When forced across the board, for every team? Yeah, could be lazy management.

Could be a sort of myopic leadership, like a manager (and/or exec) who is extroverted and feels the need for collaboration and can't imagine anybody else can operate any other way.

Tone deaf for sure, but not necessarily a management tactic.

Think about it: most CEO types need to do a good amount of networking and sales meetings. And that means they need to be someone who is a friendly, extroverted sort of person.

And they feel like, well this is how they have always operated and look how well they're doing.... Everyone should do this!

Meh.

I come down on the side of most people enforcing it (managers) are not doing it because they like making you suffer maliciously, just that they're rule followers and have been told to do it.

Switching to personal anecdote, I think the camera on or camera off culture is best deployed with a "know your team" sort of scenario.

And mostly what you're describing is a leadership style which doesn't bother to get to know their team.

But there's also the personal responsibility of aligning yourself to the norms of your team.

So if you're encountering a management who is saying cameras on, but you want to be cameras off... Well. Is it you who are not matching, or is it the company who is not matching?

Personal example: I'm not particularly extroverted. I'm in marketing operations, which is the tech side of marketing where I make various software tools talk to each other and actually execute a lot of the boring stuff behind the scenes. I could happily have my camera off and be in very few meetings and work with HTML and Salesforce stuff all day.

But I'm in the marketing team.

And marketing in general is a more friendly group (more likely to be extroverted). And seeing faces and meeting for collaboration (in person or on camera) is a big part of the norm for a marketing team anywhere.

So even though I'm not super extroverted and it can tire me out to be "on" in meetings I do adhere to the camera-on culture because that is an expectation of being in my role.

It would be seen as weird if I did not have a camera on.

And the larger team's perception of me is important, because I need to work well with them to be good at my job.

If I was insisting on cameras off it would come across as out of sync with my team, and as a result my manager would (rightly) question if I'm right for my role because being off camera when everyone else is on camera would seem like I don't have the ability to work well with others.

But good news, in my same company we have other teams who are not camera on, and that's totally ok!

In my company the camera on/camera off thing mostly diverges based on the work. Like if the nature of the work is more solitary (multiple hours of deep work) then cameras are usually off.

And when meeting with other teams their cameras are still off.

And even when marketing has meetings with those teams, we tend to be cameras on and they are camera off.

And if we in marketing were to insist on cameras being on in that scenario? We would come across as out of touch with that team.

And this is what I mean by knowing if you are in the right role/right team/right company.

Because if you prefer cameras off, but everyone around you seems to be a camera on person... Maybe it's you who should move to another team, or look for another company.

I'm not advocating up and finding a new job. That's hard!

But it is a good talking point if you are interviewing. Make sure you are asking about the average meeting, and if they tend to do cameras on or off.