What I am seeing is managers, corporate side, HR and finance side people love cameras on. They are mostly dressed up and in their houses with cameras on. IT, Development, Engineering are cameras off. I prefer cameras off. On the one hand I could see it being kind of isolating and you aren't building those social connection, on the other, is that the place of work?

I work in software engineering, and it's frankly annoying to deal with the always camera off people in zoom meetings. Usually it's well correlated with bad audio too and you have to strain to understand them. I don't want to make an argument about it because they are usually rare, but if any of my 1:1 teammates was always video off then I would bring it up to them.

Get a good A/V setup people, you have the technical ability and it's one of your main job interfaces. At the very least use a wired headphone setup and microphone so we don't play walkie talkie games as echo cancellation mutes one of us dynamically and your bluetooth headset adds 100ms random delays and a lower bit rate of audio. Also do ethernet to remove the delays and packet drops from wifi.

If you're just a name on the screen, you're easy to replace. Half-competent programmers are a dime a dozen in India, Eastern Europe, and South America. And they know how to use Zoom too!

I ask for camera-on whenever there are less than 5 persons in a call.

The fact of the matter is that most people (myself included) are able to read visual cues from others and adapt their message accordingly. Actual communication (which entails understanding) is just easier this way.

Frankly, I don't even understand the discussion about cameras. In the meetings I'm at, 80% of the time someone is either presenting slides, some document that is being discussed, some plots/figures, or code. Even when that's not the case, nobody ever complained about the general cameras-off culture of the outfit, and I don't see any reason either.

>All meetings were camera off

Some managers where I work tried to pressure people to have their cameras on. It was later implied this was based on personal assumptions about what the "big boss" preferred.

But then some people ignored it, and someone else said "wait, they can't make us, if they push it the union will back us up".

At least for me, I like that. I don’t want some stupid HR culture speech. I want to get to work.

Another finding, companies are struggling to attract talent and when they do hire, a substantial number of new hires aren’t even staying for 90 days. Easy for them to find a new remote job.