Be careful with this. In some orgs you can get a bit of a bad reputation for being technically incompetent if you can't get zoom to run.

Zoom is very invasive / flexible - so it's actually somewhat hard to have it NOT work. People will suggest you try connecting on your phone or dialing in if you really can't figure it out (note that it has a fallback to browser option if you get stuck trying to start meeting as well).

I know of at least one job interview where they claimed they couldn't get zoom to run / couldn't connect - and that was basically decisive.

You can avoid this reputation by saying “our security analysts block Zoom because they think it might be untrustworthy spyware.”

That's def a better response then I can't figure out how to call into the zoom call!

That said, a fair number of folks don't credibly have "security analysts". Unless you are interviewing / working for some sort of high security / security analyst type job the world may move on pretty quickly without you.

Yes, this excuse doesn’t work for personal calls and interviews, but most of my vendors seem to understand.

I resorted to using all modern video call software on my iPhone for that reason. I also get better camera quality so there's that. Apple Handshake also makes it relatively easy to share links.

After Pegasus, I'm not sure it's a secure solution.

Apples to oranges. Public companies aren’t going to use exploits to break the sandbox. Zoom on desktop installs all sorts of daemons that I don’t want; on iOS it can’t.

> Public companies aren’t going to use exploits to break the sandbox.

Exploits tend to leak...

> I know of at least one job interview where they claimed they couldn't get zoom to run / couldn't connect - and that was basically decisive.

I used to interview candidates via Zoom. There were quite a few who couldn't figure it out. I gave 2nd chances interviews, mostly for optics for upper management. (And because sometimes hardware breaks at the last minute.) The candidates always failed the retry interview.

At least for software development, troubleshooting a camera and mic is a pretty similar skill to what our job is on a day-to-day basis. It's also very disrespectful to make someone wait at the beginning of a meeting while you troubleshoot, especially when I'm waving my phone and sending IMs that ask the candidate to just use their phone.

But, if a candidate fell back to their phone, I appreciated that they respected my time.

Yeah - the problem is now zoom is a skill you basically need - if you can't use a computer / zoom, it can be hard to make the remote work thing work.

It's also not that difficult to click in and to the test audio / test video features. I still do that (sometimes just to check a virtual background etc).

So yeah, if you are going to always be saying it's too hard or you can't get into zoom (ie, for "security" reasons) that may be a dealbreaker.

A bit difficult when your org has decided to use Zoom for large meetings.

Although I nearly universally would be happy to skip those meetings, so…

Use the work laptop. Its security is then their problem, not yours. Do I care if the Chinese government know that I've got Visual Studio open?

You can call in by phone

They are picky about making sure everyone uses a camera.

Then I guess your IT department or your management is happy to share your work computer's content with Zoom. I see three paths:

- Resort to use Zoom in a browser, maybe from a separate profile

- If this does not work for you, use Zoom from a virtual machine (it should be possible by exporting the camera likely connected by USB to the VM)

- If you'd like to avoid a VM because it's heavy / annoying, I'm not sure there's an easy solution without learning how to use namespaces and unshare.

Additionally, and optionally:

- Gently campaign against Zoom or for a better solution internally.