Zoom meetings are a poor substitute for in-person meetings and a worse one for phone calls

[sdmikev]

@cannibalpeas

The problem isn’t the tech, it’s the meetings themselves. 50% of meetings are useless and 50% of the worthwhile ones are wasted. And it’s almost always the management and execs who are the biggest offenders.

ETA: Point is, the tech isn’t appropriately applied a lot of the time, but a pointless meeting is pointless regardless of platform.

This.
Also, it’s kind of hard to have in-person meetings if someone is not in the same location…
I work for a company remotely and a lot of our customers are not only NOT near me, they are not near my company - thus Zoom meetings (we used to use WebEx).
It’s also a little difficult to share information on a phone bridge.

Also, obligatory -

[kmoser]

Can you see me? Sorry, I’ve rebooted three times now and checked all the settings but apparently the video still doesn’t come through. Anyway, you all know what I look like so let’s get on with this meeting, shall we?

[ClutchLinkey]

A Video Conference Call in Real Life

[winkybber]

Exactly. No-one ever uses video. It’s a conference call with screen sharing. It works great, and is arguably more productive than getting together for an in-person meeting. The great thing is that you can also be doing real work during the meeting without looking rude.

[anonotwit]

Teams does calls/meetings well, but I hate it for chat. The activity feed is a poor substitute for All Unreads in Slack, notifications are hard to tune so that they aren’t either too annoying or too silent and worst of all Teams compresses nearly every individual thread and channel underneath a team. Seriously, every time I see a new thread I have to click on something to get it to unfold just so I can read it.

It probably wouldn’t be so bad in an environment where you’d be subscribed to just a few teams or channels, but that really depends on what kind of organization you’re in and what kind of job you have. We had teams not just for organization units but for different technologies and different partners and different customers.

My biggest complaint with this sort of software, though, is that if someone is sharing their screen I want to see the damn screen. I don’t want to see a thumbnails of Brian and Sarah and Puneet over there drinking their coffee, I don’t want to see cryptic icons over the text, I don’t want to see the presenter’s face blocking the screen. Yes, you can usually move all that garbage off to the side but it’s a pain in the ass.