>There are no humans on this call. Yes, there are 14 participants with their video on, one with their video off, and someone dialing in.
And they are all human.
>You have five base senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Bonus fact: you actually have seven.
There are a lot more, like a sense of danger, a sense of being manipulated, etc.
>Every single of these senses, yeah, even vestibular and proprioception, are limited in a video conference call. You do not see the entire person; you see them from the chest up.
Unless you are crawling around or peeking under the conference table, you can only see people from the waste up in a regular meeting. Please don't peek under the conference table.
>when someone attempts to insert a vital fact only stomped by the current speaker who hasn’t heard the interruption yet.
People interrupt other people all the time in face to face meetings. It's not great there either. At least on a conference call, I can mute someone if they get overly obnoxious.
>I’ve been looking for cracks. I’ve been looking for leading indicators of future doom. The Great Resignation seems like a proper crack, right? But are people quitting their jobs because they can’t work together or because their current job sucks and all this terror in the area has given them a new appreciation of what really matters?
From what I can tell many people are quitting shit jobs that require people to be at a location (like a restaurant) with shit pay and no benefits. I suspect they are sick of paying for childcare and commuting too. They aren't just quitting to sit around in their underwear, they're going to better jobs with better benefits like healthcare, and the ability to work remote, which doesn't require childcare. Childcare is friggin expensive too and probably not great for their upbringing either.
>A video conference is a sterile dehumanizing experience.
So is going to meetings and commuting to an office every day. I'd pick a conference call 7 days a week and twice on Monday.
This is obviously an emotional sell to get people back into the office. It's pretty weak on actual reason other than the author likes to smell people and look under desks perhaps.
Oh come on, everyone is smiling because there's an infant in the leftmost 2nd from top video. Or a picture of an infant. Someone did "hey look at my cute kid" and everyone loses it because that's what people do.
The interaction is better, you can interrupt the speaker more politely, and the speaker can look at audiences reactions and adjust or pause.
I've never had this meeting once.
But he's totally inexperienced in working remotely.
I guess the novelty of shuffling rooms every 45 minutes is enough to keep some people feeling "active". Or perhaps some people find it "exciting" to frantically have everyone check if there are any other nearby conference rooms with space since we're getting kicked out of this one because, unlike with a video call, the fact that everyone was "running 5 minutes late" cut into an actually scarce physical resource.
But here's my hot take: that feeling you have in video calls? It's you realizing for the first time what a meeting actually is: a waste of time. Without the chit chat and running across the hall, or the sky-high concentrated CO2 clouding your judgement, the meeting is distilled to its purest form. Since you're at home, "going to the meeting" isn't an excuse to escape your current surroundings. And since you're not walking there, the calories being burned aren't there to make you feel artificially productive when nothing meaningful took place. You're just finally seeing those 45 minutes slotted haphazardly into the middle of your day for what they really are. A waste of time.
In the same way that swapping steam engines for electric motors didn’t yield much benefit. Just swapping real meetings for zoom meetings feels like a backwards step. But the real benefits come when you _reorganise_ your production processes around the new technology. Sadly for many middle managers, their role is disappearing and their income is dependent on them not understanding this.
It is great that people don't like online meetings. It means less meetings.
I have had very enjoyable online meetings, when the meeting is useful.
If you are having meetings all day, if that is your job, I can see how it is annoying. But that isn't most people.
Some were and some weren't. Bad leaders hold bad meetings. Good leaders hold meetings that are short, to-the-point, stick to the agenda, and involve only the people who actually need to be involved. To wit: if you don't hold sufficient authority to make decisions related to the meeting or if you aren't there to weigh in as a subject matter expert, then you don't get invited.
Every virtual meeting complaint includes the grid of 16+ people. I feel like that’s the thing that is the problem
If only it was just the meeting.
That would be really great...
In-person meetings like this require you to put in effort to appear to pay attention.
This gave me a chuckle. After 20+ years in the business, the "pure jazz" in-person meetings vs "complete waste of time" in-person meeting ratio was, I don't know, 1:100. I can think of maybe 2 or 3 out of the last several years before the pandemic that were really consequential.
There are great reasons to meet and hash things out, but honestly, if everyone's in the office, I've found that it's a green light for lazy managers to work out communication and team build by... having more meetings. Not running them well, not writing any actual decision down, just having a meeting and thinking it's progress.
My main hope is that people use this remote-first time to really learn how to write and share writing. But, if I end up just getting people to learn how to start a Slack DM with a question instead of just "Hi! Are you there?", well, that will also be progress.
This is a manager's view of meetings.
There's a lot of "we have to get people back to the office" right now. Some of it is fueled by the commercial real estate industry, which is terrified that business will discover they don't really need much office space. There are a lot of office leases not being renewed. Some of it is fueled by managers who are terrified that people will discover they really aren't doing much. Some of it is just power-tripping.
There is a real concern, though. There's a comment that working alone gets more done in a day but less done in a decade. Lack of irrelevant input may have long-term consequences for both individual careers and organizations. Too much focus on internal goals.
I've been working remote for the duration of the pandemic. Is Zoom kinda terrible? Sure. But in-person meetings were often a different kind of terrible. Open office plans were a definitively worse kind of terrible for me. I was previously used to the various bad things of working in the same space. I'm now reasonably used to the various bad things of remote work, and I keep getting more comfortable with it.
I expect that if I end up going back to in-person work, I'll be able to write an article exactly like this one about what we've lost by going back to the office. That is less about the relative merits, and more about my ability to find a cloud for every silver lining.
The losses can be somewhat mitigated. As mikewarot’s comment here hints, you can slow down the meetings and take care to encourage everyone’s thoughtful participation. It requires a lot of intentional awkwardness, but I actually hope I carry this skill back to in-person meetings. “Let’s give folks a minute to think about that before we move on,” and “what are your thoughts Sally and Bob?” are useful phrases.
There are many important positives to virtual meetings. I work with a couple of new parents whose lives are greatly improved by being able to attend meetings while keeping an eye on their littles. Meetings can be much more casual and that can help us open up to each other. Meetings are often taken outside when the weather is accommodating, which is just incredibly refreshing. Folks are less able to randomly interrupt my workday just by walking by. Most importantly, time lost to commutes is returned to us and our families.
There are also negatives he left out. The biggest, by far, is just how many more meetings everyone is scheduling. Without the added back pressure of commutes, conference room availability, and real lunch breaks… everyone has gone meeting-crazy. It’s really hurting my office’s productivity.
On balance, though? Remote wins. By a mile.
https://chelseatroy.com/2018/03/29/why-do-remote-meetings-su...
I think this pool of people is growing. It still takes discipline to turn away great candidates who insist on remote first, but it’s worth it to keep this culture that works for us.
Since we are in Chicago, we all went remote for January. Work from home or from anywhere you like. Then we all got together in Austin for the last weekend of the month. I’ve never seen people so excited to see colleagues, and never heard tech workers so adamantly tell me they don’t want to work from home. (We’ll still do it again next year, because Chicago winter. But I want to make it easier for people to co-work if they are in the same place as a colleague.)
I find articles like this where people casually say they have been at home for 2 years so depressingly dehumanizing. Of course if you truly want remote, that’s great, and I’m truly happy for you. But if you don’t, you shouldn’t feel like no alternatives exist and that maybe one day if you’re lucky things will change.
(We are hiring if you are in Chicago, London, or Brisbane. Email in profile.)
I think this is very good. Hybrid teams are worse than fully on- or off-site teams. The remote employees always end up as second-class. I think that each team should be one or the other, all the way.
How would that impact you? It is difficult for you to work with them?
Also, I mean, "How does our brain know its CGI? It doesn’t." - then it proceeds to list the ways our brain knows it's not a real human.
Point remains, rands is way smarter than I am, but this sounds like a stream of consciousness turned into an article to hit a quota. I also prefer meeting humans IRL than over zoom.
Somehow trying to turn a critical comment into a positive, do watch "VFX Artists React" from Corridor Digital in YouTube (and their own website) where they list the specific oddities of a scene and why our brain can't quite parse CGI as human yet.
If you want to argue the CG isn’t good enough, fine, but the actor isn’t the character. Sometimes actors are replaced, but other times, maybe their accent slipped in an episode, or their makeup wasn’t good in season 2, etc. So where do you draw the line?
Of course, both formats have issues. Personally, I like a hybrid remote/local work life.
I thought I wanted fully remote, but it was simply too isolating for me. I like being able to shoot the shit at work with some semi-friends. I think it connects us and adds some value to the whole operation that makes it more than about work, but caring about the people you work with.
That being said, that's just my personal experience. What is good for me might not be good for you.
I too often see people say, "Oh the only people who like in-person work are managers who want to schedule pointless meetings" like hey maybe some people actually just have different needs than you and you shouldn't insult people who may have different experiences.
For work life, I think zoom is fine. Information is shared, business gets done. Zoom is good enough for work.
For social stuff, yeah it’s soul killing.
That said, when I saw the movie and she was in motion it did seem less realistic.
> Zero.
Now show us 14 people in a room together and tell me that all 14 are engaged. This was also a fiction. I’ve been working remotely since 2007. I spent the first ten years of my career in pointless meeting after pointless meeting. Part of what motivated me to work from home was all the time lost in the office shuffling between meetings, engaging in chit chat I was socially obligated to do but didn’t care about. Friday-afternoon beer bashes when I just wanted to be home with my wife. Ridiculous off-site team-building exercises.
I have a life outside work. I want my colleagues to be competent professionals. I’ll have a collegial relationship with a few I work closely with. But do I care what everyone did over the weekend? I do not. In a meeting of 14 people, how many people really had to be there?
I’m not saying that teamwork isn’t sometimes a lot easier in person. Some things are. Some things aren’t. And I understand that many people enjoy the company of their coworkers as friends.
Fine. I didn’t, except for a few.
I’m engaged on Google Meet just as much as I ever was in person when the meeting calls for it.
I understand some people can’t work this way. But Rands is projecting here. He clearly values being physically around his team. I get that.
But it isn’t for all of us.
I hope this pandemic ends and that those who want to return to the office can do so. But I also hope companies remember that some of us really prefer to work from home, and we’re more productive in doing so.
FWIW, I’ve worked for companies as big as HP and Verizon, and startups as small as a dozen people, and mid-size companies in between. I’ve worked for and with college and post-college friends. I have over 25 years of professional experience. We’re not all the same. Different strokes, man.
Oh and about that screenshot of Leia… I obviously knew Fisher had passed away before Rogue One was made, but didn’t realize it was computer generated. I thought it was somehow pieces together from old footage. It fooled me.
I think some people just have an aversion to making it work, or a power trip, or need for bums on seats.
For example, our team amazingly left our business in a much stronger position "post"-pandemic than pre-pandemic. But as soon as there was the chance, our boss pulled us all back in.
Given the sacrifices made, 80% of the core team that achieved these results were gone within 3 months, and the last 20% will be gone by the next 2 months, including me.
I really believe in remote, however I/we weren't even asking for that. Just the flexibility and trust to choose what worked best at any given time. Sometimes that meant hooking up and meeting in person; or, for focused work, staying at home using all the commute energy on a great piece of work, then having dinner with your spouse.
Articles like this are a joke. Yes, I'm very frustrated about it as these kind of views directly led to the break-up of our great team, and has left me looking for another job.
I would argue that videoconferencing provides way more information than just the written medium. Like email, or postmark before it. This is a natural form of doing business. An East India trading output way out in Siam is not going to travel all the way to London for a meeting with the leadership.
But don't get me wrong, I think there is a huge value in sitting in a room with people working on the same code base as you. There is huge value in being able to just turn around and ask somebody about something that's got you stumped. Or to get feedback. Or even just to talk shop. This just happens a lot less when remote where I work.
But also, I don't care that I can't smell my colleagues in meetings.
That's called interruptions. When I am coding this is the last thing I want, to have someone next to me bugging me with their random thoughts, or asking for a coffee.
And back in the office we actually have Carrie Fisher. She's been dead for a while now, so the office is really even more unpleasant than before this experiment.
Clearer analogy?
I jest, but this kind of question seems to be far more shallow rather than thought-provoking. If you have a point, it’s probably better to make it than some random seemingly open ended question
Commercially? No. But the value that Linux has given the world is immense.
But a business is a lot more than just coders.
> Your job is interfacing with a computer, people are just a distraction.
Without zoom, either.
Anything that can be a task (or diff, or Figma, or CAD artifact, or deck, or whatever) should be: tasks have a chain of custody, they have a clear owner/POC, they can change hands, the can have artifacts attached, they are searchable and durable, leaders can consult them asynchronously so that 1-on-1 meetings are: “how can I solve or help you solve this thing that seems to be in the way?” and not “so, whatcha working on? how’s that novel coming Bryan?”
A focused voice or video chat with the minimum number of participants, decent audio gear, a clear agenda with clear resulting action items, and everyone deeply contextualized via durable, discoverable subject matter media is a net win. Personal charisma loses some of its effect, being prepared becomes the name of the game: this is a good thing.
Yes it’s higher friction, yes it raises the stakes on getting the agenda, participant list, and actions items really tight. Yes it forces leaders to read diffs (or whatever work product artifacts) and understand them. in order to be part of the process or run a sane performance cycle. Yes it cranks up the volume on the question: “do we really need a meeting here?”.
As a manager who ruthlessly suppressed fluffy meetings by running a tight ship on tasks and diffs and knowing the subject matter deeply: forced remote work is the best thing that ever happened to knowledge work.
Sucks to be a manager who can’t code, but we’re better off without them.
I can't imagine trying to use Zoom for work. If you aren't able to let the pause happen, and slow the pace of discussion to allow for interruption without talking over people, it's just going to be a waste of time. Can people slow down on work calls and let this happen? I don't know.
We "traded" some aspects of reality in favor of distributed communications and the capacity to "resurrect" characters.
It's not as though Star Wars, itself, is any more "real" than a CGI Carrie Fisher.
What's concerning, and what is in danger of becoming lost, is the certainty that misleading others is immoral.
It's one thing to create some entertainment and suspend disbelief about characters and plots.
It's another thing to abuse such tools and pass the results off as historical facts.
I don’t know what is the sentiment in the US snd SV specifically, but Europe-based talent won’t return to offices or work in local companies or apply for work visas and migrate to US any time soon. If companies want to reach all these talented engineers they will have to operate remote-only, even if they hate zoom meetings.
First by having too many, thinking that more of them will make up for the terrible quality. Instead, have as few as possible, keep them on topic, short, and try to limit the participant count so people can actually converse without all the awkward interruptions.
Then, companies should send all employees really high quality microphones, monitors, real office chairs, etc, and pay for the highest quality internet connection available. They're going to save all this money on real estate for office space, they can damn well afford to appoint employees' home office with good hardware.
I'm especially sold on the microphone part. Much of what makes zoom calls tiring is the constant effort you spend trying to decipher what someone just said when their audio is cutting in and out, and even in the best case they're using the earpods that came with their phone. A low latency connection and a basic $100 podcast microphone would be a big improvement for most people.
Why does this piss me off so much? I mean, the Slack thing. There are half a dozen people who DM me each day with "Hi." or "Good morning". ...And nothing else. Those messages fill me with instant dread. Oh God what are they going to ask me now?, or, fuckin' out with it, yeah?
I'm pretty sure it's because I'm right, and they know what they're headed towards will be a slog. So better to trap me by having me respond first ("Hi, what's up?"). Now that I've responded, THEY GOT ME! Without knowing the subject matter, I'm committed to a discussion about it.[0]
Contrast this with those compose an actual message. ("Morning. Quick question, how many modifiers are we allowed to comp on the widgets this year before we need the TPS Approval Team to get involved?", or "Hi. Can you update the stats today for tomorrow's meeting?") Those are fantastic. If it's a simple question, I can respond instantly without losing flow or whatever. If it's a complicated question, I can respond instantly with "I'll find out by COB tomorrow", or maybe it's complicated and also aligned with what I'm working on, so I pick up the phone and call them right then. I have options.
But the "hi" with no context or further messages? I just flat out ignore those now. Hopefully I'll be getting people to learn how to start a DM with a question.
[0] Hmm, I just got an idea. I'm going to start DMs with "Promise you won't get mad." :P
I have found out a way to make people realize by themselves how inefficient this practice is: if I get a "hi" message without any further question/info, I will delay the response for a few hours. The next time I always get the full message right away.
This must be a company culture thing. Approximately no one at my company does it.
On the contrary, it feels like a waste of everyone’s time to do the TCP handshake thing before asking the question, just fire off your UDP packet with the “hi” pleasantry and actual substance in all in one.
I don’t think that contradicts Rands’ main tpoint that something significant is lost when a good discussion or debate or rant can only be held over video conf. Modern management dictates endless meetings to justify its existence, but that is largely a separate issue from the fact that a truly “alive” face to face human interaction can not be replicated by current tech, not even close. I’ve worked primarily remote for 10+ years, but I still cherish the times when a good team I was on got on-site to debate or argue and then figure out a way forward and plan it out l. I think it can be easy to forget that with the rise of remote-first jobs and endless travel restrictions we live with.
The highest bandwidth conversation is done in person, and I don’t think tech has really come close, regardless of how far it has come. I hope that gap narrows and more younger folks can experience what they have missed if their only real job experience has been done over zoom and slack.
These are what I desire to have (that and grabbing lunch together) and why I'm looking forward to <100% WFH
In my office, this has gotten significantly worse during the pandemic. Death by a million zoom calls, we have far more meetings now than when we worked in the same space. Sure, we had plenty of dumb meetings then, but it has escalated to new heights in the last couple years.
The best thing my company did was host a single "async week". Absolutely no video calls, only async. A lot of communication shifted after that week.
For example, my group has eradicated "round robin" calls, where individuals share their status or whatever. Instead, you create a card on a doc that's mostly a kanban board. That card just links to notes in another doc. So... we basically have an agenda system that: a.) keeps regular meetings on point quickly, and b.) keeps notes of what's been decided. We wouldn't have figured this out without ripping off the band-aid and forcing everyone to do it differently for a week.
I hate to sound so cynical, but the only people I've see jazzed about meetings are business types who are uncertain what they want in the product, and engineering talks them through reality of "well we could do this or that", and sometimes it results it clarity and excitement for them, e.g. "Yes! Okay!"
1. Business types: "Is {vague and half-baked feature idea} feasible?" 2. Engineer: "Why yes, it's not a perpetual motion machine so I think it should be feasible." 3. Business types: "Okay, great. So we can expect it to be shipped next week?" 4. Engineer: "Well first we would want more detailed specs and we're waiting for an API we need from another team and we have three other projects that we are finishing up to ship next week..." 5. Business types: "We need this feature next week so let's schedule another 45 minute meeting with 15 people to figure out how we can get this done by next week."
As an ex-hi-are-you-there, let me chime in.
Unless you've had years of practice writing out your thoughts (what good programmers do for a living) and have a systematic understanding of what problem you're having and how the other person may be able to help - it is actually really hard to express yourself concisely and coherently.
People who've engaged in online forums for years or are otherwise quite intelligent just don't understand how much of a challenge this is for a lot of people.
Or for the pageantry, which the quote you cited is all about.
You may disagree that it is worse, but he doesn’t confuse “I’m not used to this” with it being worse. He has specific reasons for saying so, and all the time in the world getting used to it won’t suddenly give the additional information he believes is important in communication.
Yes, but he left out the most important part: why he thinks that extra information is important.
He does leave a clue: at one point he says his ability to "read the room" is mostly lost.
The subtext to this is that he's a manager, and his job is not just cranking out technical content, it's managing people and processes to achieve a larger goal. And his ability to do that is impaired by the much reduced information he's able to get from other people in a video call as opposed to an in person meeting.
My personal response is, this mode of working isn't going away because too many people have realized how many upsides it has as compared to a daily commute to an office and having to be in that office every day. So people who were depending on the extra information that was available in that office environment are just going to have to learn how to operate without it.
Nothing is lost in video conferencing for me personally, and a bit is gained in that it's not considered rude for me to tune out and work on other things during all the time wasting bits.
I do like being in person with people, but, like you, I also like being remote. But sometimes it feels like there is an effort to not use the things that could improve remote work just so there is an excuse to go back to the office.
Has anyone tried to deal with meeting attendance inflation with some actual economic scheme? I'm thinking where tokens are distributed and used as payment for someone to attend a meeting. This would force you to think in terms of a budget for how many people-hours of time you are requesting in meetings. Of course management and especially middle management would likely hate this idea but I'm curious if anyone tried it and what the results were.
It sounded nightmarish though.
For your question, I guess the answer would be along the line of “linux development process can’t scale to more users”. Linux is running on a lot of machines, but the number of human using it is at least a magnitude less than other popular software (I count Fb, google search, gmail into this too). Things like supporting different configurations, newly released hardwares (and 3rd party softwares) are not linux strong point. For example, subsystem maintainers are recognized, but they are not incentivized (and probably can’t afford) to make sure everything works well on hardware they do not own
That's why I specified 'coder'. Software engineering is a spectrum, at the lowest level it's just coding. At the top level it transitions to being all about the people. For the folks who are coding, their life is about taking already defined stories and turning them into reality. If the story isn't super clear, they may interface with the team lead or the PO, but when things are working right they just go heads-down and work. This is pretty close to an ideal candidate for remote work.
Edit: at link to share of OSes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
I really despise this pattern, as described by OP.
People who build unicorns know how to communicate. It‘s not that hard, really.
If you entered some parts of the game, it would run the read head over the track, and you'd smell things.
Maybe zoom could distribute a smellotron or some such. Put a variety of pheromones on it, eg anxiety, etc
It's mind-boggling how bad the SDKs remain this many years into the product.
Maybe I'm just lucky here. I found the BBS scene when I was ~12, so remote communication has been an important part of my social life since before my voice changed. So maybe I have less adaptation to do.
But either way, I don't think my fellow olds should be judging technology as if our experience is universal. If I want to know the true limits of remote collaboration, I'm going to look at the 12-25 demographic segment, as they have a lot less to unlearn than people my age.
But they don't. Why? For many reasons, one of which is my previous reply.
If it did, they would do it, and we wouldn't be talking about it.
This also applies to all other possible 'why don't X do Y?' questions - it's nice like that.
I see it with other people too for example when someone keeps rambling on and on much more often than used to be acceptable in person. You can certainly adjust to not be irritated by it but still doesn’t make it fluent and natural conversation
I really encourage you to spend some time in a youth community if you can't come up with answers to theses questions. The answer is, you don't. You pitched the thing already in a group chat. People either reacted with dozens of emoji and filled reply threads with "let's talk about this..." or they didn't and your pitch died on the vine. In more formal environments, pitches are usually in an RFC-like format and feedback is via comments on that doc (or Github issue, bug tracker, whatever-they-have-in-Jira)
Speaking persuasively in a one-on-one Discord video chat is identical to in person, or it is for people who don't feel awkward on video chat to begin with.
The design discussion thing, where the back and forth is purely technical, again just doesn't happen in video conferences. Meetings themselves were a shit format for this as well, all of this is done in dedicated group chats (Discord/Slack/Teams/whatever) where people can reference and link documentation readily and on their own time. Schedules are managed via shared calendars. Private discussions are taken to DMs.
Traditional conference-type meetings are for very specific topics, typically emergencies or something happening in real time where the pace of events lends value to being able to shout something quickly into a mic. Basically the same reason video games use voice chat. Sometimes there will be a monthly touch-base or whatever but I saw a lot of those get phased out during the pandemic because people realized that nothing new was getting put out over them.
One-sided teleconferences, where you're just dialing in to listen to a presentation of something and maybe a little Q&A, work identically to someone standing at the front of an auditorium giving a presentation. I present in a similar format weekly as part of a training program and the only difference is I get to sit down instead of standing at a podium.
All that said, I've been in a video chat with a dozen recent grads and they didn't slow down for a beat or appear to have an trouble reading one another. I cannot emphasize enough that you and I struggling with this doesn't mean anything was lost, just that we're getting older and the world keeps on spinning.
As a simple example, look at the protocol for half-duplex radio channels. One says something short and then says, "over" to signal that it's the other person's turn. Is this different than how people talk in person? Sure. Does it work? Definitely.
In your shoes, I would reexamine my concept of "design discussion". My team has made plenty of design choices during the pandemic. Maybe "pitch something" and "speak persuasively" is the wrong approach now.
Imagine you're in an audience. Somebody two rows behind you raises their hands and asks a question. Do you leap to your feet so you can turn around and stare at their face?
Most people certainly don't. Ditto if the person is otherwise hard to see. They just listen and it's fine.
One of the things that I think remote work changes is that traditional power is diminished. If you are used to forcing people to have contentious discussions where you win your favored outcome, that may be the wrong framework.
After all, "design" in software is really just making a lot of small choices consistently. Arguing people into a decision is one way to get consistency, but far from the only one.
I've been part of in-person pair programming teams that had frequent pair rotation. We only rarely had meetings, and never had any formal design meetings with pitching and persuasion and whatnot. All our communications were synchronous and high bandwidth, but our design choices happened gradually and over time. It worked fine. Better, really.
I don't mind a "Hi." followed by some [user is typing] followed by the actual question. It's the naked "hi" with nothing else. The "hi" that's just dropped there awaiting me to confirm that I'm now a part of a conversation I know nothing about.
Emails have subject lines and require the sender to write out what they want. Phone calls leave me the option to pick up or let go to VM if I'm not available. But DMs are the worst of those two: text like an email, realtime like a phone call.
For some reason those seem to correlate with users who want me to do their work for them, or are about to drop a request that I have no time for—and don't even have the time to explain why it's not my domain or a good fit for my schedule. These are requests I'd love to get via email so I can respond on my own time. Or as a voicemail. Or even as a written out DM.
But not as another message in "a conversation we're having now."
Was it a nuisance when work from home started more and more people switched over to this pattern.
Nowadays I am just fed up with it.
But it might be because after 23 months we (the company I am working for) still haven't been able to learn how to replace most meetings with forms that don't take up that much synchronous time.
Most meetings I am in could be at least cut short when prepared up front by a document that enables commenting. Then one could discuss ideas and not need to generate them on the fly.
And then there are the few cases where the need is to brainstorm. These can be fun. And I like them. But they are for cases when the map/way/ideas are yet unknown.
When the path is more clear things imho should be more asynchronously organized.
On IRC this is called "scrolling" and depending on your relationship with the person you can ask them if someone is playing a joke by hooking their enter key up to their spacebar.
In general I think what's happening is a tell that a person doesn't act with fully-formed thoughts when they open their mouth.
I pretty much agree with the other comments against people just saying 'hi' and nothing else. But this made it click to me.
I think many of the people who do this are the same who drop by your desk and ask for a random thing, without taking the time to ask whether you're available or not. This is the same thing, just moved online.
Also, bonus points for people who just say 'hi', you say hi back, and they never reply anything. Reminds me of people in person who would come up to your desk, say hi, while at the same time frantically typing on their phones and making you wait.
I completely understand where you are coming from. But rest assured, your politeness is stressing the people around you and lack of it will at worst perceived as rushness.
I like to be friendly but also to not to waste time by doing some kind of weird manual slack handshake protocol.