Exactly. A lot of tools barely recognize webcams or desktop mics. You’re expected to dial in, which means being tied to whatever terrible audio quality the phone bridge provides for talking to 20 people.

wait what, are you using the DOS-zoom client? Or how is it, that everyone else got general drivers for their devices so applications can use standardized APIs and "just work"

If you've never been on a conference call where someone can't get their dial-in, audio, camera, screen share, or mute button to work, I'd suspect you've never been in a conference call. These recurring issues are fewer with Zoom. I spent 6 hours on zoom today (ugh), and every day I'm in a 25-to-50-person call that has consistently been buttery smooth.

I think you didn't parse their sentence correctly.

Edit: Why the downvotes?

WebRTC is much better at having "consistently good video quality" as this benchmark convincingly shows: https://jitsi.org/news/a-simple-congestion-test-for-zoom/

On a 1:1 video call. There a dozens of good tools for that - show me a good webrtc app that can handle a 50 user video call well. Or even 10-15 users.

WebRTC fell down for 6 users the other day, so we switched to G2M

GoToMeeting is the WORST!

They have this long long outstanding bug where if they deem the audio low-quality (despite the fact it's crystal clear) they gain the audio and it goes crackly and too loud. If you turn down the volume... they gain it again, and again, and again, till you need to restart the app. Only for it to happen again.

Wow, I've never had that happen in GoToMeeting, but I had something similar happen in MS Teams today.

Just in case anyone else was wondering, here's a web app where you can try WebRTC. https://appr.tc/

Personal opinion, you don't need video or talking heads to have a conference. Some combination of text chat to share documents with simultaneous good quality audio is sufficient.

The challenges related to audio sucking are mostly individual end users' audio stepping on itself, such as feedback from speakerphone configurations into its own microphone. Easily solved by good quality bluetooth headsets, wired headsets, or simply using something as basic as holding an android or ios phone up to your ear.

And I do put "video quality is consistently good" in the category of "makes peoples' lives slightly more convenient". It's not essential.

I disagree. To build connection, read body language, and show people are paying attention it’s important to see the person... we ask that of all of our internal remote calls.

oh yeah, let's try to look each other into the eyes. ooooh no, seems that doesn't work. And "show people paying attention": why do a conference at all if people have no stake in it?

VC > Audio > Text

Tone, emotion, and intent are incapable of being conveyed properly without facial expressions and audible cues.

Audio < Text when too many people are trying to communicate at the same time.

<rant> We are supposed to be engineers here. I regularly see this attitude that one thing is always and inherently better than another. Life is (mostly) a zero sum game and it is our job to pick a solution for the problem at hand. And the more we can constrain that problem, the better, cheaper, more reliably we can deliver a solution. More information is not better. Maybe for interview body language is important but for deciding what story to pull or what commits you did? Not really.

</rant>

Deciding what story to pull generally revolves around conversations during sprint planning or with a product manager. What commits you did means you're committing which means you probably (should) have had code reviews. Often times code reviews involve discussions.

If you're one of the few people that don't have person-to-person interaction on a daily basis - congratulations. However, that places you firmly in the minority.