What a switched-off camera taught me about leadership, culture and debugging
For a long time, I led a development department spread across Hamburg and Cairo. In our meetings, a pattern emerged that I noticed early on: in Cairo, many cameras were turned off. Quite often, those belonged to female colleagues.
My colleagues in Germany noticed it too. Everyone did. Nobody said anything, but you could feel the discomfort. A grid of black tiles with names on them is hard to talk to. It feels like talking to a wall, and it is easy to read this as disengagement, or worse, as a lack of respect for the people on the other side.
What strikes me most is not that people misinterpreted the situation. It is that they all carried the same silent interpretation around for wekks, and none of them tested it.
The question nobody asked
At some point, I simply asked. In a one-to-one with one of the colleagues concerned, I raised it directly and, I hope, without any accusation in my voice. I wanted to understand, not to correct.
The answer was so simple that I was almost embarrassed. Many people in Cairo work from home in rooms without air conditioning. In summer, temperatures can reach 40 degrees or even more. In that heat, most women at home do not wear a headscarf. For Muslim women, it is culturally not acceptable to be seen without one by men outside the family. That includes male colleagues on a video call. So the camera goes off.
That’s it. No disinterest, no hidden dissatisfaction, no cultural mismatch in work ethic. Just heat, privacy and a perfectly reasonable decision.
What the silence cost us
I keep coming back to the German side of this story. My colleagues in Hamburg were not unkind. If anything, they were polite. They did not want to embarrass anyone, and they were unsure whether the topic was even appropriate to raise. So they said nothing.
But silence is never neutral. When we do not ask, we fill the gap ourselves, and we fill it with whatever our own cultural background makes most plausible. In Germany, a camera that is turned off in a meeting, often signals multitasking or withdrawal. That story felt true, and so it quietly shaped how some people thought about their colleagues in Cairo.
To me, this is what culture actually is. Not the values on the wall, not the offsite workshop. Culture is the set of assumptions we never say out loud, and the topics we have collectively agreed not to touch.
The same mistake, in a different room
Once I had seen the pattern, I could not unsee it. It is exactly what happens in a debugging session that has gone wrong.
I was pair programming with a developer on a calculation inside the business logic. It takes several parameters, and the result was wrong. We checked the formula, then the rounding, then the parameters set by the calling code. All of that is fine. The remaining parameter comes from another module inside the business-logic, a module that has been in production for a long time. It exists, it has been used before, so we both assumed it produced the value the calculation expects.
My pairing partner was certain. “This value is xx,” he said. I asked: “Is it? Have you checked?”
He had not. And it wasn’t xx. The module returned something different from what the new calculation expected. Nobody had looked, because there was no reason to doubt a module that already existed. The existing code was treated as a guarantee when it was only an assumption.
That is the same as with the black tile on the call. We observe a symptom, and our experience supplies an explanation so quickly that it feels like an observation. It is not. It is a hypothesis, and a hypothesis is something you need to test.
In debugging, the test is a measurement: a breakpoint, a log line, a look at the actual value at the point where it enters the calculation. In a team, the test is a question. Both are cheap. Both get skipped for the same reason: asking feels unnecessary when we are sure, and slightly awkward when we are not. A developer does not want to appear to doubt a colleague’s module, and a manager does not want to poke around. So the assumption survives, and we keep building on it.
What we changed
We did not write a policy about cameras, and we did not ask anyone to explain themselves. What emerged instead was a simple practice: at the start of every meeting, everybody switches their camera on. For those first minutes, we see each other. That matters for building the sense of a team. After that, everyone is free to turn their camera off whenever they like.
The effect was better than I expected. Everyone got the chance to see their counterparts, and everyone kept the freedom to arrange their working environment the way they find most comfortable. Nobody has to justify a choice, and nobody has to explain their living room, their climate or their religion to the rest of the team.
What I take from it
First, a behaviour is not an attitude. What we can observe is the camera, or the wrong result. What we infer from it is a story, and the story tells usually more about us and our experience, and not about the situation.
Second, asking is a leadership task. Not because managers are wiser, but because they can ask without it sounding like an accusation. A one-to-one is a safe place for a question that cannot be asked in front of the team. So is a pairing session: “Have you checked?” costs nothing between two people looking at the same screen. In engineering terms, the manager’s job is to make measuring cheap.
Third, good rules leave room for dignity. The best solution we found was not a rule about cameras at all. Hard rules are only needed where common sense fails. It was a rhythm that gave everyone what they needed and asked nobody to explain themselves.
I have since then started asking myself an uncomfortable question: where else do I have black tiles? Which behaviours in my teams do I interpret instead of asking about? And which inputs in our systems do we trust only because they have always been there? I suspect there are more of both than I would like.
One caveat: this was one colleague’s situation, and I do not claim it speaks for everyone with a switched-off camera. That is rather the point. The only way to find out, is to ask.
