
Ask HN: What industries are moving to Slack/Zoom for the first time? - jamestimmins
Lots of companies and industries are presumably transitioning to tools like Slack and Zoom for the first time. Is anyone currently experiencing this right now or aware of folks who are?
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cddotdotslash
My dad is an electrical engineer. Their company is about 100 employees and,
over the last week, they have had to shift all of them to a remote setup. It
hasn't been easy at all. He mentioned numerous issues:

1\. A lot of their work is marking up drawings which traditionally have been
printed on massive sheets of paper. Online, it's hard to click, zoom, markup,
zoom out, etc. Not impossible, but much harder.

2\. These files can be GBs in size. Imagine waiting 45 minutes for a file to
download, you add two comments, and then it takes another hour to upload back
to the server where another engineer repeats the process.

3\. Many of their employees live in remote areas where bandwidth measured in
kbps, not mbps.

4\. Some employees don't have full-sized monitors or even laptops at home.
Some only have tablets.

5\. Hardly any of the employees have ever used Zoom, so that alone is a huge
learning curve for them to download/install/get a webcam setup/etc.

6\. The VPN they had was not configured to handle the amount of bandwidth now
being pushed through it. Their provider had to send technicians out to the
office multiple times.

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impendia
Academia.

Most classes are transitioning to an online format, using Zoom, Blackboard
collaborate, or other videoconferencing software. Professors will also likely
be using this software to meet with individual students one-on-one.

Research seminars too. For example, here is an online conference being
conducted over Zoom:

[https://www.daniellitt.com/agonize/](https://www.daniellitt.com/agonize/)

Here is an example of a weekly seminar that moved online:

[http://www-math.mit.edu/~dav/LG/](http://www-math.mit.edu/~dav/LG/)

This replaces the spate of in-person seminars and conferences which have all
been cancelled.

