Amazon Makes It Harder for Disabled Employees to Work from Home

Even if you replace (a) with a proper video chat solution, it's a much, much narrower channel than real interaction between people where people perceive all these tiny non-verbal signals like changes in posture, gestures, mimics, breathing, and you can actually point a colleague to something with your finger, all in real-time.

So, no, from my perspective, online interactions are very sad and simple, compared to real-world interactions.

I work in a low-latency field, maybe I'm more sensitive to latency. But I find all those narrow communication channels a nuisance. I find it frustrating to have to rely on a variety of tools to achieve collaboration: Chat, video chat, digital whiteboard, code sharing. There is so much friction, at least in my workplace, to switch between those tools or to combine them. This can surely be improved, but there are things that naturally can't disappear, like latency.

Honestly, I'm dreaming of a place where people have to work from the office again. So I can have a Kanban board with paper cards on a board again, for everyone to see, touch, and write on.

All of this is to say, you find it 'sad and simple' and therefore, it is sad and simple?

To be completely honest, this sounds like an inability to adapt to change and not using the right tools for the right job (and/or the tool is available, its not being maximally used). Rather, its shoehorning old things into a new era, which of course never works well

But basically, a fairly hard switch to pure-video conferencing meant that, for the most part, I basically didn't establish new relationships (with some exceptions) to most people before I left. It wasn't sustainable but it was a fairly short runway.

More generous travel budgets and more event travel would have helped certainly. But I wouldn't have been happy in a long-term pure WFH environment.

(For context, even in a nominally working from office environment I was doing business travel for months a year.)

Sure, but for many people, in office work still requires all of those things anyway. Many of us don't just work with only with teams or people within the single physical location we currently reside in.

I'm remote now, but i've spent a career on/off remote because my job has always been to work with with global teams and individuals, including customers. I don't know where these people are outside of geographic areas, i've never asked and they've never asked me.

> I'm dreaming of a place where people have to work from the office again. So I can have a Kanban board with paper cards on a board again, for everyone to see, touch, and write on.

I don't see how the two are related. Unless you are in charge I suppose. In most of my physical jobs i've been required to operate with a digital kanban. How I then handle my own breakdown beyond that is on me but doesnt involve others. I don't get to magically just have a physical kanban because that's what I personally want.

I don't know what line of work you're in but I would consider that stuff "noise" in a technical discussion.

I dunno. I sometimes feel like many of those things just make communication more stressful, accident-prone, and overloaded. Too much to overlook, too much to accidentally let slip, too much to process besides the content of the massage... Just too much.

Voice is pretty useful to me, but for the most part taking body language out of the picture is a burden relieved for me. I'm happy to be represented by my words and voice alone.

> you can actually point a colleague to something with your finger

That's a great thing when it works, but it's not really a given in person, either. I don't see well enough to identify most objects when someone points from across the room anymore, let alone to read someone's screen in the tiny font sizes the average person uses or cope with light mode.

A link to source code or a reference to a file and a line number is way more flexible in terms of letting people meet their own needs for contrast and sizing, clunky though it may be. Same thing for digital whiteboards; some people essentially can't participate in conversations centered on a physical whiteboard.

With that said, a little goes a long way IMO. Once you've got those relationships defined further in-person comms is mostly just bullshitting IMO.

That might be important to you, but to other people it may not matter at all, and for still others it is actually a negative.

Consider that for a neurodivergent, or disabled person, all those non-verbal signals could easily be misinterpreted, or missed by one side or the other.

Likewise, such signals could have different meanings in different cultures.

And for some people face to face communication is stressful or emotionally draining.

That's not to say that virtual communication in any medium completely solves those problems, or that such non-verbal communication doesn't have any value. But while you may feel more comfortable with face to face interactions, there are other people people, including myself, who feel more communicating via a textual format.

It was and still is the default/status quo. So, no, not really...