Sorry, but I strongly disagree with you. Reading the cited book (Smart and gets thing done) was an absolute eye opener for me, and for every person that I have recommended it to.
Really, you should read it (unless you were only trolling). It is a very fast read and full of insight.
Also, "tech Q&A site " is a huge mischaracterization of Joel's blog. He has really insightful articles like "Evidence based Scheduling", or the ones about (not) rewriting-code.
Latency is the issue for me more so than eye contact.
On video chat sometimes I’ll say something like “mmhmm” or “yes” in agreement, and accidentally throw the speaking party off because my comment was delivered after a normal pause in speech due to latency.
This interruption of normal conversation flow is more problematic to me than eye contact. We both know were speaking into machines after all.
For some reason video calls have just never worked well for me. Every single time it's either latency, massive amounts of echo making it hard to speak, and "can you hear me" every minute or two. For some reason, it's 2019 and we as a human race still haven't figured out how to get a stable 480p video stream over gigabits of bandwidth.
Video conferencing worked perfectly when it was still done over circuit-switched digital telco networks. It’s only the Internet that has botched things up.
If by "botched things up" you mean "Made affordable." Nobody other than Vint Cerf will argue that circuit-switched networks are not superior from a QoS point of view, but they can be orders of magnitude more expensive to build and maintain.
They should be feasible to implement within a building, between buildings on the same street, and probably between geographically diverse sites of multi billion dollar companies that spend 30%+ of their labor hours on site-spanning meetings.
Maybe it's a good use for deepfake technology. Send the audio quickly (that works fine on a telephone, must be OK), then the receiver fakes up a talking head based on that.
You'd be surprised - audio is very slow. Telephone works because we are trained to compensate and also because there are no visual cues. (Weird thing - the old analog lines were much faster than our cell phones of today.)
I can recall using the Hack to force international calls over cable instead of satellite (to reduce latency) when I used to do a lot of international liaison for BT.
Fair enough, no gatekeeping intended. That’s why I ended with a comment that it’s probably fun to listen to! And that’s fine and great! More power to em. Maybe a more accurate wording would be “it’s not an electro-acoustic sound reproduction system built on sound (pun intended) engineering principles in light of the state of the art in electrical engineering”? But that doesn’t have the same ring to it, lol.
If someone orients their speakers in an aesthetically-pleasing-but-sub-optimal-for-hearing manner, then it's difficult to argue that they have an "ardent interest" in high-fidelity sound replication.
I’d say negotiate away that clause or find another job. Company owning all IP outside work for the duration of employment is in my opinion a red flag. I’d not be surprised to learn they mistreat employees in other ways as well.
Design wise this looks similar to something teenage engineering would make. Which I think is cool, I like their stuff. Specifically the op1 with the hand crank functionality
Hosting a tech Q&A site doesn't make you the canonical source of how to structure interviews.
The live coding interview style was a toxic and negative contribution to the tech industry as a whole, IMO.