Where I work (backend software development), we do video calls and meetings all the time. Probably an hour every day or more is spent in direct contact. I see this as absolutely essential to get people on the same page - but none of the reasons that people have listed in this thread for why people prefer personal meetings apply to me. For instance, I am extremely grateful if someone writes up meeting notes, I read text documents all the time, and I often require continuous uninterrupted time and respect it in others, and I still prefer voiced meetings.
I think the primary reason is if I am trying to clarify an idea for a design or an approach, I will go to the people who have also touched that field of difficulty, and try to explain what I am trying to do to them in advance. The spoken medium in that case gives room for interruptions, immediate elaborations and feedback. A write-up either convinces or it doesn't; it can be edited but it has feedback cycles on the order of tens of minutes to hours. Spoken communication has feedback cycles of seconds, so even if I was going to write something up, I'd talk it through verbally first, anyways.
95% of all substantial corporate meetings would be vastly, vastly improved if someone wrote up some dot point notes of said meeting, and circulated the document as a courtesy.
In my time in the workplace I've seen this done in maybe 5% of meetings. The entirety of that 5% involved team leaders having a regularly scheduled catch-up with our divisional overlord, and I sat in or saw the memo.
Why don't these very basic things that would vastly improve productivity take place?
Garden variety laziness.
Unless you get over that very basic hurdle of couldn't give a damn, what's the point of all these other solutions?
There are two types of approaches to working out a problem. One is to get everyone in a meeting and talk it over until a solution is reached. The other is for a single person to carefully think through the problem and possible solutions, write down a solution, and pass it around for (usually asynchronous) comments.
People who think meetings are really useful thrive in the first approach. The more meetings they have the faster they can get things done. People who prefer the solitary focused approach tend to see meetings as obstructions to progress, because they prevent them from actually solving problems by pretending to solve the problem while not making headway.
Which approach is right is highly contextual, and you can’t really argue it either way without falling back on personal preferences.
> we do video calls and meetings all the time. Probably an hour every day or more is spent in direct contact.
That's not all the time my friend. My usual day is 3-5 hours on conf calls, you gain 'popularity' as your time / seniority at the company rises. I get 50% of my actual work done during those meetings, while others talk in matters unrelated/distantly related to my work.
Video all the time? No, thank you. Our top 10 bank in the world is managing just fine without a single video call since forever. You get used to it very quickly, and the freedom it gives you is magical.
I'm not sure your definition of "all the time" matches anyone else in the industry, quite frankly. At the architect/staff level I'm lucky if I can only spend half my time on the phone or in some sort of meeting (includes the ad hoc group chat where we're discussing something via our internal equivalent of Slack). I get maybe 5-10 hours a week of coding, and it's usually either something extremely challenging that someone else has already spent weeks hacking on, or a super basic bug I grab to keep myself sane and in touch with the nitty gritty code stuff.
An hour a day is junior dev level meeting load at almost every place I've ever worked. Seniors are 2-3, arch/staff/principal 4-6 and managers all day long (all averaged over a couple weeks or so it obviously ebbs and flows).
I do one on one 5-15-min zoom meetings when I need to clarify things that need clarification after 1-2 text exchanges. Super useful to look at the thing together and align mental models in real time.
Other useful formats - look at work together with stakeholders and get instant feedback + clarification questions.
For almost anything else, meetings can be a time waste. Some communications do not require full bandwidth exchange but where tone is important, an efficient meeting can be a timesaver.
I agree with everything you said; but coming from a place where 20 +++ hrs a week is spent in video meetings (and that's after rejecting just as many invites), having only an hr a day means somebody somewhere, whether explicitly or culturally, already set up system and expectation when productive time is respective and meetings are minimized. In other words you are already in a place many of us only dream of :-)
For sure. This bald assertion in the post blew me away: "Working in a distributed team means working asynchronously."
This is just false. You and I live other approaches every day. I believe his way of working is fine for him, and he's welcome to it. But that doesn't justify sweeping dismissal of everybody else's experience.
The author wants to educate people on the benefits of (more) text communication, but I don't believe it will change minds.
Reading the sibling comment from papaf[1] and also a previous reply to me by jakubp[2] about talking things out instead of email, it seems like the higher meta-analysis is that some people have a predisposition to prefer synchronous (videoconference, phone call, cubicle visit) over asynchronous communication (email, chat).
One group really prioritizes synchro comm for "emotional nuance" etc. The other group prioritizes written text's dense information content and searchability.
So if the company has folks like papaf and jakubp, it doesn't matter if you have a blog article recommending structured emails over video calls. Some employees prefer not to communicate that way. In fact, the blog article just makes them express their disagreement with it. E.g. papaf saying we're not "efficient robots" and jakubp advising me that I should accommodate his communication style of in-person cubicle visits.
To prevent clashing, I guess the higher-level advice is to hire a team where everybody likes to communicate the same way.
> it doesn't matter if you have a blog article recommending structured emails over video calls
Exactly! Funny thing is that if you send these people an article explaining the benefits of written docs (design docs, RFCs, proposals, any text document documenting a decision), they will just simply not read it.
I'm on a team where I believe we started gigantic refactoring and redesigning projects without being clear on the goals, non-goals, and tradeoffs we take. I proposed that before we start working on something huge, we should write a short document where we explain what, how and why we want to do.
I recommended them some articles, for example "Design Docs at Google" [1], and "Scaling Engineering Teams via RFCs: Writing Things Down" by Gergely Orosz [2], but I couldn't even convince them to read those articles...
I didn't even send them my favorite posts about the Amazon 6-page memo, because I knew they'd dismiss the whole idea in a second (no matter if I told them that we could do "OurCompany 1-page memo").
This lead me to the sad realization, that our team will never start "writing things down". In my opinion, it would force us to think things through, but it seems like they disagree, or they just don't care.
My coworkers will not even read a 3-paragraph ticket, but they'd love to talk about the same ticket for an hour in a video call. Then in 3 weeks, nobody remembers anything anyway, and they discuss it again.
>One group really prioritizes synchro comm for "emotional nuance" etc. The other group prioritizes written text's dense information content and searchability.
Don't forget the usefulness of email when you need the ability to reference past conversations. For some people, a faulty memory is a finely honed art.
I like both and I guess many people, too. But it depends on the people involved.
I think the big advantage of text is accountability.
Lots of people say lots of things (the other person wants to hear) ... and remember only some of it. I wasted so much time relying and then discussing forgotten promises, where I wished have had that exchange via text. And I actually believe, this is a big (unconscious) reason for many avoid written communication. Talk is cheap.
> Some employees prefer not to communicate that way.
I think it depends on the purpose of the team as to whether people should change.
I’m technology, if the purpose is to build things well then the people who like to emotionally nuance things in synchronous communication should do more async because that works better for building.
It really frustrates me when I analyze a problem, thoughtfully write up a solution and send it out. And then someone (or several) wants to meet to talk about it.
Then the meeting has nothing persistent than a feeling and the details get lost and a week later people forget the resolution. And want to meet again.
I guess if there’s no accretive development it doesn’t matter, like sales or restaurants or whatever. But there seems to be a better way to design and execute complex things.
I agree, this is my experience as well. At the extreme ends, some people absolutely require synchronous communication / social interaction to be productive, while others' performance (and sometimes happiness) depends on the absence thereof (often perceived as inefficient or even a waste of time). They are inherently at odds with each other.
Personally I fall into the latter category and I do believe it's a better fit for a software engineering role in terms of getting things done, but I've also come to the realiziation that in our world, you'll eventually have to meet the others half-way. Hiring a team that shares the same communication style is often just too difficult (exacerbated by the fact many candidates aren't even self-aware enough to know which preferences they really have, or don't want to admit them).
> The other group prioritizes written text's dense information content and searchability.
I would add that the other group also likely prioritises focus, flow, blocks of uninterrupted time for deep work and minimising context switching. For me personally the text-based content and searchability is way down the list compared to keeping the focus on my core tasks.
I think there is quite a lot more the author could touch on regarding the huge overhead and performance hit of context switching and the absolute importance of protecting your time against non-urgent interruptions if you're doing any kind of deep work. Makers vs managers schedule stuff. And yes, even managers should be doing deep work occasionally (I would argue often).
Personally I dislike getting on calls for stuff. I think the clarity of text is much better, and the fact that it’s asynchronous means I can look things up while responding, meaning my responses are more high quality.
It’s super frustrating being like this and then interacting with people who don’t want to write things out clearly or don’t want to read my responses, and then ask me to “hop on a call”.
You're absolutely right. That's why many companies will have weekly team calls and then someone will write down a transcript and email it to everyone. It's the best of both worlds, because you can react to emotional nuances, yet you still have an email that you can search for and re-read as a reference later.
People get very confused when it comes async communication. In fact I have opted to stop calling it asynchronous communication and instead just talk about individual aspects of it and the benefits of those aspects in an applied manner at my company Over time you can slowly build people up to your level of understanding.
If you are not a team lead or similar you are fighting an exhausting and losing battle. If you are in a lead position then you have the power to show others by focusing on your own team and getting your team on that level via coaching them multiple times per week. That said, without commitment from your manager or peer teams it will be extra hard even as a team lead.
PS I'm in the coaching part right now with my team and have stopped calling it "asynchronous" communication.
This can be achieved with meeting notes. These can even be posted "publicly", potentially in a cleaned up form, in a wiki so future employees see them unlike an email chain.
I agree with your point, but I also think more nuance is possible in structure.
For me, sync and async are good for different kinds of things. So I think a good distributed team needs to get at least decent at both and uses them when they fit. We all know the horror of a meeting that could have been a memo. But we also know the horror of the interminable email thread that should have been a quick discussion.
In my experience, many people prefer meetings over asynchronous communication because they can't write. I'm not referring to grammar or to spelling, but to being able to communicate effectively without a continuous feedback from the recipient of the message. When these people are asked to write documentation, the result is usually very sparse text with too many bullet points, table and images.
Good asynchronous communication requires a high degree of introspection, clarity of mind and empathy, that not everybody has. A meeting allows you to pass your message through successive approximations, as in adjusting what you are saying based on the reactions of the listeners and being pushed in the right direction by their questions. Unfortunately it is also much more time consuming, because everybody has to stop whatever they are doing and listen for 1-2 hours, while reading 2 pages of text would taken them 30 minutes and they could have scheduled it at their convenience.
I don't see much of a difference between older vs younger generations nor between native and non-native English speakers.
I'm open to accept that it's just my own experience and that it doesn't generalize.
I don't fully agree. I'm an ok writer, and don't mind writing documentation. But it takes time for me to write a good email. Like you say, you need clarity in your head. So basically you have to clear things out on your own before you can finish the document.
Compare this to a meeting: you just say what you are thinking at the moment. Others might join in and raise points you haven't thought of. So you start from there and readon further. Basically a meeting is clearing things out in a group, which sometimes is more efficient.
I prefer documentation with sparse text and lots of diagrams and images. It provides the high level context and I can fill in any gaps with a short follow up conversation.
For most people, the high level information is all they really need. The few who need to dig in more can hash out the details in a smaller more effective meeting without wasting everyone else's time.
I disagree with a lot of this article because it assumes that we are efficient robots that just need things to be searchable and written down. Tools are also a bit lacking -- in theory writing stuff in a wiki is useful but then try finding the information with, say, Confluence search.
The article also assumes every one is a native speaker who can write quickly and clearly in a chat -- in a lot of international projects this is not the case.
I find that there is less chance for misunderstanding and aggression if you disagree over a video call. Also, human contact and informal communication make life and working more enjoyable.
One thing I personally hard disagree with is the author's view on chat/DMs; that they are by default and expected to be synchronous and immediate.
Unless urgency is indicated somehow, I see chat as asynchronous - an incoming question doesn't carry an expectation of immediate feedback. This is in contrast with, say, a phone call.
Some of the negatives of chat-heavy comms disappear under that mode. Like, why does encrypted e-mail need to have benefits over chat (apart from the interoperability, maybe).
Chat is new to society and we don't (yet) have strong cultural norms and expectations around how it should work. I think things like this are important to talk about when forming a team or starting to work on a project or in a new context.
I've done like three or four video calls at work since corona (=full remote). I don't get the US obsession with video calls. Voice is perfectly cromulent for almost everything (see: those 3-4 exceptions).
In distributed teams involving people from multiple countries you probably want to avoid both video and voice calls because on average everyone is much better at writing and reading English compared to speaking and listening.
I do a lot of meetings on Zoom. The idea that I should instead carefully craft documentation for much of the work I do is an incredibly bad one. The ideas I develop are easy to misunderstand, and constantly in flux. Meanwhile, my teammates have other things to do than keep up with my confluence pages.
Usually such intensive documenting ideas are promoted by people with no respect for good documentation. But also, people with little understanding of how working relationships are formed and maintained.
Hard disagree here. In practice, corporate wikis are always graveyards of outdated and incomplete information. The process usually looks like this:
1. Someone is excited about a new project and creates a wiki page with a lot of aspirational introductory content and a sketch of the rest of the page with TBD everywhere
2. Author gets busy on other things, leaves the company, or the project quickly diverges from the original vision
3. The original page stays in the wiki, adding negative value
People keep saying reading body language and expressions is important and so in-person or video meetings are crucial. However in my experience in the software industry experienced people don't show their emotions from behind their poker-face. If people show emotions, they are mostly fake smiles and fake enthusiasm. If you don't get honest feedback from your team in text, you're not going to get it from body language either.
This is a well-written, cogent, and carefully considered article whose conclusions I disagree with almost completely.
Many of the specifics have already been discussed, but a major benefit of video calls has been missed: Screen sharing. Computer interaction is largely a visual medium in modern times. It is so much easier to look interactively, together, at something than to try to type out what's going on. This applies to both instructions on using or doing something, and especially to code review or discussion.
That doesn't mean you screenshare or call for most problems - you don't. But for some things it just ends up taking infinitely less time, especially when you are having trouble getting one side to understand via text.
I work for a fully remote engineering team that has been remote for more than a decade - COVID changed very little of my organization's culture, as far as I know (I joined after the pandemic started). One of our core rules is "if a conversation is not going well, or people don't understand what's being said, take it to video," and that has served us well.
Everyone I know uses YouTube as a de facto reference. They don't read blogs, Wikipedia, news articles or company documentation, rather they look for explainer videos or tutorials.
I mention that because I think it overflows into work interactions. I've had to deal with many complex problems, technically complex but also with business complexity needing collaboration to manage the objectives and risk. In these circumstances it really warrants a document or detailed email to tell others everything they need to know and consider, and yes it's going to require effort to absorb it. In recent years I've noticed that people almost never read these and ask for a video call. They want you to present it as if it were a YouTube video and you lose an hour trying to explain everything and losing much of it, because it's too much to absorb in real-time.
Maybe I'm a bad writer but I think few would dispute that it's the best way to transfer a block of information. As a rule of thumb calls only make sense for Q & A or discussions.
> Everyone I know uses YouTube as a de facto reference. They don't read blogs, Wikipedia, news articles or company documentation, rather they look for explainer videos or tutorials.
This comes as a complete surprise to me because I don't know anybody who uses Youtube for technical information. Everyone I work with primarily uses Google or DuckDuckGo to find answers on blogs or on stack overflow. If that doesn't work they check the official docs.
I've noticed this too but I don't think it's because of YouTube. I think some people just communicate differently.
There are a few people on my team that won't engage with written communication. Similarly, I have difficulty with video communication. It's just something you need to look out for when hiring and building teams.
I find people don't like calls if they don't have an opportunity to prepare for them well. A call that has a clear agenda, a clear purpose, a set of well defined outcomes, and (ideally) a document sent ahead of time for people to read and think about makes calls significantly more effective. Otherwise everyone just says they'll think about stuff and then you need a second call to get people's reactions.
Sometimes setting everything out in a document and an agenda can even make the actual call redundant, if people respond with their input early enough.
High latency: An idea that takes 30 back-and-forths to resolve may take minutes in a meeting but weeks in writing. Meetings really have negative latency because you see people react before you've finished speaking.
High effort: Even if you account for low bandwidth and reach the same % chance of being understood as when speaking, when that % "misses" the cost is high because of the round-trip-time. To counteract this, you spend even more time editing than you did getting your meaning across.
Emotional: I perceive people as meaner in writing than in meetings, and in response I become meaner. I don't want to and I try not to, but it can still happen.
Albeit I agree with the author on nearly every point, some challenges seem neglected.
"Write. Things. Down." may let a a competitor obtain some company's efficient ways/tools, especially such information is shared among departments ("view permissions") and with the high employee turnover rate. Even if it is not a real risk (in most cases it IMHO isn't) some (especially among senior managers) will think it is, and fight against this convention.
If you like the approach described in this article AND are able to hire you will probably describe your ways during job interviews, and in many ways attract candidates similar to yourself. Leading an old existing team not build by yourself towards this approach is a totally different matter because pertinent habits are among the most difficult to change.
Most pertinent tools (wiki and bugtrackers alike) publish each piece of information's history (who wrote what/when). It sometimes becomes a metric: people committing numerous or very useful information obtain consideration. Many organizations, especially large ones, have people unable to produce such input BUT nonetheless useful as 'crossroads': they usually have all most recent important info and are also able to say who may answer to a question. Other ancillary challenges include shyness (some are able to talk or write a mail to a direct colleague but won't commit any potentially widely-read wiki article) and 'weird' syntax/orthograph.
One of my clients employees struggles massively with asynchronous communication. He constantly spams one-liner after one-liner and demands immediate answers. Anything that involves working together on a sheet or a document becomes a pain in the butt.
Having to work with someone like this has caused our current project to take longer and become more expensive. I really wish corporations gave these people some basic training and tips on async communication. Some people just don't get it.
In my experience, both asynchronous teams and teams of people doing highly synchronized work, some spending most of their time together in voice chats or calls have worked great.
I appreciate the experience feedback from that article, but I wish some of the feedback was contextualized rather than presented as universal. The antithesis laid at the end of the talk helps a bit, but it is a bit reductive about the effectiveness being limited to ops.
I just scanned this, but some of it seems ludicrously wrong. Like rating chat a neutral face for "find" when honestly one of the biggest advantages to chat in my mind is being able to search for key terms long in the future and be able to turn up the exact transcript of the discussion you're thinking of. Or like this quote:
> Using interactive chat is a good idea for the kind of communication that requires immediate, interactive mutual feedback from two or more participants. If that is not the case, chat is not a good idea.
No. Just... no. This is so wrong it's absurd. The point of text chat instead of in-person chat is that it's asynchronous and it doesn't require immediate, interactive feedback. I'm honestly just baffled at how someone could actually use chat and come to this kind of conclusion.
I think neutral is a good rating for chat searchability. It's better than video or face to face chat. It's good for recalling the conversations you were part of. It's bad for discovering information you don't know about and you weren't part of.
The chat that doesn't require immediate feedback is called "email".
Otherwise you are stuck with "hey, can you help?" with zero details for when you actually get to take a look. Then you have to say "yeah, what's wrong?" and wait another hour. A properly written email would have solved the issue in a tenth of the time.
One of the reasons for having a meeting is knowing that most people won't read or watch anything you send them, and even if they read they won't recall much. That is why in film school my teachers screened films in class instead of just assigning them.
I prefer written communication because I like to think while absorbing information. As a result, when it's on a call, often I'll space out for a bit if I suddenly get a thought -- and then I'll have to ask the speaker to repeat themselves, which isn't very fun for anyone involved. Plus, I don't have the best memory when it comes to conversations.
Just the fact that written communication can be referenced (and searched!) at any point in the future makes it magnitudes better for me.
Even if a call is recorded (which it never is at my workplace), it takes a lot more time to go through a recording to find the bit you need, as compared to a quick and simple ctrl+F.
I feel like Discord can work OK for a small team. People can answer things asynchronously in the chat, organize in different channels or threads. And usually it is possible to sync up every now and then, and that can be useful.
I think its easier for people to start putting things in an issue tracker and then forget about them, and the other person doesn't even know about it, or dismisses part of it, writes a comment, the first person doesn't see the comment, etc. So people often need to discuss things directly and tools like an issue tracker can make it too easy to avoid resolving issues or talk past each other.
It depends though. I am talking about really small teams.
[+] [-] FeepingCreature|4 years ago|reply
Where I work (backend software development), we do video calls and meetings all the time. Probably an hour every day or more is spent in direct contact. I see this as absolutely essential to get people on the same page - but none of the reasons that people have listed in this thread for why people prefer personal meetings apply to me. For instance, I am extremely grateful if someone writes up meeting notes, I read text documents all the time, and I often require continuous uninterrupted time and respect it in others, and I still prefer voiced meetings.
I think the primary reason is if I am trying to clarify an idea for a design or an approach, I will go to the people who have also touched that field of difficulty, and try to explain what I am trying to do to them in advance. The spoken medium in that case gives room for interruptions, immediate elaborations and feedback. A write-up either convinces or it doesn't; it can be edited but it has feedback cycles on the order of tens of minutes to hours. Spoken communication has feedback cycles of seconds, so even if I was going to write something up, I'd talk it through verbally first, anyways.
[+] [-] closeparen|4 years ago|reply
It’s an extraordinary week when I get as many as 40% of my working hours for focus time.
* Weekly cross functional syncs for the products I’m involved in, 2 hours.
* Weekly design and SLA/postmortem reviews for the org, 2 hours.
* Three interviews and associated debriefs, 4.5 hours.
* Standup, planning, and retro, 2.5 hours.
* Tech talks, knowledge sharing sessions, org and company all hands, 2 hours.
That’s before anything as-needed to work on a specific issue.
[+] [-] urthor|4 years ago|reply
95% of all substantial corporate meetings would be vastly, vastly improved if someone wrote up some dot point notes of said meeting, and circulated the document as a courtesy.
In my time in the workplace I've seen this done in maybe 5% of meetings. The entirety of that 5% involved team leaders having a regularly scheduled catch-up with our divisional overlord, and I sat in or saw the memo.
Why don't these very basic things that would vastly improve productivity take place?
Garden variety laziness.
Unless you get over that very basic hurdle of couldn't give a damn, what's the point of all these other solutions?
[+] [-] Joeri|4 years ago|reply
There are two types of approaches to working out a problem. One is to get everyone in a meeting and talk it over until a solution is reached. The other is for a single person to carefully think through the problem and possible solutions, write down a solution, and pass it around for (usually asynchronous) comments.
People who think meetings are really useful thrive in the first approach. The more meetings they have the faster they can get things done. People who prefer the solitary focused approach tend to see meetings as obstructions to progress, because they prevent them from actually solving problems by pretending to solve the problem while not making headway.
Which approach is right is highly contextual, and you can’t really argue it either way without falling back on personal preferences.
[+] [-] saiya-jin|4 years ago|reply
That's not all the time my friend. My usual day is 3-5 hours on conf calls, you gain 'popularity' as your time / seniority at the company rises. I get 50% of my actual work done during those meetings, while others talk in matters unrelated/distantly related to my work.
Video all the time? No, thank you. Our top 10 bank in the world is managing just fine without a single video call since forever. You get used to it very quickly, and the freedom it gives you is magical.
[+] [-] skohan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pc86|4 years ago|reply
An hour a day is junior dev level meeting load at almost every place I've ever worked. Seniors are 2-3, arch/staff/principal 4-6 and managers all day long (all averaged over a couple weeks or so it obviously ebbs and flows).
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] andrei_says_|4 years ago|reply
Other useful formats - look at work together with stakeholders and get instant feedback + clarification questions.
For almost anything else, meetings can be a time waste. Some communications do not require full bandwidth exchange but where tone is important, an efficient meeting can be a timesaver.
[+] [-] NikolaNovak|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wpietri|4 years ago|reply
This is just false. You and I live other approaches every day. I believe his way of working is fine for him, and he's welcome to it. But that doesn't justify sweeping dismissal of everybody else's experience.
[+] [-] oceanghost|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasode|4 years ago|reply
Reading the sibling comment from papaf[1] and also a previous reply to me by jakubp[2] about talking things out instead of email, it seems like the higher meta-analysis is that some people have a predisposition to prefer synchronous (videoconference, phone call, cubicle visit) over asynchronous communication (email, chat).
One group really prioritizes synchro comm for "emotional nuance" etc. The other group prioritizes written text's dense information content and searchability.
So if the company has folks like papaf and jakubp, it doesn't matter if you have a blog article recommending structured emails over video calls. Some employees prefer not to communicate that way. In fact, the blog article just makes them express their disagreement with it. E.g. papaf saying we're not "efficient robots" and jakubp advising me that I should accommodate his communication style of in-person cubicle visits.
To prevent clashing, I guess the higher-level advice is to hire a team where everybody likes to communicate the same way.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28651678
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20583427
[+] [-] serial_dev|4 years ago|reply
Exactly! Funny thing is that if you send these people an article explaining the benefits of written docs (design docs, RFCs, proposals, any text document documenting a decision), they will just simply not read it.
I'm on a team where I believe we started gigantic refactoring and redesigning projects without being clear on the goals, non-goals, and tradeoffs we take. I proposed that before we start working on something huge, we should write a short document where we explain what, how and why we want to do.
I recommended them some articles, for example "Design Docs at Google" [1], and "Scaling Engineering Teams via RFCs: Writing Things Down" by Gergely Orosz [2], but I couldn't even convince them to read those articles...
I didn't even send them my favorite posts about the Amazon 6-page memo, because I knew they'd dismiss the whole idea in a second (no matter if I told them that we could do "OurCompany 1-page memo").
This lead me to the sad realization, that our team will never start "writing things down". In my opinion, it would force us to think things through, but it seems like they disagree, or they just don't care.
My coworkers will not even read a 3-paragraph ticket, but they'd love to talk about the same ticket for an hour in a video call. Then in 3 weeks, nobody remembers anything anyway, and they discuss it again.
[1] https://www.industrialempathy.com/posts/design-docs-at-googl...
[2] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/scaling-engineering-teams...
[+] [-] GravitasFailure|4 years ago|reply
Don't forget the usefulness of email when you need the ability to reference past conversations. For some people, a faulty memory is a finely honed art.
[+] [-] hutzlibu|4 years ago|reply
I think the big advantage of text is accountability.
Lots of people say lots of things (the other person wants to hear) ... and remember only some of it. I wasted so much time relying and then discussing forgotten promises, where I wished have had that exchange via text. And I actually believe, this is a big (unconscious) reason for many avoid written communication. Talk is cheap.
[+] [-] prepend|4 years ago|reply
I think it depends on the purpose of the team as to whether people should change.
I’m technology, if the purpose is to build things well then the people who like to emotionally nuance things in synchronous communication should do more async because that works better for building.
It really frustrates me when I analyze a problem, thoughtfully write up a solution and send it out. And then someone (or several) wants to meet to talk about it.
Then the meeting has nothing persistent than a feeling and the details get lost and a week later people forget the resolution. And want to meet again.
I guess if there’s no accretive development it doesn’t matter, like sales or restaurants or whatever. But there seems to be a better way to design and execute complex things.
[+] [-] foxtacles|4 years ago|reply
Personally I fall into the latter category and I do believe it's a better fit for a software engineering role in terms of getting things done, but I've also come to the realiziation that in our world, you'll eventually have to meet the others half-way. Hiring a team that shares the same communication style is often just too difficult (exacerbated by the fact many candidates aren't even self-aware enough to know which preferences they really have, or don't want to admit them).
[+] [-] tailspin2019|4 years ago|reply
I would add that the other group also likely prioritises focus, flow, blocks of uninterrupted time for deep work and minimising context switching. For me personally the text-based content and searchability is way down the list compared to keeping the focus on my core tasks.
I think there is quite a lot more the author could touch on regarding the huge overhead and performance hit of context switching and the absolute importance of protecting your time against non-urgent interruptions if you're doing any kind of deep work. Makers vs managers schedule stuff. And yes, even managers should be doing deep work occasionally (I would argue often).
[+] [-] atom_arranger|4 years ago|reply
Personally I dislike getting on calls for stuff. I think the clarity of text is much better, and the fact that it’s asynchronous means I can look things up while responding, meaning my responses are more high quality.
It’s super frustrating being like this and then interacting with people who don’t want to write things out clearly or don’t want to read my responses, and then ask me to “hop on a call”.
[+] [-] fxtentacle|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] birthday|4 years ago|reply
If you are not a team lead or similar you are fighting an exhausting and losing battle. If you are in a lead position then you have the power to show others by focusing on your own team and getting your team on that level via coaching them multiple times per week. That said, without commitment from your manager or peer teams it will be extra hard even as a team lead.
PS I'm in the coaching part right now with my team and have stopped calling it "asynchronous" communication.
[+] [-] marcinzm|4 years ago|reply
This can be achieved with meeting notes. These can even be posted "publicly", potentially in a cleaned up form, in a wiki so future employees see them unlike an email chain.
[+] [-] wpietri|4 years ago|reply
For me, sync and async are good for different kinds of things. So I think a good distributed team needs to get at least decent at both and uses them when they fit. We all know the horror of a meeting that could have been a memo. But we also know the horror of the interminable email thread that should have been a quick discussion.
[+] [-] mmarq|4 years ago|reply
I don't see much of a difference between older vs younger generations nor between native and non-native English speakers.
I'm open to accept that it's just my own experience and that it doesn't generalize.
[+] [-] koonsolo|4 years ago|reply
Compare this to a meeting: you just say what you are thinking at the moment. Others might join in and raise points you haven't thought of. So you start from there and readon further. Basically a meeting is clearing things out in a group, which sometimes is more efficient.
[+] [-] mobjack|4 years ago|reply
For most people, the high level information is all they really need. The few who need to dig in more can hash out the details in a smaller more effective meeting without wasting everyone else's time.
[+] [-] papaf|4 years ago|reply
The article also assumes every one is a native speaker who can write quickly and clearly in a chat -- in a lot of international projects this is not the case.
I find that there is less chance for misunderstanding and aggression if you disagree over a video call. Also, human contact and informal communication make life and working more enjoyable.
[+] [-] 3np|4 years ago|reply
Unless urgency is indicated somehow, I see chat as asynchronous - an incoming question doesn't carry an expectation of immediate feedback. This is in contrast with, say, a phone call.
Some of the negatives of chat-heavy comms disappear under that mode. Like, why does encrypted e-mail need to have benefits over chat (apart from the interoperability, maybe).
Chat is new to society and we don't (yet) have strong cultural norms and expectations around how it should work. I think things like this are important to talk about when forming a team or starting to work on a project or in a new context.
[+] [-] formerly_proven|4 years ago|reply
In distributed teams involving people from multiple countries you probably want to avoid both video and voice calls because on average everyone is much better at writing and reading English compared to speaking and listening.
[+] [-] satisfice|4 years ago|reply
I do a lot of meetings on Zoom. The idea that I should instead carefully craft documentation for much of the work I do is an incredibly bad one. The ideas I develop are easy to misunderstand, and constantly in flux. Meanwhile, my teammates have other things to do than keep up with my confluence pages.
Usually such intensive documenting ideas are promoted by people with no respect for good documentation. But also, people with little understanding of how working relationships are formed and maintained.
[+] [-] picodguyo|4 years ago|reply
1. Someone is excited about a new project and creates a wiki page with a lot of aspirational introductory content and a sketch of the rest of the page with TBD everywhere
2. Author gets busy on other things, leaves the company, or the project quickly diverges from the original vision
3. The original page stays in the wiki, adding negative value
[+] [-] keskival|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivraatiems|4 years ago|reply
Many of the specifics have already been discussed, but a major benefit of video calls has been missed: Screen sharing. Computer interaction is largely a visual medium in modern times. It is so much easier to look interactively, together, at something than to try to type out what's going on. This applies to both instructions on using or doing something, and especially to code review or discussion.
That doesn't mean you screenshare or call for most problems - you don't. But for some things it just ends up taking infinitely less time, especially when you are having trouble getting one side to understand via text.
I work for a fully remote engineering team that has been remote for more than a decade - COVID changed very little of my organization's culture, as far as I know (I joined after the pandemic started). One of our core rules is "if a conversation is not going well, or people don't understand what's being said, take it to video," and that has served us well.
[+] [-] alephu5|4 years ago|reply
I mention that because I think it overflows into work interactions. I've had to deal with many complex problems, technically complex but also with business complexity needing collaboration to manage the objectives and risk. In these circumstances it really warrants a document or detailed email to tell others everything they need to know and consider, and yes it's going to require effort to absorb it. In recent years I've noticed that people almost never read these and ask for a video call. They want you to present it as if it were a YouTube video and you lose an hour trying to explain everything and losing much of it, because it's too much to absorb in real-time.
Maybe I'm a bad writer but I think few would dispute that it's the best way to transfer a block of information. As a rule of thumb calls only make sense for Q & A or discussions.
[+] [-] yarcob|4 years ago|reply
This comes as a complete surprise to me because I don't know anybody who uses Youtube for technical information. Everyone I work with primarily uses Google or DuckDuckGo to find answers on blogs or on stack overflow. If that doesn't work they check the official docs.
[+] [-] duped|4 years ago|reply
There are a few people on my team that won't engage with written communication. Similarly, I have difficulty with video communication. It's just something you need to look out for when hiring and building teams.
[+] [-] onion2k|4 years ago|reply
Sometimes setting everything out in a document and an agenda can even make the actual call redundant, if people respond with their input early enough.
[+] [-] MattGaiser|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glacials|4 years ago|reply
Low bandwidth: Writing doesn't have inflection or body language, so you need more words to convey the same idea. More: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bFsqk84frI
High latency: An idea that takes 30 back-and-forths to resolve may take minutes in a meeting but weeks in writing. Meetings really have negative latency because you see people react before you've finished speaking.
High effort: Even if you account for low bandwidth and reach the same % chance of being understood as when speaking, when that % "misses" the cost is high because of the round-trip-time. To counteract this, you spend even more time editing than you did getting your meaning across.
Emotional: I perceive people as meaner in writing than in meetings, and in response I become meaner. I don't want to and I try not to, but it can still happen.
[+] [-] natmaka|4 years ago|reply
"Write. Things. Down." may let a a competitor obtain some company's efficient ways/tools, especially such information is shared among departments ("view permissions") and with the high employee turnover rate. Even if it is not a real risk (in most cases it IMHO isn't) some (especially among senior managers) will think it is, and fight against this convention.
If you like the approach described in this article AND are able to hire you will probably describe your ways during job interviews, and in many ways attract candidates similar to yourself. Leading an old existing team not build by yourself towards this approach is a totally different matter because pertinent habits are among the most difficult to change.
Most pertinent tools (wiki and bugtrackers alike) publish each piece of information's history (who wrote what/when). It sometimes becomes a metric: people committing numerous or very useful information obtain consideration. Many organizations, especially large ones, have people unable to produce such input BUT nonetheless useful as 'crossroads': they usually have all most recent important info and are also able to say who may answer to a question. Other ancillary challenges include shyness (some are able to talk or write a mail to a direct colleague but won't commit any potentially widely-read wiki article) and 'weird' syntax/orthograph.
[+] [-] mkl95|4 years ago|reply
Having to work with someone like this has caused our current project to take longer and become more expensive. I really wish corporations gave these people some basic training and tips on async communication. Some people just don't get it.
[+] [-] pyrale|4 years ago|reply
I appreciate the experience feedback from that article, but I wish some of the feedback was contextualized rather than presented as universal. The antithesis laid at the end of the talk helps a bit, but it is a bit reductive about the effectiveness being limited to ops.
[+] [-] lordlic|4 years ago|reply
> Using interactive chat is a good idea for the kind of communication that requires immediate, interactive mutual feedback from two or more participants. If that is not the case, chat is not a good idea.
No. Just... no. This is so wrong it's absurd. The point of text chat instead of in-person chat is that it's asynchronous and it doesn't require immediate, interactive feedback. I'm honestly just baffled at how someone could actually use chat and come to this kind of conclusion.
[+] [-] duckmysick|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nzmsv|4 years ago|reply
Otherwise you are stuck with "hey, can you help?" with zero details for when you actually get to take a look. Then you have to say "yeah, what's wrong?" and wait another hour. A properly written email would have solved the issue in a tenth of the time.
[+] [-] bananamerica|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notRobot|4 years ago|reply
Just the fact that written communication can be referenced (and searched!) at any point in the future makes it magnitudes better for me.
Even if a call is recorded (which it never is at my workplace), it takes a lot more time to go through a recording to find the bit you need, as compared to a quick and simple ctrl+F.
But people all work differently, so... :shrug:
[+] [-] ilaksh|4 years ago|reply
I think its easier for people to start putting things in an issue tracker and then forget about them, and the other person doesn't even know about it, or dismisses part of it, writes a comment, the first person doesn't see the comment, etc. So people often need to discuss things directly and tools like an issue tracker can make it too easy to avoid resolving issues or talk past each other.
It depends though. I am talking about really small teams.