During the
Meta Connect 2022 live keynote last week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed his new plans for Meta to bring avatars—uncanny digital stand-ins for human workers—to video chats.
They would be customized to match a person’s exact skin tone, hair style, and outfit choices. According to Zuckerberg, an entirely virtual roundtable meeting would consist of you and your coworkers’ avatars chatting in something like a “third mode” between fully camera-on and camera-off.
“You can still express yourself and react, but you’re not on-camera, so it’s kind of like a better camera-off mode,” he said.
The social media giant
invested $10 billion in building the metaverse last year, a digital space where users can interact with experiences and other people using VR technology. Zuckerberg revealed the video chat avatar feature in the key note after announcing partnerships with several companies, including one with
Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella that would bring Microsoft apps to Meta Horizon Workrooms—the VR metaverse rooms where workers’ avatars meet—to create “a unified, digital office we think can make distributed work so much better.”
As
Intelligencer’s John Herrman points out, all of this could be a strategy to diversify Meta’s business—but it could also be a play at acknowledging execs’ challenges with remote work and trying to rectify them. The opportunity for a “better camera-off mode” just might be an answered prayer for the bosses unhappy with the remote workers who tend to join meetings with their web cameras off.
I think this could be a related article
Okay, I Give Up—What’s Quiet Quitting?
The software development industry might be competitive and fierce, but quitting has always been frowned upon. No company wants its brightest and best talent to consider calling it quits. To that end, great effort is made to ensure that people are happy and healthy in the workplace. That’s why the recent trend of “quiet quitting,” popularized by professionals who are a part of Generation-Z, can be troubling. The question is what “quiet quitting” is in the first place.
It’s all about proper work-life balance.
To be clear, quiet quitting doesn’t involve an employee terminating their relationship with an employer. On the contrary, nobody is going anywhere. However, a transformation is taking place in the tech environment where workers are saying long hours at the office will no longer be tolerated. It’s a movement in which employees become more in control of their schedule and begin prioritizing personal over professional duties.
Having less work to do overall is the goal of quiet quitting. Many professionals are now openly refusing to work any amount of overtime. In addition, emails are going ignored as soon as a person leaves the office. Those duplicate emails will only be answered when the individual returns to the office during what they consider a “normal” workday.
In reality, quiet quitting appears to be the modern generation’s answer to burnout. Even in an ultra-competitive tech environment, professionals are no longer willing to give up their dreams and ambitions in exchange for a corporate mindset that gives them little control over their schedule.
