16 ms·

Written communication is remote work super power

831 points by snird 6y ago

MattGaiser 6y ago
I have a day where everyone else in on flex (basically their day off every two weeks). I have already cleared two large tickets because I can address the comments they left when I am done another task (because they wrote out their entire thought instead of waiting for a conversation). I would bet I am 2-3x as productive as I now have hours of uninterrupted time.
DenisM 6y ago
We're finding it quite effective to record short 2-minute videos and circulate those. Everyone can talk and point things on the screen, not everyone can write or even read attentively.
- chinigo 6y ago
  Are these screen recordings with narration or video recordings from a webcam? Personal preference of course, but I'd be less able to express myself in a video recording than in an audio recording or written document, out of pure self-consciousness.
  - DenisM 6y ago
    They are all screens. Rarely I record a design on the whiteboard and I end up in the frame, but I'm fine with it. BTW this also works much better than any spec. Self consciousness is an interesting problem. I prefer seeing faces on the screen during the stand-up (such as it is in the days of COVID), but I was told many hesitate to be on camera. Did you ever find a way out of this? Join.me has very small video size, I imagine this is one way to lessen the stress. Alas it doesn't work for me - I need to see the facial expressions because I need to know when I lost the audience, and because I find it hard to pay attention to a disembodied (and heavily compressed) voice.
    - gav 6y ago
      > Self consciousness is an interesting problem. I prefer seeing faces on the screen during the stand-up (such as it is in the days of COVID), but I was told many hesitate to be on camera. Getting people to turn on their cameras has always seemed to be a challenge in my experience, but it does seem contagious, once a few people do, everyone starts to over time. It makes a huge difference to see peoples faces over talking into a void. I think empathy is a bit part of it.
- mwcampbell 6y ago
  > Everyone can talk and point things on the screen I think you may be making some unconscious assumptions about everyone having the same abilities. Deaf or mute people can't talk. Blind people can't point at things on a screen. And even people who can talk might be more comfortable writing, e.g. people who are self-conscious about their accent. For these reasons, I think that the recent increase in remote work, though forced on us by the pandemic, gives us an opportunity to better include people who might be inadvertently excluded in an on-site environment.
  - mwcampbell 6y ago
    On further reflection, I believe I responded uncharitably to the GP, by taking the quoted part of that comment out of context. The GP most likely meant that everyone on their team can talk and point at things on the screen. In that case, doing videos like that is fine, except that the team should be prepared to adapt if anyone who can't use that method of communication joins the team.
jka 6y ago
Yep, this article rings true on a number of levels, particularly regarding asynchronous work and lack of interrupts. Anecdotally, I'm working on a software project at the moment with a small team of volunteers. To explain some context: I'm the sole developer currently, and I'm treating communications to the team as high-value for us, now and in future - the same way that I'd like to think that I treat the code (I write this with the awareness I've recently cut some corners; but cleanup is on the cards). One observation is that I'm really enjoying only using email for that communication. Sometimes I code for a couple of days before checking or answering emails, simply based on what feels most productive or compelling at the time. As a result I never get distracted by pings while working, and feel much more comfortable taking time while writing messages and replies, generally allowing me to be a bit more thoughtful. And there's only one communication platform. My attention's not split between instant messages, emails, and other organizational tools. This situation's probably an edge case based on the small team size and my personal preferences, but it's been an interesting experience. I don't know how well this approach would scale* -- and an open question based on my experience and also raised by the article is: how and where do you organize that content so that it can be discovered by newcomers to the team? *Example: crisis moments, such as technical outages, would be tricky to manage for a multi-person operations team
- vasco 6y ago
  I like flow as much as anyone but find the thought of working multiple days without speaking to my team to be crazy, I'd feel like none of us would be able to move as fast alone as we do together, and half the time would end up following rabbitholes, or spending too much time on the wrong things because we'd never check in for an opinion. The only way I'd see a full or more days of work without communicating working well is if we'd work on larger amounts of releasable code at once, but then there's more chances of conflicts, reviews get longer and harder to do and there's more risk releasing. I think having a team with 1 rotating person responsible to handle all external requests per week, and everyone else being focused on their work but still being able to pair when needed, ask questions provide guidance, etc to be really cool. All of this remote, of course.
  - 6y ago
joe8756438 6y ago
I also find keeping a log of work helps provide the right communication at the right time. Especially when remote I find it is easy to forget all the things I’ve worked on in a given week. It doesn’t always make sense to interrupt somebody with updates on something the moment it is done. Colocation provides so many more cues to communicate progress, ideas, etc. in the collocation context the work log is less important as a communication tool. It so happens, (shameless plug alert) I built a tool [0] that asks me what I did on a daily basis via sms, the responses are organized in my work notes folder. I use this for keeping track of long-running projects that depend on lots of other people for input. I also use it to build a monthly description of work to include with my clients’ invoices. 0. https://www.tatatap.com https://www.tatatap.com
tomplayford 6y ago
Not everyone finds written comms as easy as everyone else. absolutely +1 to keeping records, but as a form of communication it's not terribly equal.
- Benjammer 6y ago
  I don't know how to phrase this without sounding like a somewhat pedantic asshole, but I cannot understand this reasoning. Are we really saying there is less variability in people's spoken communication abilities than written? This concept is baffling to me. Who in the world talks better than they write? Also, in my experience, written comms is immensely more accessible and accommodating to diverse teams with people who may have variable levels of expertise with English.
  - tomplayford 6y ago
    I was referring to dyslexia. About 5-15% of the US population have some form of dyslexia. Probably should have spelled that out. I do agree that for non native english speakers, the written word is more accessible.
    - Benjammer 6y ago
      I worked with a guy who was legally blind, but could function with a physical screen overlay device that magnified things up to pretty absurd proportions. He was one of the better communicators (in writing) in the entire engineering org. I think we should work on individual cases to make writing more accessible to people for whom it's a struggle. But we shouldn't just throw out writing and it's overall effectiveness. That's not a solution, it's avoiding a hard problem. We don't just decide to only build one story buildings because of physical accessibility, because we don't want to throw out the efficiencies of multi-story structures. Instead we install ramps, automatic doors, elevators, etc. And we have legal standards for door widths and hallway widths, etc, etc.
      - tomplayford 6y ago
_curious_ 6y ago
Effective written communication is remote work super power
- ggurgone 6y ago
  that! I wrote something on the same lines https://giuseppegurgone.com/remote-work-communication/ https://giuseppegurgone.com/remote-work-communication/
  - _curious_ 6y ago
    I read it and I like it, thanks for sharing. Though I do hold the unpopular opinion that slack is antithetical to effective communication methods/mediums.
    - ggurgone 6y ago
      yes I agree
jackjeff 6y ago
Async communication is suitable to resolve some kind of issues. But it has two drawbacks: participants need to be competent at writing and reading prose (it’s harder than it sounds) and even with the best of care your ideas can easily be misinterpreted resulting in the loss of an async cycle. For problems which are not well defined, and where a lot of decisions need to be taken, especially when they verge toward the arbitrary, it’s a lot easier to have people in a room and hash it out. A remote meeting can work too. The problem with meetings are those which are not well prepared. There shall be an agenda and proper minutes should be produced. For most complicated matters actions/investigations are supposed to be followed up. In a way that’s how you mix async with sync communication.
- Benjammer 6y ago
  >For problems which are not well defined, and where a lot of decisions need to be taken, especially when they verge toward the arbitrary, it’s a lot easier to have people in a room and hash it out Easier in what way? I think it makes people less frustrated by having to think hard about a hard problem, and feels "better" when everyone is saying what they think without any barriers, but I would guess it's much worse at arriving at good solutions to challenging business problems. Especially in the case you describe, with many decision points. I cannot fathom how a group of people chatting can efficiently work through many decisions at once, without laying it all out on paper anyway, whether it's before or after the fact. None of the meeting conversation matters unless you have someone taking good notes and summarizing decisions. Which makes me think, why not just start with the writing part? How is one person's notes about what a bunch of people said during a real-time conversation going to be even remotely on the same level as the people themselves composing their thoughts in writing? The in person meeting just seems like a space to share emotions and make shows of power in front of others. I think async writing is much better (obviously nothing's perfect) for removing emotions from the discussion and forcing people to spend time thinking through their thoughts. The act of composing a written email, or composing a one-page spec document can do wonders for people ironing out their own thoughts and ideas. And CC (+BCC) is, imo, the greatest business tool being dropped nowadays in favor of synchronous comms. CC keeps people informed without wasting time or disrupting schedules. It also allows the bosses to keep a much better handle on the comms culture of the company, since they obviously cannot sit in on or observe every meeting. In person meetings have plenty of specific use cases, but I don't really understand the drive to make critical decisions synchronously in the moment during a meeting. Meetings are great for presentations, Q&A, gathering feedback, etc.
lbotos 6y ago
I gave a talk on this idea few years ago, that even just the metadata of slack messages was enough to make improvements to process. As a support engineer it was useful for us to see when we were asking questions in slack, what the patterns were to improve our team training: Ticket comes in -> we don't know -> we link to ticket in X channel. Tally the channel links, look at chart, identify patterns. In an office, this would require me to be an EXTREME micro manager, whereas remotely, I just paid attention and used the meta data to drive our training. In an office, you could ask the team to keep track, or to tell you what they noticed, but by having a direct tap into the data stream, the team just does the work. (This requires a high degree of trust, and we were looking _inward_ so it wasn't something that was met with disdain. If we were using this to compare what teams were more responsive and being outwardly critical, well, I don't think that will go over well anywhere.)
zawaideh 6y ago
would be nice to use "they" or alternate between "he" and "she" in the post. Otherwise, it's a great post
danielovichdk 6y ago
Actually funny this question. Because come to think about it, text is by far my preffered way to communicate. That goes for work and for serious-private matters. The absolute strengt with text is that it gives you history by default - you can save it. While you can save text it's also eaiser to the search. The mental model around writing and communicating is the mental proces that goes into it, and which is also the reason i disagree with people that believe you should be good at writing - if you haven't thought about what you want to communicate you can't write it nor speak about it. Why would you be better at communicating by speech rather than text? Sure it's faster to speak or video, but does that give a better result? I say no way
- EvanAnderson 6y ago
  It's worth noting that some people specifically see verbal communication's undocumented-by-default nature as a feature. When I was younger I found that idea very offensive. I considered people who held that viewpoint to be suspect (engaging in political machinations, or using fluid recollections of conversations to their advantage). I still think there's a grain of truth to my suspicions, but I've learned to recognize that there are acceptable reasons for undocumented conversations.
  - Buttons840 6y ago
    There's still phone calls. Any co-worker you trust enough to have an "off the record" conversation with wouldn't turn down a "hey, can I call you?" request. They might think it's weird at first, but would understand later I'm sure.
    - RHSeeger 6y ago
      I've called coworkers literally just to rant to someone before. Sometimes, you need to complain, but having a record of that is not helpful in any way.
      - Aeolun 6y ago
devxpy 6y ago
Written communication will also give you RSI though
Buttons840 6y ago
> participants need to be competent at writing and reading prose (it’s harder than it sounds) In my experience, around 1/3rd of developers are not good typists. Writing code isn't really about typing, so it's OK, but when participating in an active conversation in a chat room with multiple people, not being able to type well hurts.
jaakl 6y ago
Video calls are like single-room IRC 20 years ago, before PM, threads etc within same room were added. Probably just matter of months when we will see subrooms, side-channel whisper, history of transcribed logs and many other additions also in video calls. Just current software limitations.
- giglamesh 6y ago
  "Breakout Rooms" is already a feature of Zoom.
- djrogers 6y ago
  Pretty much all of those features you call out are available in modern video chat software - at least the one I have to use daily (Zoom).
jugg1es 6y ago
In my experience, the people most averse to writing stuff down are usually the remote engineers. Remote workers don't typically have the same cultural influence as local employees, so they tend to be somewhat alienated and therefore have fewer expectations put on them. I think this disincentivizes remote workers from fully assimilating into the culture and leads to less interest in communication. Inevitably, this ends up affecting their willingness to properly document. Just my opinion built on my anecdotal experience.
- Benjammer 6y ago
  I have the exact opposite anecdotal experience. Remote engineers I've worked with have put a lot more effort into their writing because they understand that it's one of their only avenues to participate in the company communication culture.
rogerkirkness 6y ago
Fundamentally, it's faster to write and type than it is to talk and listen.
- nine_k 6y ago
  It hugely depends on one's competence in writing, and one's style of thinking.
- tomplayford 6y ago
  I personally find it much faster to talk and / or draw than to write or type.
krm01 6y ago
In our business, async communication is at the core of how we deal with clients. We design UI/UX for tech companies (http://fairpixels.pro http://fairpixels.pro) and in the 10+ years of trying out a dozen of ways to work, async email conversations were by far the most effective for us. Email over Slack, why? Slack and other chat environments still create the expectation of realtime responses. Also, messages you type there are short and often of a lower quality. Email is usually more longform. This forces us and clients to think first, write second. The quality of feedback and communication is just so much better.
oDot 6y ago
I wrote Emergency Remote[0] for companies thrown into remote due to the situation. From my experience, it seems that the reason companies use sync communication and "emulating" an office is not because they don't understand the benefits of async, but because of the required discipline. Fortunately, that discipline is required vastly more of the initiator of the conversation. This allows the recipient to quite easily refuse sync communication. This way employees can help each other out and get used to async. [0]: https://www.emergencyremote.com/EmergencyRemote.pdf https://www.emergencyremote.com/EmergencyRemote.pdf
nine_k 6y ago
Real-time, spoken communication is on-site work super power. When uncertainty is high, and an intense discussion is needed, spoken word is much more efficient, from my experience. People are fundamentally better at speaking quickly and taking proper turns. This all is much slower and more cumbersome in video call, phone call, or a text chat. The perceived sequence breaks, the turn-taking protocol breaks (unless enforced by a moderator, at the expense of speed), and the communication become slower, less efficient, and more tiresome. I love neatly written logically organized texts. But to produce such a text, a lot of the questions it answers should be already understood, answered, and arranged in a easy-to-consume order. There are situations when this is not possible, and finding out the scope of the problem and its structure is exactly the task. Here's where face-to-face verbal communication rules. Of course, providing some written output after such a meeting is important, too, be it nicely written minutiae (a shared document on a large screen works well), or just a photo of the whiteboard. So, both written and face-to-face types of communication are important. None can efficiently replace the other.
- e40 6y ago
  I agree with you partially. I found something interesting, with this everyone work from home: I'm able to communicate with certain people more effectively via zoom. I think it boils down to with zoom, you are literally in someone's face, and it's very obvious when you aren't fully focused on them. Perhaps the new way, with zoom, gave some people an opportunity to reset their manners? Not clear what the real reason behind it is, but I noticed it immediately. What a great bonus it was.
  - sdoering 6y ago
    I agree. I see a distinct difference between video-meetings where all people have video active vs. having that disabled. In the second case I have to actively work on keeping engaged. It is quite some effort. When people are in each other's face it is more easy.
  - nahname 6y ago
    In a natural conversation, it is rare to have someone stair you in the eyes for more than a couple seconds. Hadn't considered that for some, this constant stair feels like they are finally being recognized. This makes a lot of sense. You wait for your turn to talk and the stage is yours. In some sense, everything is fairer.
deleted 6y ago
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Traster 6y ago
I think a big part of this article is that the author doesn't like being interrupted and therefore has defined this as the problem. I don't like being interrupted either - but often the interruptions I experience are the best opportunities I have to communicate ideas, have creative back and forth, and importantly, communicate the details that are going to get me shouted at for saying on the wiki. The problem with asynchronous communication is that I need to predict what information you're going to need, before you need it. The result is huge amounts of documentation work going on - 90% of which is useless, and the other 10% is either undiscoverable or could as just as easily be solved with "has anyone touched the db" in chat. The example is great - because it's absolutely something that I've seen happen. You post on the group chat "did anyone touch the db" and someone replies, "Oh Johnny mentioned something about it the other day". Suddenly you're not searching through thousands of jira tickets and wiki pages, and most likely not finding what you want anyway - since no one can predict how they'll scre up. You just ping Johnny, and if Johnny isn't there? Well he'll reply when it's back. It's fine. That is part of flexible working. Flexible working isn't "I get to pick up my kids at 12" it's about everyone having flexibility, and everyone giving flexibility. To me, this asynchronous communication plan sets an unacheivable goal, because you're never going to know what it is other people are going to need to know, and documenting everything exhaustively is an uneconomical.
baron816 6y ago
How do you get your coworkers to start proofreading what they write?
satvikpendem 6y ago
If I were to ever hire, I'd optimize first for clear, written, long-form asynchronous communication, second for ability for the job at hand, and anything else third. Having hired some freelancers recently, I've found that there is a world of difference between those who can communicate clearly and those who can't.
- abalashov 6y ago
  Oh, indeed. I think this is the single most underrated dimension of actually being able to extract value from someone in a commercial organisation. Also, having run into it a number of times, I feel compelled to mention those who are quite capable of clear, written, long-form asynchronous communication as a matter of skills and abilities, but seem cholerically averse to doing it.
siculars 6y ago
People ask me what do they need to be good at to work at Google. I jokingly (but kind of seriously) tell them it's just like grade school - reading and writing. 80% of the job is reading, editing and commenting on docs people wrote or writing docs people will read.
watwut 6y ago
We found it faster to call and speak
rakoo 6y ago
Interestingly, I've been thinking about organization at work and I feel like there are many forms of async communications that should or could be merged, because of how common they are. We need to communicate announcements, ask for opinions on changes, document a process, list relevant steps to a change that is happening, ... In my mind there are multiple goals a perfect system should have: - Must be easy to create a new "conversation" - Must be possible to write long form content in a "post", where "post" is the first item in a conversation - Must be able to have a meaningful conversation with replies to specific points - Must be able to change the content of the "post" based on the discussion that happened (such that a "post" can be a poll, participants discuss options, and the final decision is summarized) - Must be able to easily enter and exit the full conversation - Must be able to easily link the full conversation, for referencing - Must be able to set metadata (dates, relevant people, status, stuff like that) We have many systems, but none really fits the bill: - Email is probably the worst, because you can't modify the original message, you can't link to it and you can't transparently enter the conversation if you weren't part of it initially. We've all seen the "adding XYZ to the loop" that provide 0 content to the conversation. There's also the whole issue about top-posting and lack of proper threading that make having a conversation difficult. Probably just a client issue rather than a protocol issue though - NNTP is a step above, but ironically because it has remained niche the clients and the etiquette help having a proper conversation. Still doesn't fill the bill - Ticket systems are paradoxically pretty good for this situation. They do contain the necessary structure for incorporating metadata, in all the various forms ingenuity can come up with.... sometimes too much ingenuity, such as the labels and fields and knobs that were needed for that project years ago are still here, cluttering a lot of space because most aren't actually needed anyway. Imagine using such a mess - A wiki is nice, but the emphasis on structuring is detrimental for flows that go outside of documenting. Sometimes you just want a linear list of conversations ordered by date - Google docs and associated are good for really long forms for the initial "post", but are not very good at structured conversation Perhaps the best software, for all those use cases, is a forum software. I'm partial to the (old) reddit UX or the HN UX; remove the useless voting and it's almost the perfect way to communicate. The interface gives you the space to actually take time about what you want to say and properly articulate it. HN is a bit terse here, reddit gives you formatting helps to nicely present your ideas and makes reading it easier. Only drawback is that they are text only, and sometimes you need to include non-text (a screenshot of the planned changes, a video of the flow to document, a map of the place you're discussing about, ...) (If it is not clear already, I'm still sad at the death of Google Wave. 10 years later and it's still the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6pgxLaDdQw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6pgxLaDdQw)
cmarschner 6y ago
Peter F. Drucker, influential author of countless books on management, once made a very simple argument: there are reader types, and there are listener types. If you are dealing with a partner you better know which type they are. It doesn‘t make sense to hand a listener type a manuscript without talking about the subject, and it doesn‘t make sense to set up meetings with a reader type before you hand off the written argument. We should perhaps just accept that an tolerate each other where our strengths are. [1] Peter F. Drucker: Managing Oneself. https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Oneself-Harvard-Business-Classics/dp/142212312X https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Oneself-Harvard-Business-Cla... Edit: Online: http://academic.udayton.edu/lawrenceulrich/LeaderArticles/Drucker%20Managing%20Oneself.pdf http://academic.udayton.edu/lawrenceulrich/LeaderArticles/Dr...
- xpe 6y ago
  Whatever people’s preferences in terms of reading or listening, I am inclined to think teams get better results when a high quality meeting summary goes out ahead of time. I don’t claim this is an absolute truth, but I also don’t think many organizations have given it proper try.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    If you send out a high quality summary you cover the reader types, then during the meeting you cover the listeners.
  - paragraft 6y ago
    I agree, but think the virtue is as much as in the actual process of writing the summary forces the summoner to clearly work out ahead of time what the meeting is actually about and what it is aiming to achieve.
timwaagh 6y ago
In my team if someone needs to pick up the kids he just says it in chat or even in a video meeting and gets them. I think webex meetings work better than real live ones. If they are tiring that's positive because meetings last too long. If only one person can speak at a time it prevents people from interrupting and makes them conscious not to hog the mic. Async communication? How would you do that? If you have a question and can't find an answer, what do you do? Make a jira user story to document this specific scenario and put yourself as the reporting too? Then assign to a colleague and hope he does something with it? I mean it could possibly work if everyone is accustomed to it, is of a very high level and is also a high level technical writer. But it just seems to me that in practice junior might be too dumb to understand seniors writing. Or senior just writes something that's not legible. Or senior ignores his new assigned story because junior created it and not the product owner. Or scrum master sees the story and thinks: that's not part of sprint goals and throws it out of the board. It seems really slow to work this way.
- eXpl0it3r 6y ago
  I think it really depends on the project size and the kind of work. If you're more in a waterfall model, where the specs are clear and you just got to do it, I can understand how being able to work uninterrupted is a nice-to-have. But if you work very closely with the business and often run into things that could be done or understood in different ways, having to wait a day or more to get a clarifying response would not work. And this is know-how that can't be written down easily if at all, since a lot of decisions are purely based on experience and historical knowledge. I used to have this illusionary vision of how everything should be neatly documented, but if you operate on a constantly changing code base, it's really hard to find a good balance. Documentation gets outdated every few weeks and sometimes days, plus most of the time, you don't even know that said documentation has been written. As such, you can't fully trust the documentation and you always have to check out at least part of the code. What seems to work for me, is documentation that gives a broad overview of a topic and then gives certain pointers into the code. That way you capture the essence of functionality that is likely to remain for a longer time and the transition from documentation to code is made easier. And finally, if someone is stuck or doesn't understand something, I find it problematic to have the expectation that nobody may be available to read your message for the next few hours or whole day. What is more efficient, someone spending a couple of minutes to provide assistance or someone googling/search Jira/wiki/Confluence for half a day and not making any progress?
VectorLock 6y ago
I've noticed the biggest difference between junior developers and more experienced individuals is their written communication abilities. This has led me down the path of trying to find resources to help teach communications to those that I mentor but since this isn't my area of expertise (teaching communications) I'd love if anybody had resources to share.
- ilaksh 6y ago
  I'm not an expert on teaching communications but I personally don't believe we need to be an expert to figure out how people can increase their communications skills. Its like anything else. They have to practice, and get correction when they do something wrong. A big part of it is habit or level of effort. Force them to read books. Maybe something fun like a genre of novel that they like. Because the fundamental level of literacy is going to have a big impact on writing ability. Have them find a forum of subreddit that they like and then regularly participate in it. And then offline or in a private message, fix their grammar and point out the problems with their communication. Or just have them use written communications at work rather than in-person meetings etc. And then when the communication is lacking, point out the specific flaws.
  - VectorLock 6y ago
    Practices is great and all, thats how I learned, but I'd know there have to be resources out there to help people learn beyond simply "figure it out as you go."
techbio 6y ago
The discoverability of written thought decreases with its quantity. It comes down to knowing your sources, not relying on some Bacon number of reinforced echoes.
sytse 6y ago
When writing you are not getting feedback (give more context, go faster, what concerns to address). A back and forth can be a much faster way (both in total time elapsed and time spend) to resolve something. At GitLab we recommend async by default and jump to sync when you start going back and forth. https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/asynchronous/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/asynchro...
cborenstein 6y ago
A strength (and weakness) of async is that it comes with a higher expectation of writing quality. When the expectations are too high, it's likely that people won't get things down in the first place. My team has noticed an unintuitive approach to communication that seems to work better than alternatives. Write better private notes. Private notes are low-friction. You know what's worth writing. You don't need to worry as much about if it's a mess. Our approach is to help you make your private notes a little better organized. And to make it fast to share these notes when they might be helpful to someone else too. It's bytebase.io. Would love the community's feedback.
sabujp 6y ago
i find that i spend 3x more time explaining something through writing than through a quick chat
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
My biggest issue (and it is an issue that has been brought to my attention), is the old "Emperor Joseph" issue: "Too many words." I trend prolix. In my essays, this can be corrected by post-edit, but it is not so easy to do that in realtime.
chiefalchemist 6y ago
Communication is a super power. Full stop. The key to communication is to remember: "It's not what you say, it's what they hear." (Note: say can be written, and hear therefore read.) The mantra works either way. Ultimately, the responsibility of the communication belongs to the sender. Improvement still takes work, but you'll progress faster if you have this foundation.
alexashka 6y ago
I think emotional intelligence coupled with integrity are the real super power wombo-combo, no matter the role. It helps if you have the technical skills to go with it but to be honest, having those skills should be a matter of training, not expecting people to be learning on their own time. This should be fixed on the company level - every employee should receive regular training, not be expected to magically keep up their workload and learn new technologies in their spare time. Another issue that makes projects go side-ways is people relying on a paycheque for their livelihood. If you want people with integrity to practice it in the workplace, don't place them in impossible situations where they have to choose between their integrity and their family's financial well being. This should be fixed on the government level. This is all to say that this endless stream of blog posts about what an already over-worked, under-paid worker ought to improve upon, are not helpful - highly educated people used to be Aristocrats who fine dined and wrote poetry. Today we are expecting people to pay for their own training, spend the best years of their lives studying to pass tests, be hazed trying to get a job, for the privilege of getting worked to the bone for the benefit of a corporate entity. I thought only dystopian novels could think of a system so counter-productive and insane, until I read Brave New World and thought hm, this might be an upgrade over the life I'm currently living. Anyhow :)
ChicagoDave 6y ago
Except no one actually reads emails anymore.
brongondwana 6y ago
I agree with this so much that I even wrote about it recently! https://fastmail.blog/2020/05/22/email-for-remote-productivity/ https://fastmail.blog/2020/05/22/email-for-remote-productivi... Snir David writes well. One point that I think is missed in the "chats and video calls" is that you don't have situational awareness of whether the other person is busy like you do in person. It's the same as the problem with taking phone calls when driving a car as compared to talking to people who are in the car with you. The people in the car with you can see when you're in a tricky traffic situation. The caller, not so much.
naveedn 6y ago
I have been thinking about the same problem as the author, but I’ve reached vastly different conclusions about how to do remote work better.Polar opposite. I wrote my opinion here: https://www.naveed.dev/posts/consider-xp-for-distributed-teams https://www.naveed.dev/posts/consider-xp-for-distributed-tea... However, I think his points are thought provoking, and it’s interesting to see how someone else thinks about the problem.
Kaze404 6y ago
This article is great because it puts into words the relationship I've had with Slack since the beginning of my career. I've been working professionally for 4 years and I cannot remember a single time where I thought "I'm so glad we have Slack". Don't get me wrong, I think the platform itself is a great interpretation of IM, but IM is the absolute last thing I want to use in a work environment. One of the reasons I didn't work out on my first remote job is because I refused to treat Slacks red icon as my #1 priority in the world. Coworker needs my attention immediately? Call me. Is calling too much of a hassle? Then it's probably not as urgent as you think. I understand it's very arrogant of me but I cannot bear the thought of losing all of my focus to answer a question that was really not that immediate. It sure doesn't help that people think they need to greet me and wait for a response before they actually say what they want to say. I'm working at a new place now and we've gotten so good at asynchronous collaboration that I haven't exchanged a single message on Slack with one of my coworkers since they joined the team. All of our talks are done through Github and our weekly meeting on Friday where we plan the next week and spend an hour or two chatting. This is nice because it gives me time to reason about discussions, and even makes me look forward to the next meeting to have some fun with them, while previously I got so sick of my coworkers that I had literal nightmare-induced panic attacks over constant meetings. I'm really glad I managed to find a team that enjoys working on the same way I do.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  > It sure doesn't help that people think they need to greet me and wait for a response before they actually say what they want to say. This is indeed intensely frustrating. It is so ridiculous that when you just don’t respond, you’ll end up with a person just saying only ‘hello’ to you three days in a row...
  - somurzakov 6y ago
    in cases like this, i just reply "sup" and switch back to my main window, until sender formulates his/her question
  - vishnugupta 6y ago
    This is a wide enough pain that someone has created a webpage: https://www.nohello.com/?m=0 https://www.nohello.com/?m=0
abhayb 6y ago
The super power I see is not so much written communication as intentional communication. I try to get myself to communicate intentionally by having command-enter send my Slack messages. But sometimes you need to Do the Thing. And you can't afford to Intend to Do the Thing first. In those situations the speed of spoken-face-to-face makes the organizational debt worth it.
ilaksh 6y ago
Agree with the headline. Good written communication is a requirement for a software development project. But I am not sure about all of his ideas in all circumstances. In particular in relation to a very small dev team and small client group. In terms of something different like for example an open-source piece of software on github, issue trackers are key. However, for a small sort of private project. For example, if you have a very small team and can get people in a chat room consistently so that you can have solid conversations every day in there, that has worked better for me than using some kind of issue tracker. Especially in terms of dealing with clients or business-related team members. And maybe its really only for very small projects, like one or two developers, I don't know. But for me, with most of the projects that I have been on my own building a product or tool for a client, the issue trackers and things like that worked against me and the project as far as I could tell: - People would seem to think it was their job to fill the board/tracker up with as many things as they could think of. This caused extra stress and tended to make me want to rush through things to get them out of the way. The biggest problem with that was that it took time away from the really important things. And it is very difficult to get people to give realistic priorities. - Sometimes, people would write critical information in the issue tracker or board, and I did not realize it had been updated or how critical it was. And so they operate with the assumption that they have communicated something, but actually I didn't see it until two days later. - When they have a place to put an infinite number of tasks, it encourages them to increase the scope of the project, without having a real discussion or necessarily even thinking the feature through. For me when doing projects on my own (or maybe with a designer) for a specific small group, there is just a limited amount of stuff that I can realistically finish in a given time frame. So I actually will not allow an issue tracker or board and try to get everyone to show up sort of simultaneously in a chat room. Sometimes people cannot or will not do that, and in those cases sometimes a phone call can work. Or maybe they actually are capable of reading and writing async messages in the chat room (not very common). Basically every few days I meet in the chat or phone or whatever with the client and discuss what I have been working on in the last few days, walk them through the updates to the application. So something is being delivered and tested by the client every week or even every few days. Then we specifically talk about exactly what is the priority for the next few days. If there is development work that needs to be caught up on, then there may not be any new features to work on. Or there may be a feature that has been in progress, and the client gets an update on that. Often the client has ideas for new features. Instead of putting them in a board or issue tracker to pile up, when they bring them up, we decide whether they are now higher priorities than other existing items and will fit into the work load of the next few days. Or, I tell them to remind me later. There is no such thing as a task that I will "get to when I have time". I have the client focus on the next most important priority and/or I explain the ongoing dev work, and we work out like 2-5 days of work and that's it. There is no infinitely expanding list of things to get to later. If something he has been thinking about is really important, it becomes a priority as soon as the previous task is completed. We check if I implemented something correctly as soon as it is implemented. We don't have to refer to a database of things, because we just talked about it a couple of days before.
tabbott 6y ago
The author did a really good job of articulating why I've spent the last several years working on Zulip despite there being a thousand Slack clones to choose from. Asynchronous communication is essential to being able to focus, at least if you do enough communication that it matters how you communicate. And it's very inefficient to do asynchronous communication at scale in Slack or any of its copycats. This leads to the Slack cultural issues detailed in the post; they're the result of people working around the bad core workflow of a beautiful, masterfully marketed tool. Consider "Everybody expects an immediate response" culture. In my view, that is people adapting to it being unpleasant to be a busy person waiting for a reply in a Slack channel. (Which is because it's miserable to make sure you don't miss things in busy slack channel, so everyone does, so anyone who wants to be sure of a response spams PMs and mentions and otherwise applies pressure to get a reply now now now so that they can mentally move on to their next task). Zulip aims to make asynchronous communication so efficient that such adaptations are unnecessary. The core innovation is that all messages in channels are organized within "topics", which work exactly like the Subject field in email. This model works great for enabling asynchronous communication in email, and it works even better in Zulip (mainly because of topic editing and linking features). The main goal of Zulip's interaction design is to make skimming hundreds or thousands of Zulip messages (and replying thoughtfully to the ones where you can add something!) pleasant. This enables a better way of working. Personally, I read and respond to 500-1000 Zulip messages sent by dozens of people across 50+ topics every single day, and I get compliments on how responsive I am, despite the fact that I do focus work in multi-hour blocks most days, Zulip's development community is all over the world, and I lose hours of productive time every day due to a chronic illness. This wouldn't be possible with Slack. And this isn't just my experience; I've heard from so many people in organizations that switched to Zulip that they love how Zulip makes better use of the limited time they have (whether busy managers at companies or participants in part-time communities). > "You'll lose your history" This is the other major bundle of problems that Zulip's topics solve. Zulip can be a valuable knowledge store because of the organization provided by topics (combined with features like permanent links and topic-powered search workflows). Zulip is 100% open source software (Not open core! We're intentionally not VC-backed so that we can prioritize our values; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23102430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23102430). And we sponsor free hosting on zulip.com for open source projects, academic research, and other non-commercial organizations.
throwdbaaway 6y ago
Chat is only problematic if all you have is slack, with the lousy threading UX, and the prevalence of DM and private channel. Still, slack is miles better than wiki pages (go staled immediately), emails (even more broken threading interface), and heaven forbids google docs (impossible for collaboration, may work for bosses). I think the best solution is something like zulip chat, complemented by wiki pages for "immutable" information.
phendrenad2 6y ago
There's a reason Technical Writing is a class offered in engineering courses in college. When you've read good documentation (HP user manuals from the 90s) and bad documentation (most open-source projects, no judgement, they're crowdsourced and we're lucky to have contributors willing to document things at all), you really get a sense for how valuable this skill is.
johndoe42377 6y ago
So, writing rfcs, standards, articles and Usenet (boomer's tech, you know) was not that bad after all? The absurdity of synchronous realtime communication is most evident when taking to an extreme of online coding. Nothing but crap is being produced. https://karma-engineering.com/lab/wiki/Remote https://karma-engineering.com/lab/wiki/Remote
Animats 6y ago
Did this guy just re-invent memos? There's a lot of history here, going back centuries. The military has put much effort into designing written communication. There's the classic 5-paragraph operations order format. There's the "bottom line up front" style, which for information rather than orders. The military makes a very strong distinction between info documents and orders. Diplomats have some traditional formats, too.[1] Most correspondence is formal. Sometimes there's an "appreciation of the situation" attached to correspondence from a mission to its state department. That's an informally written summary of what the writer has observed and what they think is going to happen. An amusing read is "How to Live though an Executive", which is nominally by L. Ron Hubbard, the Scientology guy, but was really written by Richard DeMille. This is from 1953. It's someone trying to invent Slack, before computers. It's done with wallboards, clips, carbon paper forms, tear-off tickets, and people called "communicators" doing the paperwork. It was never used. Too complicated pre-computer. The basic concept is a trouble ticket, with an organized system to insure that handing off the problem to someone doesn't mean it gets lost to follow-up. [1] https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/hks-communications-program/files/pp_sri_kulkarni_and_yotam_goren_4_10_17.pdf https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/hks-communications-pro...
ezoe 6y ago
The problem is, most people don't have enough literacy and practicing to communicate via text. Most of them appear to be able to read and write text, but they are not. They simply recognize the few keywords and pretend they understand it. That's why most of the people, after remote work become the norm, fallback to inefficient video chat rather than efficient text chat.
- andykx 6y ago
  It is possible to convey much more nuance through speech. I like to think of myself as an effective writer. Nonetheless, it is incredibly difficult to express nuanced emotions through writing. This is particularly true in “professional” contexts, where an informal message may be perceived as rude. In many situations, I suspect that the same message, delivered verbally, would not even warrant a second thought. The reality is that few people are taught to write in a manner that allows them to actually express their feelings. The fact that we even need to learn this indicates to me that speech is a far more effective way of getting our thoughts across
arminiusreturns 6y ago
I am surrounded by people who love to do voice and video meetings, and I find them taxing and not very efficient. I've been hearing a lot about communication in this remote work covid world, but I've seen that turn into more of these comms that I don't want. I need to find a way to tactfully say I prefer text...
mister_hn 6y ago
Async writing is powerful but unfortunately, it requires also dedicated time slots to achieve it. When you have the constant pressure from management to do X instead of writing on Y in a limited time, then you have no chance to write beautiful, centralised information. And so, the company itself accumulates technical debt, looses history and precious information that might be speed up people in the future.
AceyMan 6y ago
except for Slack | Teams | its ilk next question. /me: an expert writer who sees no change on the horizon
livealife 6y ago
Sometimes you need instant answer. You just can't move forward. Then it requires documentation written 'properly'. Honestly finding programmers with good writing skills too is difficult.
inertiatic 6y ago
I am a firm believer that written communication is the best way to sustain a productive team. Talking, especially in person, might get you the result you're looking for faster. Look, we decided what we needed to make and skipped the overhead of opening a ticket and capturing the back and forth. But then you have to revisit your decision and your reasoning behind them 4 months from now. Why didn't we just do that other thing that seems more efficient? Or even worse, someone picks up your work after you leave and they have to do that, without the potential ability to recall the context. Or then you leave a meeting about making any sort of decision and start working and a few days later realize you're not on the same page. I get that writing might not be some people's best skill, or even their preferred way of communication. We all have to put up with things we don't enjoy and learn skills to work, why should this be any different? I work for company that is in the process of going remote first, without embracing a culture of writing first and writing everything and it's not very pretty. Previously, I worked for a company that despite not really prioritizing remote workers, because teams were distributed across the world, had to capture a lot of the things I mentioned in the tickets created for each task. And it was really empowering to have a lot of context as someone who was tasked with maintaining those things.
mcsoft 6y ago
Finally, someone came up with a good wording for 'Slack is #1 productivity killer'.
domsom 6y ago
Picking the Slack / Chat argument: I don't think it should be expected to reply immediately. It's more like a lightweight inbox (when being tagged / DMed) that's easy to reply to (no greeting/regards required). Channels are a great place for async discussions that can be linked to and are kind of public so noone needs to decide beforehand whom to engage, and everyone can decide to join or leave the discussion without being cc'd forever.
adolforismos 6y ago
"The Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous land empire in history. It started with the unification of Mongolia in 1206 and territory of 4 million km² ruled by Genghis Khan, to have 35 million km² in 1279 under Emperor Kublai Khan." "Here is the thing: all that remote work in one of the biggest empires in history was accomplished without videoconferencing." Why Videoconferencing Is for Rookies https://medium.com/swlh/why-video-conferencing-is-for-rookies-8a03f0ed534c https://medium.com/swlh/why-video-conferencing-is-for-rookie...
m0llusk 6y ago
Nonwritten communication is unreliable. People often have different interpretations of what was said and what exactly should be done. The only way to reliably manage work is to have everything written down.

831 points by snird 6y ago

I have a day where everyone else in on flex (basically their day off every two weeks). I have already cleared two large tickets because I can address the comments they left when I am done another task (because they wrote out their entire thought instead of waiting for a conversation). I would bet I am 2-3x as productive as I now have hours of uninterrupted time.

DenisM 6y ago

We're finding it quite effective to record short 2-minute videos and circulate those. Everyone can talk and point things on the screen, not everyone can write or even read attentively.

chinigo 6y ago
Are these screen recordings with narration or video recordings from a webcam? Personal preference of course, but I'd be less able to express myself in a video recording than in an audio recording or written document, out of pure self-consciousness.
- DenisM 6y ago
  They are all screens. Rarely I record a design on the whiteboard and I end up in the frame, but I'm fine with it. BTW this also works much better than any spec. Self consciousness is an interesting problem. I prefer seeing faces on the screen during the stand-up (such as it is in the days of COVID), but I was told many hesitate to be on camera. Did you ever find a way out of this? Join.me has very small video size, I imagine this is one way to lessen the stress. Alas it doesn't work for me - I need to see the facial expressions because I need to know when I lost the audience, and because I find it hard to pay attention to a disembodied (and heavily compressed) voice.
  - gav 6y ago
    > Self consciousness is an interesting problem. I prefer seeing faces on the screen during the stand-up (such as it is in the days of COVID), but I was told many hesitate to be on camera. Getting people to turn on their cameras has always seemed to be a challenge in my experience, but it does seem contagious, once a few people do, everyone starts to over time. It makes a huge difference to see peoples faces over talking into a void. I think empathy is a bit part of it.
mwcampbell 6y ago
> Everyone can talk and point things on the screen I think you may be making some unconscious assumptions about everyone having the same abilities. Deaf or mute people can't talk. Blind people can't point at things on a screen. And even people who can talk might be more comfortable writing, e.g. people who are self-conscious about their accent. For these reasons, I think that the recent increase in remote work, though forced on us by the pandemic, gives us an opportunity to better include people who might be inadvertently excluded in an on-site environment.
- mwcampbell 6y ago
  On further reflection, I believe I responded uncharitably to the GP, by taking the quoted part of that comment out of context. The GP most likely meant that everyone on their team can talk and point at things on the screen. In that case, doing videos like that is fine, except that the team should be prepared to adapt if anyone who can't use that method of communication joins the team.

jka 6y ago

Yep, this article rings true on a number of levels, particularly regarding asynchronous work and lack of interrupts. Anecdotally, I'm working on a software project at the moment with a small team of volunteers. To explain some context: I'm the sole developer currently, and I'm treating communications to the team as high-value for us, now and in future - the same way that I'd like to think that I treat the code (I write this with the awareness I've recently cut some corners; but cleanup is on the cards). One observation is that I'm really enjoying only using email for that communication. Sometimes I code for a couple of days before checking or answering emails, simply based on what feels most productive or compelling at the time. As a result I never get distracted by pings while working, and feel much more comfortable taking time while writing messages and replies, generally allowing me to be a bit more thoughtful. And there's only one communication platform. My attention's not split between instant messages, emails, and other organizational tools. This situation's probably an edge case based on the small team size and my personal preferences, but it's been an interesting experience. I don't know how well this approach would scale* -- and an open question based on my experience and also raised by the article is: how and where do you organize that content so that it can be discovered by newcomers to the team? *Example: crisis moments, such as technical outages, would be tricky to manage for a multi-person operations team

vasco 6y ago
I like flow as much as anyone but find the thought of working multiple days without speaking to my team to be crazy, I'd feel like none of us would be able to move as fast alone as we do together, and half the time would end up following rabbitholes, or spending too much time on the wrong things because we'd never check in for an opinion. The only way I'd see a full or more days of work without communicating working well is if we'd work on larger amounts of releasable code at once, but then there's more chances of conflicts, reviews get longer and harder to do and there's more risk releasing. I think having a team with 1 rotating person responsible to handle all external requests per week, and everyone else being focused on their work but still being able to pair when needed, ask questions provide guidance, etc to be really cool. All of this remote, of course.
- 6y ago

joe8756438 6y ago

I also find keeping a log of work helps provide the right communication at the right time. Especially when remote I find it is easy to forget all the things I’ve worked on in a given week. It doesn’t always make sense to interrupt somebody with updates on something the moment it is done. Colocation provides so many more cues to communicate progress, ideas, etc. in the collocation context the work log is less important as a communication tool. It so happens, (shameless plug alert) I built a tool [0] that asks me what I did on a daily basis via sms, the responses are organized in my work notes folder. I use this for keeping track of long-running projects that depend on lots of other people for input. I also use it to build a monthly description of work to include with my clients’ invoices. 0. https://www.tatatap.com https://www.tatatap.com

tomplayford 6y ago

Not everyone finds written comms as easy as everyone else. absolutely +1 to keeping records, but as a form of communication it's not terribly equal.

Benjammer 6y ago
I don't know how to phrase this without sounding like a somewhat pedantic asshole, but I cannot understand this reasoning. Are we really saying there is less variability in people's spoken communication abilities than written? This concept is baffling to me. Who in the world talks better than they write? Also, in my experience, written comms is immensely more accessible and accommodating to diverse teams with people who may have variable levels of expertise with English.
- tomplayford 6y ago
  I was referring to dyslexia. About 5-15% of the US population have some form of dyslexia. Probably should have spelled that out. I do agree that for non native english speakers, the written word is more accessible.
  - Benjammer 6y ago
    I worked with a guy who was legally blind, but could function with a physical screen overlay device that magnified things up to pretty absurd proportions. He was one of the better communicators (in writing) in the entire engineering org. I think we should work on individual cases to make writing more accessible to people for whom it's a struggle. But we shouldn't just throw out writing and it's overall effectiveness. That's not a solution, it's avoiding a hard problem. We don't just decide to only build one story buildings because of physical accessibility, because we don't want to throw out the efficiencies of multi-story structures. Instead we install ramps, automatic doors, elevators, etc. And we have legal standards for door widths and hallway widths, etc, etc.
    - tomplayford 6y ago

_curious_ 6y ago

Effective written communication is remote work super power

ggurgone 6y ago
that! I wrote something on the same lines https://giuseppegurgone.com/remote-work-communication/ https://giuseppegurgone.com/remote-work-communication/
- _curious_ 6y ago
  I read it and I like it, thanks for sharing. Though I do hold the unpopular opinion that slack is antithetical to effective communication methods/mediums.
  - ggurgone 6y ago
    yes I agree

jackjeff 6y ago

Async communication is suitable to resolve some kind of issues. But it has two drawbacks: participants need to be competent at writing and reading prose (it’s harder than it sounds) and even with the best of care your ideas can easily be misinterpreted resulting in the loss of an async cycle. For problems which are not well defined, and where a lot of decisions need to be taken, especially when they verge toward the arbitrary, it’s a lot easier to have people in a room and hash it out. A remote meeting can work too. The problem with meetings are those which are not well prepared. There shall be an agenda and proper minutes should be produced. For most complicated matters actions/investigations are supposed to be followed up. In a way that’s how you mix async with sync communication.

Benjammer 6y ago
>For problems which are not well defined, and where a lot of decisions need to be taken, especially when they verge toward the arbitrary, it’s a lot easier to have people in a room and hash it out Easier in what way? I think it makes people less frustrated by having to think hard about a hard problem, and feels "better" when everyone is saying what they think without any barriers, but I would guess it's much worse at arriving at good solutions to challenging business problems. Especially in the case you describe, with many decision points. I cannot fathom how a group of people chatting can efficiently work through many decisions at once, without laying it all out on paper anyway, whether it's before or after the fact. None of the meeting conversation matters unless you have someone taking good notes and summarizing decisions. Which makes me think, why not just start with the writing part? How is one person's notes about what a bunch of people said during a real-time conversation going to be even remotely on the same level as the people themselves composing their thoughts in writing? The in person meeting just seems like a space to share emotions and make shows of power in front of others. I think async writing is much better (obviously nothing's perfect) for removing emotions from the discussion and forcing people to spend time thinking through their thoughts. The act of composing a written email, or composing a one-page spec document can do wonders for people ironing out their own thoughts and ideas. And CC (+BCC) is, imo, the greatest business tool being dropped nowadays in favor of synchronous comms. CC keeps people informed without wasting time or disrupting schedules. It also allows the bosses to keep a much better handle on the comms culture of the company, since they obviously cannot sit in on or observe every meeting. In person meetings have plenty of specific use cases, but I don't really understand the drive to make critical decisions synchronously in the moment during a meeting. Meetings are great for presentations, Q&A, gathering feedback, etc.

lbotos 6y ago

I gave a talk on this idea few years ago, that even just the metadata of slack messages was enough to make improvements to process. As a support engineer it was useful for us to see when we were asking questions in slack, what the patterns were to improve our team training: Ticket comes in -> we don't know -> we link to ticket in X channel. Tally the channel links, look at chart, identify patterns. In an office, this would require me to be an EXTREME micro manager, whereas remotely, I just paid attention and used the meta data to drive our training. In an office, you could ask the team to keep track, or to tell you what they noticed, but by having a direct tap into the data stream, the team just does the work. (This requires a high degree of trust, and we were looking _inward_ so it wasn't something that was met with disdain. If we were using this to compare what teams were more responsive and being outwardly critical, well, I don't think that will go over well anywhere.)

zawaideh 6y ago

would be nice to use "they" or alternate between "he" and "she" in the post. Otherwise, it's a great post

danielovichdk 6y ago

Actually funny this question. Because come to think about it, text is by far my preffered way to communicate. That goes for work and for serious-private matters. The absolute strengt with text is that it gives you history by default - you can save it. While you can save text it's also eaiser to the search. The mental model around writing and communicating is the mental proces that goes into it, and which is also the reason i disagree with people that believe you should be good at writing - if you haven't thought about what you want to communicate you can't write it nor speak about it. Why would you be better at communicating by speech rather than text? Sure it's faster to speak or video, but does that give a better result? I say no way

EvanAnderson 6y ago
It's worth noting that some people specifically see verbal communication's undocumented-by-default nature as a feature. When I was younger I found that idea very offensive. I considered people who held that viewpoint to be suspect (engaging in political machinations, or using fluid recollections of conversations to their advantage). I still think there's a grain of truth to my suspicions, but I've learned to recognize that there are acceptable reasons for undocumented conversations.
- Buttons840 6y ago
  There's still phone calls. Any co-worker you trust enough to have an "off the record" conversation with wouldn't turn down a "hey, can I call you?" request. They might think it's weird at first, but would understand later I'm sure.
  - RHSeeger 6y ago
    I've called coworkers literally just to rant to someone before. Sometimes, you need to complain, but having a record of that is not helpful in any way.
    - Aeolun 6y ago

devxpy 6y ago

Written communication will also give you RSI though

Buttons840 6y ago

> participants need to be competent at writing and reading prose (it’s harder than it sounds) In my experience, around 1/3rd of developers are not good typists. Writing code isn't really about typing, so it's OK, but when participating in an active conversation in a chat room with multiple people, not being able to type well hurts.

jaakl 6y ago

Video calls are like single-room IRC 20 years ago, before PM, threads etc within same room were added. Probably just matter of months when we will see subrooms, side-channel whisper, history of transcribed logs and many other additions also in video calls. Just current software limitations.

giglamesh 6y ago
"Breakout Rooms" is already a feature of Zoom.
djrogers 6y ago
Pretty much all of those features you call out are available in modern video chat software - at least the one I have to use daily (Zoom).

jugg1es 6y ago

In my experience, the people most averse to writing stuff down are usually the remote engineers. Remote workers don't typically have the same cultural influence as local employees, so they tend to be somewhat alienated and therefore have fewer expectations put on them. I think this disincentivizes remote workers from fully assimilating into the culture and leads to less interest in communication. Inevitably, this ends up affecting their willingness to properly document. Just my opinion built on my anecdotal experience.

Benjammer 6y ago
I have the exact opposite anecdotal experience. Remote engineers I've worked with have put a lot more effort into their writing because they understand that it's one of their only avenues to participate in the company communication culture.

rogerkirkness 6y ago

Fundamentally, it's faster to write and type than it is to talk and listen.

nine_k 6y ago
It hugely depends on one's competence in writing, and one's style of thinking.
tomplayford 6y ago
I personally find it much faster to talk and / or draw than to write or type.

krm01 6y ago

In our business, async communication is at the core of how we deal with clients. We design UI/UX for tech companies (http://fairpixels.pro http://fairpixels.pro) and in the 10+ years of trying out a dozen of ways to work, async email conversations were by far the most effective for us. Email over Slack, why? Slack and other chat environments still create the expectation of realtime responses. Also, messages you type there are short and often of a lower quality. Email is usually more longform. This forces us and clients to think first, write second. The quality of feedback and communication is just so much better.

oDot 6y ago

I wrote Emergency Remote[0] for companies thrown into remote due to the situation. From my experience, it seems that the reason companies use sync communication and "emulating" an office is not because they don't understand the benefits of async, but because of the required discipline. Fortunately, that discipline is required vastly more of the initiator of the conversation. This allows the recipient to quite easily refuse sync communication. This way employees can help each other out and get used to async. [0]: https://www.emergencyremote.com/EmergencyRemote.pdf https://www.emergencyremote.com/EmergencyRemote.pdf

nine_k 6y ago

Real-time, spoken communication is on-site work super power. When uncertainty is high, and an intense discussion is needed, spoken word is much more efficient, from my experience. People are fundamentally better at speaking quickly and taking proper turns. This all is much slower and more cumbersome in video call, phone call, or a text chat. The perceived sequence breaks, the turn-taking protocol breaks (unless enforced by a moderator, at the expense of speed), and the communication become slower, less efficient, and more tiresome. I love neatly written logically organized texts. But to produce such a text, a lot of the questions it answers should be already understood, answered, and arranged in a easy-to-consume order. There are situations when this is not possible, and finding out the scope of the problem and its structure is exactly the task. Here's where face-to-face verbal communication rules. Of course, providing some written output after such a meeting is important, too, be it nicely written minutiae (a shared document on a large screen works well), or just a photo of the whiteboard. So, both written and face-to-face types of communication are important. None can efficiently replace the other.

e40 6y ago
I agree with you partially. I found something interesting, with this everyone work from home: I'm able to communicate with certain people more effectively via zoom. I think it boils down to with zoom, you are literally in someone's face, and it's very obvious when you aren't fully focused on them. Perhaps the new way, with zoom, gave some people an opportunity to reset their manners? Not clear what the real reason behind it is, but I noticed it immediately. What a great bonus it was.
- sdoering 6y ago
  I agree. I see a distinct difference between video-meetings where all people have video active vs. having that disabled. In the second case I have to actively work on keeping engaged. It is quite some effort. When people are in each other's face it is more easy.
- nahname 6y ago
  In a natural conversation, it is rare to have someone stair you in the eyes for more than a couple seconds. Hadn't considered that for some, this constant stair feels like they are finally being recognized. This makes a lot of sense. You wait for your turn to talk and the stage is yours. In some sense, everything is fairer.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Traster 6y ago

I think a big part of this article is that the author doesn't like being interrupted and therefore has defined this as the problem. I don't like being interrupted either - but often the interruptions I experience are the best opportunities I have to communicate ideas, have creative back and forth, and importantly, communicate the details that are going to get me shouted at for saying on the wiki. The problem with asynchronous communication is that I need to predict what information you're going to need, before you need it. The result is huge amounts of documentation work going on - 90% of which is useless, and the other 10% is either undiscoverable or could as just as easily be solved with "has anyone touched the db" in chat. The example is great - because it's absolutely something that I've seen happen. You post on the group chat "did anyone touch the db" and someone replies, "Oh Johnny mentioned something about it the other day". Suddenly you're not searching through thousands of jira tickets and wiki pages, and most likely not finding what you want anyway - since no one can predict how they'll scre up. You just ping Johnny, and if Johnny isn't there? Well he'll reply when it's back. It's fine. That is part of flexible working. Flexible working isn't "I get to pick up my kids at 12" it's about everyone having flexibility, and everyone giving flexibility. To me, this asynchronous communication plan sets an unacheivable goal, because you're never going to know what it is other people are going to need to know, and documenting everything exhaustively is an uneconomical.

baron816 6y ago

How do you get your coworkers to start proofreading what they write?

satvikpendem 6y ago

If I were to ever hire, I'd optimize first for clear, written, long-form asynchronous communication, second for ability for the job at hand, and anything else third. Having hired some freelancers recently, I've found that there is a world of difference between those who can communicate clearly and those who can't.

abalashov 6y ago
Oh, indeed. I think this is the single most underrated dimension of actually being able to extract value from someone in a commercial organisation. Also, having run into it a number of times, I feel compelled to mention those who are quite capable of clear, written, long-form asynchronous communication as a matter of skills and abilities, but seem cholerically averse to doing it.

siculars 6y ago

People ask me what do they need to be good at to work at Google. I jokingly (but kind of seriously) tell them it's just like grade school - reading and writing. 80% of the job is reading, editing and commenting on docs people wrote or writing docs people will read.

watwut 6y ago

We found it faster to call and speak

rakoo 6y ago

Interestingly, I've been thinking about organization at work and I feel like there are many forms of async communications that should or could be merged, because of how common they are. We need to communicate announcements, ask for opinions on changes, document a process, list relevant steps to a change that is happening, ... In my mind there are multiple goals a perfect system should have: - Must be easy to create a new "conversation" - Must be possible to write long form content in a "post", where "post" is the first item in a conversation - Must be able to have a meaningful conversation with replies to specific points - Must be able to change the content of the "post" based on the discussion that happened (such that a "post" can be a poll, participants discuss options, and the final decision is summarized) - Must be able to easily enter and exit the full conversation - Must be able to easily link the full conversation, for referencing - Must be able to set metadata (dates, relevant people, status, stuff like that) We have many systems, but none really fits the bill: - Email is probably the worst, because you can't modify the original message, you can't link to it and you can't transparently enter the conversation if you weren't part of it initially. We've all seen the "adding XYZ to the loop" that provide 0 content to the conversation. There's also the whole issue about top-posting and lack of proper threading that make having a conversation difficult. Probably just a client issue rather than a protocol issue though - NNTP is a step above, but ironically because it has remained niche the clients and the etiquette help having a proper conversation. Still doesn't fill the bill - Ticket systems are paradoxically pretty good for this situation. They do contain the necessary structure for incorporating metadata, in all the various forms ingenuity can come up with.... sometimes too much ingenuity, such as the labels and fields and knobs that were needed for that project years ago are still here, cluttering a lot of space because most aren't actually needed anyway. Imagine using such a mess - A wiki is nice, but the emphasis on structuring is detrimental for flows that go outside of documenting. Sometimes you just want a linear list of conversations ordered by date - Google docs and associated are good for really long forms for the initial "post", but are not very good at structured conversation Perhaps the best software, for all those use cases, is a forum software. I'm partial to the (old) reddit UX or the HN UX; remove the useless voting and it's almost the perfect way to communicate. The interface gives you the space to actually take time about what you want to say and properly articulate it. HN is a bit terse here, reddit gives you formatting helps to nicely present your ideas and makes reading it easier. Only drawback is that they are text only, and sometimes you need to include non-text (a screenshot of the planned changes, a video of the flow to document, a map of the place you're discussing about, ...) (If it is not clear already, I'm still sad at the death of Google Wave. 10 years later and it's still the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6pgxLaDdQw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6pgxLaDdQw)

cmarschner 6y ago

Peter F. Drucker, influential author of countless books on management, once made a very simple argument: there are reader types, and there are listener types. If you are dealing with a partner you better know which type they are. It doesn‘t make sense to hand a listener type a manuscript without talking about the subject, and it doesn‘t make sense to set up meetings with a reader type before you hand off the written argument. We should perhaps just accept that an tolerate each other where our strengths are. [1] Peter F. Drucker: Managing Oneself. https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Oneself-Harvard-Business-Classics/dp/142212312X https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Oneself-Harvard-Business-Cla... Edit: Online: http://academic.udayton.edu/lawrenceulrich/LeaderArticles/Drucker%20Managing%20Oneself.pdf http://academic.udayton.edu/lawrenceulrich/LeaderArticles/Dr...

xpe 6y ago
Whatever people’s preferences in terms of reading or listening, I am inclined to think teams get better results when a high quality meeting summary goes out ahead of time. I don’t claim this is an absolute truth, but I also don’t think many organizations have given it proper try.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  If you send out a high quality summary you cover the reader types, then during the meeting you cover the listeners.
- paragraft 6y ago
  I agree, but think the virtue is as much as in the actual process of writing the summary forces the summoner to clearly work out ahead of time what the meeting is actually about and what it is aiming to achieve.

timwaagh 6y ago

In my team if someone needs to pick up the kids he just says it in chat or even in a video meeting and gets them. I think webex meetings work better than real live ones. If they are tiring that's positive because meetings last too long. If only one person can speak at a time it prevents people from interrupting and makes them conscious not to hog the mic. Async communication? How would you do that? If you have a question and can't find an answer, what do you do? Make a jira user story to document this specific scenario and put yourself as the reporting too? Then assign to a colleague and hope he does something with it? I mean it could possibly work if everyone is accustomed to it, is of a very high level and is also a high level technical writer. But it just seems to me that in practice junior might be too dumb to understand seniors writing. Or senior just writes something that's not legible. Or senior ignores his new assigned story because junior created it and not the product owner. Or scrum master sees the story and thinks: that's not part of sprint goals and throws it out of the board. It seems really slow to work this way.

eXpl0it3r 6y ago
I think it really depends on the project size and the kind of work. If you're more in a waterfall model, where the specs are clear and you just got to do it, I can understand how being able to work uninterrupted is a nice-to-have. But if you work very closely with the business and often run into things that could be done or understood in different ways, having to wait a day or more to get a clarifying response would not work. And this is know-how that can't be written down easily if at all, since a lot of decisions are purely based on experience and historical knowledge. I used to have this illusionary vision of how everything should be neatly documented, but if you operate on a constantly changing code base, it's really hard to find a good balance. Documentation gets outdated every few weeks and sometimes days, plus most of the time, you don't even know that said documentation has been written. As such, you can't fully trust the documentation and you always have to check out at least part of the code. What seems to work for me, is documentation that gives a broad overview of a topic and then gives certain pointers into the code. That way you capture the essence of functionality that is likely to remain for a longer time and the transition from documentation to code is made easier. And finally, if someone is stuck or doesn't understand something, I find it problematic to have the expectation that nobody may be available to read your message for the next few hours or whole day. What is more efficient, someone spending a couple of minutes to provide assistance or someone googling/search Jira/wiki/Confluence for half a day and not making any progress?

VectorLock 6y ago

I've noticed the biggest difference between junior developers and more experienced individuals is their written communication abilities. This has led me down the path of trying to find resources to help teach communications to those that I mentor but since this isn't my area of expertise (teaching communications) I'd love if anybody had resources to share.

ilaksh 6y ago
I'm not an expert on teaching communications but I personally don't believe we need to be an expert to figure out how people can increase their communications skills. Its like anything else. They have to practice, and get correction when they do something wrong. A big part of it is habit or level of effort. Force them to read books. Maybe something fun like a genre of novel that they like. Because the fundamental level of literacy is going to have a big impact on writing ability. Have them find a forum of subreddit that they like and then regularly participate in it. And then offline or in a private message, fix their grammar and point out the problems with their communication. Or just have them use written communications at work rather than in-person meetings etc. And then when the communication is lacking, point out the specific flaws.
- VectorLock 6y ago
  Practices is great and all, thats how I learned, but I'd know there have to be resources out there to help people learn beyond simply "figure it out as you go."

techbio 6y ago

The discoverability of written thought decreases with its quantity. It comes down to knowing your sources, not relying on some Bacon number of reinforced echoes.

sytse 6y ago

When writing you are not getting feedback (give more context, go faster, what concerns to address). A back and forth can be a much faster way (both in total time elapsed and time spend) to resolve something. At GitLab we recommend async by default and jump to sync when you start going back and forth. https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/asynchronous/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/asynchro...

cborenstein 6y ago

A strength (and weakness) of async is that it comes with a higher expectation of writing quality. When the expectations are too high, it's likely that people won't get things down in the first place. My team has noticed an unintuitive approach to communication that seems to work better than alternatives. Write better private notes. Private notes are low-friction. You know what's worth writing. You don't need to worry as much about if it's a mess. Our approach is to help you make your private notes a little better organized. And to make it fast to share these notes when they might be helpful to someone else too. It's bytebase.io. Would love the community's feedback.

sabujp 6y ago

i find that i spend 3x more time explaining something through writing than through a quick chat

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

My biggest issue (and it is an issue that has been brought to my attention), is the old "Emperor Joseph" issue: "Too many words." I trend prolix. In my essays, this can be corrected by post-edit, but it is not so easy to do that in realtime.

chiefalchemist 6y ago

Communication is a super power. Full stop. The key to communication is to remember: "It's not what you say, it's what they hear." (Note: say can be written, and hear therefore read.) The mantra works either way. Ultimately, the responsibility of the communication belongs to the sender. Improvement still takes work, but you'll progress faster if you have this foundation.

alexashka 6y ago

I think emotional intelligence coupled with integrity are the real super power wombo-combo, no matter the role. It helps if you have the technical skills to go with it but to be honest, having those skills should be a matter of training, not expecting people to be learning on their own time. This should be fixed on the company level - every employee should receive regular training, not be expected to magically keep up their workload and learn new technologies in their spare time. Another issue that makes projects go side-ways is people relying on a paycheque for their livelihood. If you want people with integrity to practice it in the workplace, don't place them in impossible situations where they have to choose between their integrity and their family's financial well being. This should be fixed on the government level. This is all to say that this endless stream of blog posts about what an already over-worked, under-paid worker ought to improve upon, are not helpful - highly educated people used to be Aristocrats who fine dined and wrote poetry. Today we are expecting people to pay for their own training, spend the best years of their lives studying to pass tests, be hazed trying to get a job, for the privilege of getting worked to the bone for the benefit of a corporate entity. I thought only dystopian novels could think of a system so counter-productive and insane, until I read Brave New World and thought hm, this might be an upgrade over the life I'm currently living. Anyhow :)

ChicagoDave 6y ago

Except no one actually reads emails anymore.

brongondwana 6y ago

I agree with this so much that I even wrote about it recently! https://fastmail.blog/2020/05/22/email-for-remote-productivity/ https://fastmail.blog/2020/05/22/email-for-remote-productivi... Snir David writes well. One point that I think is missed in the "chats and video calls" is that you don't have situational awareness of whether the other person is busy like you do in person. It's the same as the problem with taking phone calls when driving a car as compared to talking to people who are in the car with you. The people in the car with you can see when you're in a tricky traffic situation. The caller, not so much.

naveedn 6y ago

I have been thinking about the same problem as the author, but I’ve reached vastly different conclusions about how to do remote work better.Polar opposite. I wrote my opinion here: https://www.naveed.dev/posts/consider-xp-for-distributed-teams https://www.naveed.dev/posts/consider-xp-for-distributed-tea... However, I think his points are thought provoking, and it’s interesting to see how someone else thinks about the problem.

Kaze404 6y ago

This article is great because it puts into words the relationship I've had with Slack since the beginning of my career. I've been working professionally for 4 years and I cannot remember a single time where I thought "I'm so glad we have Slack". Don't get me wrong, I think the platform itself is a great interpretation of IM, but IM is the absolute last thing I want to use in a work environment. One of the reasons I didn't work out on my first remote job is because I refused to treat Slacks red icon as my #1 priority in the world. Coworker needs my attention immediately? Call me. Is calling too much of a hassle? Then it's probably not as urgent as you think. I understand it's very arrogant of me but I cannot bear the thought of losing all of my focus to answer a question that was really not that immediate. It sure doesn't help that people think they need to greet me and wait for a response before they actually say what they want to say. I'm working at a new place now and we've gotten so good at asynchronous collaboration that I haven't exchanged a single message on Slack with one of my coworkers since they joined the team. All of our talks are done through Github and our weekly meeting on Friday where we plan the next week and spend an hour or two chatting. This is nice because it gives me time to reason about discussions, and even makes me look forward to the next meeting to have some fun with them, while previously I got so sick of my coworkers that I had literal nightmare-induced panic attacks over constant meetings. I'm really glad I managed to find a team that enjoys working on the same way I do.

Aeolun 6y ago
> It sure doesn't help that people think they need to greet me and wait for a response before they actually say what they want to say. This is indeed intensely frustrating. It is so ridiculous that when you just don’t respond, you’ll end up with a person just saying only ‘hello’ to you three days in a row...
- somurzakov 6y ago
  in cases like this, i just reply "sup" and switch back to my main window, until sender formulates his/her question
- vishnugupta 6y ago
  This is a wide enough pain that someone has created a webpage: https://www.nohello.com/?m=0 https://www.nohello.com/?m=0

abhayb 6y ago

The super power I see is not so much written communication as intentional communication. I try to get myself to communicate intentionally by having command-enter send my Slack messages. But sometimes you need to Do the Thing. And you can't afford to Intend to Do the Thing first. In those situations the speed of spoken-face-to-face makes the organizational debt worth it.

ilaksh 6y ago

Agree with the headline. Good written communication is a requirement for a software development project. But I am not sure about all of his ideas in all circumstances. In particular in relation to a very small dev team and small client group. In terms of something different like for example an open-source piece of software on github, issue trackers are key. However, for a small sort of private project. For example, if you have a very small team and can get people in a chat room consistently so that you can have solid conversations every day in there, that has worked better for me than using some kind of issue tracker. Especially in terms of dealing with clients or business-related team members. And maybe its really only for very small projects, like one or two developers, I don't know. But for me, with most of the projects that I have been on my own building a product or tool for a client, the issue trackers and things like that worked against me and the project as far as I could tell: - People would seem to think it was their job to fill the board/tracker up with as many things as they could think of. This caused extra stress and tended to make me want to rush through things to get them out of the way. The biggest problem with that was that it took time away from the really important things. And it is very difficult to get people to give realistic priorities. - Sometimes, people would write critical information in the issue tracker or board, and I did not realize it had been updated or how critical it was. And so they operate with the assumption that they have communicated something, but actually I didn't see it until two days later. - When they have a place to put an infinite number of tasks, it encourages them to increase the scope of the project, without having a real discussion or necessarily even thinking the feature through. For me when doing projects on my own (or maybe with a designer) for a specific small group, there is just a limited amount of stuff that I can realistically finish in a given time frame. So I actually will not allow an issue tracker or board and try to get everyone to show up sort of simultaneously in a chat room. Sometimes people cannot or will not do that, and in those cases sometimes a phone call can work. Or maybe they actually are capable of reading and writing async messages in the chat room (not very common). Basically every few days I meet in the chat or phone or whatever with the client and discuss what I have been working on in the last few days, walk them through the updates to the application. So something is being delivered and tested by the client every week or even every few days. Then we specifically talk about exactly what is the priority for the next few days. If there is development work that needs to be caught up on, then there may not be any new features to work on. Or there may be a feature that has been in progress, and the client gets an update on that. Often the client has ideas for new features. Instead of putting them in a board or issue tracker to pile up, when they bring them up, we decide whether they are now higher priorities than other existing items and will fit into the work load of the next few days. Or, I tell them to remind me later. There is no such thing as a task that I will "get to when I have time". I have the client focus on the next most important priority and/or I explain the ongoing dev work, and we work out like 2-5 days of work and that's it. There is no infinitely expanding list of things to get to later. If something he has been thinking about is really important, it becomes a priority as soon as the previous task is completed. We check if I implemented something correctly as soon as it is implemented. We don't have to refer to a database of things, because we just talked about it a couple of days before.

tabbott 6y ago

The author did a really good job of articulating why I've spent the last several years working on Zulip despite there being a thousand Slack clones to choose from. Asynchronous communication is essential to being able to focus, at least if you do enough communication that it matters how you communicate. And it's very inefficient to do asynchronous communication at scale in Slack or any of its copycats. This leads to the Slack cultural issues detailed in the post; they're the result of people working around the bad core workflow of a beautiful, masterfully marketed tool. Consider "Everybody expects an immediate response" culture. In my view, that is people adapting to it being unpleasant to be a busy person waiting for a reply in a Slack channel. (Which is because it's miserable to make sure you don't miss things in busy slack channel, so everyone does, so anyone who wants to be sure of a response spams PMs and mentions and otherwise applies pressure to get a reply now now now so that they can mentally move on to their next task). Zulip aims to make asynchronous communication so efficient that such adaptations are unnecessary. The core innovation is that all messages in channels are organized within "topics", which work exactly like the Subject field in email. This model works great for enabling asynchronous communication in email, and it works even better in Zulip (mainly because of topic editing and linking features). The main goal of Zulip's interaction design is to make skimming hundreds or thousands of Zulip messages (and replying thoughtfully to the ones where you can add something!) pleasant. This enables a better way of working. Personally, I read and respond to 500-1000 Zulip messages sent by dozens of people across 50+ topics every single day, and I get compliments on how responsive I am, despite the fact that I do focus work in multi-hour blocks most days, Zulip's development community is all over the world, and I lose hours of productive time every day due to a chronic illness. This wouldn't be possible with Slack. And this isn't just my experience; I've heard from so many people in organizations that switched to Zulip that they love how Zulip makes better use of the limited time they have (whether busy managers at companies or participants in part-time communities). > "You'll lose your history" This is the other major bundle of problems that Zulip's topics solve. Zulip can be a valuable knowledge store because of the organization provided by topics (combined with features like permanent links and topic-powered search workflows). Zulip is 100% open source software (Not open core! We're intentionally not VC-backed so that we can prioritize our values; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23102430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23102430). And we sponsor free hosting on zulip.com for open source projects, academic research, and other non-commercial organizations.

throwdbaaway 6y ago

Chat is only problematic if all you have is slack, with the lousy threading UX, and the prevalence of DM and private channel. Still, slack is miles better than wiki pages (go staled immediately), emails (even more broken threading interface), and heaven forbids google docs (impossible for collaboration, may work for bosses). I think the best solution is something like zulip chat, complemented by wiki pages for "immutable" information.

phendrenad2 6y ago

There's a reason Technical Writing is a class offered in engineering courses in college. When you've read good documentation (HP user manuals from the 90s) and bad documentation (most open-source projects, no judgement, they're crowdsourced and we're lucky to have contributors willing to document things at all), you really get a sense for how valuable this skill is.

johndoe42377 6y ago

So, writing rfcs, standards, articles and Usenet (boomer's tech, you know) was not that bad after all? The absurdity of synchronous realtime communication is most evident when taking to an extreme of online coding. Nothing but crap is being produced. https://karma-engineering.com/lab/wiki/Remote https://karma-engineering.com/lab/wiki/Remote

Animats 6y ago

Did this guy just re-invent memos? There's a lot of history here, going back centuries. The military has put much effort into designing written communication. There's the classic 5-paragraph operations order format. There's the "bottom line up front" style, which for information rather than orders. The military makes a very strong distinction between info documents and orders. Diplomats have some traditional formats, too.[1] Most correspondence is formal. Sometimes there's an "appreciation of the situation" attached to correspondence from a mission to its state department. That's an informally written summary of what the writer has observed and what they think is going to happen. An amusing read is "How to Live though an Executive", which is nominally by L. Ron Hubbard, the Scientology guy, but was really written by Richard DeMille. This is from 1953. It's someone trying to invent Slack, before computers. It's done with wallboards, clips, carbon paper forms, tear-off tickets, and people called "communicators" doing the paperwork. It was never used. Too complicated pre-computer. The basic concept is a trouble ticket, with an organized system to insure that handing off the problem to someone doesn't mean it gets lost to follow-up. [1] https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/hks-communications-program/files/pp_sri_kulkarni_and_yotam_goren_4_10_17.pdf https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/hks-communications-pro...

ezoe 6y ago

The problem is, most people don't have enough literacy and practicing to communicate via text. Most of them appear to be able to read and write text, but they are not. They simply recognize the few keywords and pretend they understand it. That's why most of the people, after remote work become the norm, fallback to inefficient video chat rather than efficient text chat.

andykx 6y ago
It is possible to convey much more nuance through speech. I like to think of myself as an effective writer. Nonetheless, it is incredibly difficult to express nuanced emotions through writing. This is particularly true in “professional” contexts, where an informal message may be perceived as rude. In many situations, I suspect that the same message, delivered verbally, would not even warrant a second thought. The reality is that few people are taught to write in a manner that allows them to actually express their feelings. The fact that we even need to learn this indicates to me that speech is a far more effective way of getting our thoughts across

arminiusreturns 6y ago

I am surrounded by people who love to do voice and video meetings, and I find them taxing and not very efficient. I've been hearing a lot about communication in this remote work covid world, but I've seen that turn into more of these comms that I don't want. I need to find a way to tactfully say I prefer text...

mister_hn 6y ago

Async writing is powerful but unfortunately, it requires also dedicated time slots to achieve it. When you have the constant pressure from management to do X instead of writing on Y in a limited time, then you have no chance to write beautiful, centralised information. And so, the company itself accumulates technical debt, looses history and precious information that might be speed up people in the future.

AceyMan 6y ago

except for Slack | Teams | its ilk next question. /me: an expert writer who sees no change on the horizon

livealife 6y ago

Sometimes you need instant answer. You just can't move forward. Then it requires documentation written 'properly'. Honestly finding programmers with good writing skills too is difficult.

inertiatic 6y ago

I am a firm believer that written communication is the best way to sustain a productive team. Talking, especially in person, might get you the result you're looking for faster. Look, we decided what we needed to make and skipped the overhead of opening a ticket and capturing the back and forth. But then you have to revisit your decision and your reasoning behind them 4 months from now. Why didn't we just do that other thing that seems more efficient? Or even worse, someone picks up your work after you leave and they have to do that, without the potential ability to recall the context. Or then you leave a meeting about making any sort of decision and start working and a few days later realize you're not on the same page. I get that writing might not be some people's best skill, or even their preferred way of communication. We all have to put up with things we don't enjoy and learn skills to work, why should this be any different? I work for company that is in the process of going remote first, without embracing a culture of writing first and writing everything and it's not very pretty. Previously, I worked for a company that despite not really prioritizing remote workers, because teams were distributed across the world, had to capture a lot of the things I mentioned in the tickets created for each task. And it was really empowering to have a lot of context as someone who was tasked with maintaining those things.

mcsoft 6y ago

Finally, someone came up with a good wording for 'Slack is #1 productivity killer'.

domsom 6y ago

Picking the Slack / Chat argument: I don't think it should be expected to reply immediately. It's more like a lightweight inbox (when being tagged / DMed) that's easy to reply to (no greeting/regards required). Channels are a great place for async discussions that can be linked to and are kind of public so noone needs to decide beforehand whom to engage, and everyone can decide to join or leave the discussion without being cc'd forever.

adolforismos 6y ago

"The Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous land empire in history. It started with the unification of Mongolia in 1206 and territory of 4 million km² ruled by Genghis Khan, to have 35 million km² in 1279 under Emperor Kublai Khan." "Here is the thing: all that remote work in one of the biggest empires in history was accomplished without videoconferencing." Why Videoconferencing Is for Rookies https://medium.com/swlh/why-video-conferencing-is-for-rookies-8a03f0ed534c https://medium.com/swlh/why-video-conferencing-is-for-rookie...

m0llusk 6y ago

Nonwritten communication is unreliable. People often have different interpretations of what was said and what exactly should be done. The only way to reliably manage work is to have everything written down.