> I'm talking about preferring to never do a voice/video call.
That would drive me crazy.
I think you'll have to accept that somethings have to be face to face. And some companies prefer to do things that way.
I guess you adapt or go to a company that can guarantee you'll never have to speak to someone at all.
But face to face is the oldest form of human interaction. Its going to be hard to get along in the real world if you really don't like it.
I'm trying to imagine how you'd do something like a lay off over chat or an interview or a performance review? That just seems like living life on the hardest possible mode.
I for one prefer actually face to face, then text chat, then voice chat, video chat never. Screen shares are almost always a signal that this call will be a huge waste of time, but I suppose it’s fairly necessary if you insist on voice chat.
Video chat is obviously here to stay in the software industry, which is why I’ve left it. I worked started working remotely from 2015 onward, felt ambivalent about it, but the the proliferation of video meetings with the pandemic really made it bad. I worked in office in 2021 and 2022, but once the genie was out of the bottle, you’d get calls all the time. Used to be you could just send a status report to sync up with overseas teams, but now, why not a daily video call? just a bizarrely irritating and draining way to spend your day.
Screen shares are almost always a signal that this call will be a huge waste of time
If you're talking about just sharing images of each other's faces, then sure. But if you're talking about an actual screen, with an editor, and code, and config files, and debug logs, or whatever, then "hard disagree" here. I can't even count the times somebody has pinged me for help with something, made it sound super mysterious and unsolvable while explaining through text chat, and then we had a Teams call and I saw something in (their code|their config|their debug logs|etc) that let me solve the problem for them in like 2 minutes.
That shit is exactly why I agree with the person up-thread who said "I almost always want to jump on a call ..." IME, things get done quicker when I can actually see what's going on for myself instead of having to read someone else's abridged / misinterpreted / whatever version of events.
That would drive me crazy.
I think you'll have to accept that somethings have to be face to face. And some companies prefer to do things that way.
I guess you adapt or go to a company that can guarantee you'll never have to speak to someone at all.
But face to face is the oldest form of human interaction. Its going to be hard to get along in the real world if you really don't like it.
I'm trying to imagine how you'd do something like a lay off over chat or an interview or a performance review? That just seems like living life on the hardest possible mode.