Michael C. McGreevyIt is 2023. If you are in a remote friendly work setting and you still ask if everyone can see your screen when you start sharing you might want to spend some time actually learning your tech.
The Laughing Muse@mcmcgreevy I work at Zoom, and some of my teammates still ask that question. I think it's tech-industry hangover.
@thelaughingmuse I just died a little on the inside
Kit Rhett Aultman@mcmcgreevy Counterargument-- it's legitimate to ask such questions when the technology has a sufficiently high failure rate, and Zoom is above that.
It's similar to how microphones and PA systems have existed for decades and yet many people who've been burned by bad setups have learned to start with inconsequential banter as a way of ensuring the audio stack works.
@roadriverrail Fair point! When I am going to be presenting in a meeting I make it a point to join early, make sure my settings are right, and have a co-worker validate before hand that all is as I expect it when possible. This makes me comfortable in assuming people can see my screen and will let me know if they cannot. The amount of waste around activities that treat meetings like an afterthought kills me.
@mcmcgreevy This speaks a lot to how different our contexts of use are. The overwhelming majority of my meetings where screen sharing occurs are not prepared presentations.
That said, even with prior preparation, I've seen Zoom screen sharing be a bit of a crap shoot, so each individual click of "share screen" is a new chance for failure. Heck; for months on Zoom, thanks to some bug or another, sharing a window would cause me to lose other windows, sometimes the Zoom window itself.
@roadriverrail We are a Teams/WebEx house, so that could be a factor as well. But yeah, the overwhelming majority of the time we are sharing content we know we will be up front, and if we are doing something collaborative ad hoc we (should be) spinning up a Miro board and sharing the link to that
@mcmcgreevy I've generally not used Teams except for vendor calls, though I have used WebEx and not found it to have a great reliability track record, either, especially on Linux. For collaboration between engineers, sharing a screen and reading the same code is pretty darn useful, and for quick team checkins and going through the Jira queue, it's not worth treating it as a formal presentation.
@roadriverrail I am having serious “good software development practices” envy right about now.
@mcmcgreevy How's that?
@roadriverrail Developers working together collaboratively on code. Sounds like pair/mob programming?
@mcmcgreevy I wouldn't go that far. More like "Hey...can you look at this with me for a second?" We don't have the people to spare for pair programming.
@roadriverrail Oh, ok. That part we do. Lol