I've done like three or four video calls at work since corona (=full remote). I don't get the US obsession with video calls. Voice is perfectly cromulent for almost everything (see: those 3-4 exceptions).
In distributed teams involving people from multiple countries you probably want to avoid both video and voice calls because on average everyone is much better at writing and reading English compared to speaking and listening.
There are people out there who would not even give a single sentence description of what they want rather it is "when can you jump on a call with me".
They assume the task is difficult to explain in text but to me it often sounds like they don't even have an idea of what they want really.
They want me to hold their hands and lead them through a journey of self discovery while on the ride we discover joy and surprise and at the end of the tunnel only to discover the project is radically abstract and the client is not happy to pay on a per hour basis.
A lot of people had very little video/voicechat experience before the pandemic. It doesn't occur to them, that the "downgrade" to audio-only is actually better than video+audio.
Text trumps audio in terms of communicating hard facts. But many people outside of the tech industry can't properly touch-type. Just consider how many people still make phone calls instead of writing an e-mail.
Many people in the tech industry can't touch-type!
Certainly in the UK, and probably Europe, where you are much less likely to have a comp-sci degree, it is very hard to create consistent requirements for devs like "touch type 60 words per minute" or "understands patterns and principles".
It would be great to have something, even an industry standard like exists for law, medicine and even some building trades to at least have a base-level of consistency. I think this would help communication a lot - the domain language like "this wouldn't work as a Singleton because we need to subclass it" is nice and terse but only if you know the words.
I meant, we had computers, but not a whole class full of them. Teaching kids one by one on the one computer per class would have been very inefficient.
Most of the meetings that I attend as a full-time remote employee are ones where someone is sharing a screen anyways. There's little screen real estate for anyone's webcam and I wouldn't really be interested in staring at them since I'm primarily looking at the shared screen.
The obsession is clear at least: Video calls are the narcissist's prime weapon of choice to fake useful involvement in a project. Many managers grade people on presence and eloquence in meetings.
What is not clear is why the actually productive people don't push back.
In distributed teams involving people from multiple countries you probably want to avoid both video and voice calls because on average everyone is much better at writing and reading English compared to speaking and listening.