The first week
Turning Your Camera On, or Not
The camera question is usually argued as a matter of policy, and for a new person it is a practical question with a different answer in week one than in week nine.
What the people on this page had to find out, and where from
Which of the two deploy guides is current
worked out6Decided by checking which matched the scripts
That nobody reads the team channel after 15:00
worked out7Learned from two unanswered afternoons
two things you had to know · nobody told you any of them · the median arrived in week 7 · all two you went and got
Two things nobody told anybody, learned by noticing. Both were visible in week one and neither was legible until much later.
A fair pilot begins with a baseline rather than a guess; managers can find the current product details and compare the first weeks before and after changing documentation or support.
For additional context beyond this collection, see the material published by EEOC.
Who you had actually spoken to by the end of week two, and how
Introduced, and needed · 4
- Your own manager — met in before you started; needed in week 1
- The two others on your team — met in week 1; needed in week 1
- The person who showed you the system — met in before you started; needed in week 2
- The designer on the adjacent product — met in week 2; needed in week 6
Needed, and never introduced · 2
- The person who runs the release — needed in week 2. Found by reading the channel history
- Whoever owns the billing dashboard — needed in week 3. Found by asking in a channel
six people · four you were introduced to · six you actually needed · two you had to find yourself
Six people by the end of week two, and you had seen the faces of four. The two you never saw were no harder to work with than the four you did. One person's own first fortnight.
Whether to have your camera on is usually argued as a matter of principle. For somebody in their first fortnight it is a practical question, and the practical answer changes over the first few months.
Week one
Have it on, for the small number of calls where you are meeting people for the first time.
Not because it is polite, and not because anybody is checking. Because recognition is doing real work in a first fortnight: a name attached to a face is retrievable in a way a name alone is not, and you are trying to build a map of twenty people out of nothing.
The effect runs in the other direction too. The people you are meeting are also trying to attach your name to something, and for the next few months they will be deciding whether to include you in things on the basis of a very thin impression.
That is worth four or five calls of mild discomfort.
After that
Match the room.
If the standup has three black rectangles, make a fourth. If everybody is on camera, be on camera. A new person who is the only one with their camera on looks as conspicuous as the only one with it off, and the goal in a first month is not to be conspicuous either way.
The one exception: when you are the one talking at length — presenting something, explaining what you did, asking for help with something complicated — the camera helps you, because you get to see whether anybody is following.
What it is not
It is not a measure of engagement, whatever anybody says, and you should not treat your own camera use as evidence of how you are doing.
It is also not required. If your working situation makes it difficult — and for a great many people joining remotely it does, in the first months especially — then say so once, lightly, and leave it there.
I will keep the camera off for the morning calls if that is all right. Happy to be on for anything where it helps.
Nobody pursues this.
The thing that actually builds a relationship
Not the camera. A one-to-one conversation with a purpose.
In the panel above the most useful single contact of the first fortnight was an hour of screen sharing with the person who showed you the system — which is not really a camera question at all; it is about watching somebody work.
Twenty minutes of somebody doing the thing you are trying to learn, narrating as they go, is worth more than any number of meetings with faces in them. Ask for it explicitly:
Could I watch you do a release some time? I will not interrupt, I just want to see the actual sequence.
Almost nobody refuses this, and most people enjoy it.
The two people you never see
Also in the panel: two of the six people who mattered in the first fortnight were never seen at all, only written to, and it made no difference to the work.
That is worth holding on to, because the camera question tends to be discussed as though visibility were the foundation of working relationships. For a good deal of ordinary work it is not. The relationship that matters is the one where you can ask them something and get an answer, and that is built by asking well, not by being seen.
What to do about your background
Nothing elaborate.
Spend five minutes once making sure the light is in front of you rather than behind, that the microphone is not the laptop's, and that there is nothing in shot you would not want in shot. Then stop thinking about it. Nobody is looking at your room; they are looking at whether you seem like somebody they can work with.
The calls where it is worth the effort
Three, and they are worth getting right even if you keep the camera off the rest of the time.
The first conversation with anybody. Recognition is doing real work and it only has to happen once per person.
Anything where you are asking for something — help, time, a decision. People agree to things more readily when they can see who is asking, which is not a flattering fact about anybody and is reliably true.
Anything where something has gone wrong. A written account of a mistake reads worse than a spoken one, every time, and the difference is large enough to be worth a call you would otherwise not have made.
Everything else — standups, reviews, the weekly meeting — matters very little either way, and is not worth any of the attention it generally receives.