WFH is nice, esp when you can spare a separate room for work at your house/apartment. VoIP is also not a problem, it's even better is several ways than the real thing, as you can chat with multiple people at the same time without dragging them off their desks. Even better - screen sharing sessions.

However, there's one thing I don't understand.Why would anyone do video calls? I mean.. why...? What's the point? If I'm on metered network I'll be charged extra only because I'll have to stream out my ugly face to people who don't want to see it and stream in all the other ugly faces I don't want to see. My voice will become laggy, I'll miss out on some details, and all that because of some completely unnecessary overhead.

So why would you want me to enable my webcam? And why do you feel the need to show your face to everyone else? Why is this necessary...?

Why are you on a shitty metered connection in 2020

@electrineer because it's summer and I prefer to work from more relaxing places than my apartment

@electrineer another reason - might be not metered, but still flaky, especially in rural areas where internet is provided wirelessly. Poor weather, unfortunately, does have an impact on the signal quality.

Anyone that wants to do a video call has probably never spent enough time in one. It's always been a pain will will probably stay that way until the end of time.

Pro tip: If you can't just tell them that you don't want to show your face, just blame the hardware "oh nuh! It doesn't seem to work"

@netikras can't you get a non-shitty unmetered connection outside your apartment in 2020? Lame.

@electrineer Yepp, I'm lame.

I've been saying this since we all got sent home. You'd think a company of software engineers would understand the impact video has on bandwidth. Why do we insist on having everyone's webcam on when half of us can barely manage a decent audio connection most of the time?

Also I know for some of my co-workers it's not just them on the connection. They have 3-5 kids all also streaming for school. Plus their spouse. Even with broadband, 7 people all being in a video conference at once is a little demanding. I'd rather be able to hear my coworkers 100% than see their pixelated face.

Easy, working on a desktop PC with no webcam. And I won’t buy one “just for video calls”.
I never got why some people love video calls (Professional or personal).
“But you can stream your phone camara into teams meeting”. Yeah sur, sorry phone is out of batterie.

I dislike video calls as well, but for the sake of full disclosure :

Most of the natural communication in person goes non-verbal (something like 80% I think).
Developers are used to verbal/text communication only - not mentioning the social awkwardness that our kind suffers from. So we don't realize that as easily as other people.

Many people *need* non verbal communication to communicate efficiently, hence their requests for video calls.

Also, seeing the people you're talking to helps building rapport, which is often underrated by us, but is actually very important for a company to work well.

@M1sf3t I'm surprised he didn't mentioned the starving children

@M1sf3t Damn, you're right! It's a once in a lifetime combo we can do right here and now. Just need to squeeze some more political thing and boom! We got "THE" thing.

Sharing screens is better than sharing faces in dev calls.

Are you seriously having video calls? In 8 years working with remote collegaues we had only one and that was when higher up wanted to boast with newly installed telepresence system. Calls and meetings are common, but nobody we worked with used a webcam and i always considered video sharing to be more of marketing bait than usefull feature.

@scor except it's even easier to blame it on your internet connection when there's a 5 second lag between everyone's sentence because we're all using our webcam. And if someone freezes on screen for 5 seconds all the sudden they're nodding in agreement to something they don't actually agree with. That sounds like a bunch of nonsense.

That simply makes NO sense. It's even easier to interrupt because they claim they didn't hear anyone talking thanks to the lag. If anything that's an even better reason not to use video calls. And no one said the call itself is uninformative, you might have jump to a huge conclusion there.

@ChaoticGoods why do you have such shitty Internet services over there? Do you live in the middle of the ocean or what.

@electrineer wow. No. First, I have a 1gig connection. But that doesn't mean everyone does. Realistically MOST people don't need a great internet connection if they aren't working from home. If all you ever do is stream a little bit of Netflix and browse the internet, you're a schmuck if you're paying $80-100/m for a connection you never use. So a fair amount of my coworkers are on 25mb or 100mb connections. Which is slower enough to be detrimental to a call with up to 50 people on it.

But seriously, you can't possibly sound more elitist. "Oh my God why don't your co-workers pay more for something they don't actually need since they didn't work from home until 5 months ago. Geez, why can't you waste your money like the rest of us".

Also 5 seconds was probably an exaggeration but even 1-2 seconds is plenty of time for people to start talking when it's not their turn.

@ChaoticGoods you don't need many megabits for a reasonable video stream.

@electrineer maybe when you're

1. Not in a meeting with 50 people.

2. The people also have decent hardware instead of out of the box routers.

3. The slowest connection you can get in my area is 25mb. Yet every call we have where people are using their webcam is like watching a video taken on a security camera from the 90s. So I beg to differ. And it's not just one provider. We use Skype, teams, and Zoom depending on who's in the meeting (aka business folks who refuse to move from Skype, developers, contractors, etc).

@electrineer Where I'm spending my summer I have a 30mb/s connection. Speed is good enough, but considering the technology (wireless) the internet is "coming" to the house, it's unreliable in certain meteorologic conditions. When it's raining or snowing I'm seeing packet drops and retransmits. Unfortunately, that's the best hardware my ISP can offer (even so - not many peeps have it around there).

And I'm not planning to switch my provider just to see some faces I don't want to see.

@scor what are you even saying man? Are you just trolling? You can't seriously think there's LESS lag with video calls? Have you ever been on one?

@scor also SJW? Really? What does our dislike for video conference calls have to do with social justice exactly?

@ChaoticGoods
You, Sir, are a main driver of cancel culture.

@scor lmao cancel what? Nice try troll. We can agree to disagree but I'm not going to play into your weird idea that I'm somehow some bleeding heart SJW because I think video conferences are pointless and unnecessary especially for large teams.