I don't disagree, but on the other hand: Lloyd's used to be a London pub where merchants would hang out all day, carrying out their business as they ate. Business deals at the highest level are still routinely done over breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

I think the problem, as usual, is the power imbalance: they are eating and you are not, in addition to the fact that they have the money and you don't - so it becomes a bit too humiliating.

Apart from it being over Zoom, the main differentiator is that only one party eats. That’s a clear show of power. What you are talking about is that that both meet over food, which is very different.

I gather the situation here was that he was multi-tasking over Zoom. But, yes, in-person meetings/conversations over a meal are not necessarily ideal but they're very commonplace in a business context and range from the very casual to more formal. (If you're at an event for business partners/customers/media/etc. they're pretty much inevitable.)

In my dream world we would normalize things like eating on a zoom call. People gotta eat, it’s no big deal. Maybe if they’re audibly slurping soup that’s a problem in terms of noise, but that would also be a problem during a boardroom meeting.

(I once got in a lot of trouble for having a bowl of cereal while I was a silent participant in a call with a client at a fintech company, so I understand that attitudes like yours are common.)

People also gotta shit. Should I do a Zoom call while on the toilet?

It's a matter of where is your attention. If you're eating you're not fully focused on the other participant you're interacting with and not being fully present for them is rude.

Isn't this a false equivalence?

I'll often eat with other people, but I wouldn't take a sh*t with them.

If society agrees that eating during workplace meetings is acceptable, then so be it. My point was that "it's a biological need therefore it's acceptable" isn't an excuse to use for eating in a meeting (working lunches excluded as all participants understand the intention of those).

It’s okay, we’re all grownups here. You can say shit without censoring yourself.

Meals are an excellent venue for conversation. People are fully capable of eating, listening and responding. Being remote doesn't change that.

Conversations on the can are less universally accepted. But do you ever see people go off-camera for a minute or ten? Some fraction of them must be listening from the loo.

It's one thing, on a team meeting, to somewhat embarrasingly say "I'm going to go off-video because I haven't had breakfast yet" and it's quite another thing to be eating when on a call with a client.

Yes, in retrospect I obviously should have waited as a matter of norms (that I didn’t know). I’m saying that I would like for that norm to be relaxed.

I recently turned down a job where the CEO of a startup came into an interview unexpectedly, and started texting or checking his emails or something halfway through. It wasn’t the only thing that put me off but it certainly was a big part.

Because Shuttleworth in particular or because someone at a company took someone out to a meal? The latter seems perfectly normal and I've been in that situation a number of times. Obviously you ought to have the opportunity to eat but having especially a more casual conversation over a meal just doesn't seem odd to me.

> Because Shuttleworth in particular or because someone at a company took someone out to a meal?

It sounds more like situation where he was eating on zoom with mic on, while the second person just talked.

In that case, it's entirely possible I misunderstood the situation.

It doesn't sound like they had a shared meal, but that he ate his dinner during a pre-allocated meeting time via zoom/google meet/etc.

That sounds like a euphemism for "micromanager".

Not really. A micromanager is more consistent in their interventions. With him it was much more distributed and somewhat random.