> This is why meetings at companies seem so frivolous. What could be communicated in an email, slack message, or hallway conversation is left to a meeting and I

> This is why meetings at companies seem so frivolous. What could be communicated in an email, slack message, or hallway conversation is left to a meeting and I often wondered if it's just because these folks want free lunch and some socialization. One thing that remote work during the pandemic has demonstrated to me is the line at which chat rooms lose their efficacy as a tool for collaborative problem solving. Many times a week I need to upgrade a conversation happening over chat to a video conversation, simply because The linearity of chat sessions makes it quite difficult to communicate more complex concepts, especially causality. Something about spoken language allows us to communicate more dimension. Furthermore, regularly scheduled face-to-face meetings over video are the only times I get to hear about work by members of my team whose day-to-day tasks do not overlap with mine. It's not just for the purposes of socialization - though socialization is very important in any team - but rather very frequently in meetings I learn about something that someone else is working on that is consequential to my own work.