15 ms·

No, we won’t have a video call for that

• commandlinefan 5y ago
  It’s gracious of the author to assume that the purpose of video calls is usually to convey information and solicit feedback, but the true purpose of most video calls is to exert some control over somebody who (the organizer thinks) needs a reminder of who’s in charge.
  • scrollaway 5y ago
    You might need to quit your workplace If this is the way you feel people take video calls …
• papaf 5y ago
  I disagree with a lot of this article because it assumes that we are efficient robots that just need things to be searchable and written down. Tools are also a bit lacking -- in theory writing stuff in a wiki is useful but then try finding the information with, say, Confluence search. The article also assumes every one is a native speaker who can write quickly and clearly in a chat -- in a lot of international projects this is not the case. I find that there is less chance for misunderstanding and aggression if you disagree over a video call. Also, human contact and informal communication make life and working more enjoyable.
  • the_gipsy 5y ago
    The article assumes that we are NOT efficient robots that can store any and all information that we get in our heads.
  • masklinn 5y ago
    > I disagree with a lot of this article because it assumes that we are efficient robots that just need things to be searchable and written down. It assumes no such thing. If anything it assumes the opposite of your assertion, that we are not perfectly efficient robots able to instantaneously and fully recall the content of transient discussions. Written content is perennial and searchable, so it can be retrieved in the future if necessary without being limited by human foibles and memory. Even if the search is bad and the system is not especially designed for it, I regularly manage to find information I dimly recall through search in discord and friends, something which would be entirely impossible using video calls. IME that is in fact a regular issue, people asserting that things were told during discussions and there's no way to confirm it, have context, … because the discussion was a voice / video call. > The article also assumes every one is a native speaker who can write quickly and clearly in a chat -- in a lot of international projects this is not the case. Have you been in that scenario, ever? Video calls are infinitely worse than typed text between non-native speakers. And if the call is not going to be in english… why would the written communication be so? > I find that there is less chance for misunderstanding and aggression if you disagree over a video call. I find that there are regular shouting matches over video calls, and collisions between speakers makes the experience miserable. It's also impossible to dive in and out and recover the information, if you arrive on a group discussion midway you can read the history, if you dive out for a bit you can read what you missed. On a video call, it's gone. > Also, human contact and informal communication make life and working more enjoyable. To you.
    • foldr 5y ago
      While there may be some people who don’t enjoy human contact, I think it’s a little unfair to suggest that this is some kind of idiosyncratic preference of the original poster. It’s a basic human need. Most people who work full time will want to have some kind of social contact within working hours.
      • masklinn 5y ago
        > While there may be some people who don’t enjoy human contact We're not discussing human contact, we're discussing video calls. > I think it’s a little unfair to suggest that this is some kind of idiosyncratic preference of the original poster. So pointing out that people differ is "a little unfair" but asserting liking video calls is a universal human requirement and enjoyment is fine? > It’s a basic human need. History is full of people who happily did without.
        • foldr 5y ago
          It was not clear from your post that you were referring to video calls rather than human contact in general. Here is the part I was responding to: >> Also, human contact and informal communication make life and working more enjoyable. >To you. I think the vast majority of people would prefer having social contact via video calls to the alternative of having no social contact or having it only via text chat - yes. But I was not talking specifically about video calls.
          • tluyben2 5y ago
            > I think the vast majority of people would prefer having social contact via video calls to the alternative of having no social contact I believe that too, but for me at least, video chat is for chitchat and banter and text chat for everything, including substance. This is the same for in person; I enjoy going with clients and colleagues to coffeeshops and bars, but we don't get much done in either (in bar, if with techies, actually more than you would think) but it is nice for the human contact. (Talking work context here if that was not clear)
  • thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > The article also assumes every one is a native speaker who can write quickly and clearly in a chat -- in a lot of international projects this is not the case. You think non-native speakers have an easier time communicating in real time in a video call than through text? A video call is the worst case for a non-native speaker. (Well, OK, a phone call is even worse. But being synchronous and relying on their ability to understand the spoken language are both terrible ideas if you're concerned about what makes things easy for non-native speakers.)
    • nottorp 5y ago
      > You think non-native speakers have an easier time communicating in real time in a video call than through text? A video call is the worst case for a non-native speaker. Oh yea, I forgot about this because I don't do video/audio calls. A non native speaker is NOT exposed to spoken english daily. In some countries they even dub Hollywood movies so not even their entertainment is in english. And where movies are subtitled you tend to read the subtitles so you don't bother understanding accents, speech over explosions and stuff like that. Written english is another thing, if you do programming. There's no point of looking for docs in your native language; the originals are in english and always more up to date. So maybe the non native speakers have trouble because the OP speaks too fast / has an unfamiliar accent?
      • astonex 5y ago
        I work as a non-native speaker in Korea. Speaking and listening is just insanely harder than reading and writing. I can be productive as long as I'm exchanging messages on Github/Messenger, but meetings are horrendous.
        • jdshaffer 5y ago
          I have the opposite problem here in Japan. I can listen and speak pretty well, even in meetings, but written stuff kills me because of all the kanji...
          • 5y ago
  • nottorp 5y ago
    It's also implying that you do need to train a bit to work efficiently in a distributed team. > The article also assumes every one is a native speaker who can write quickly and clearly in a chat -- in a lot of international projects this is not the case. These are two different things. Native speaker is one, having the skill of writing quicky and clearly is another. They're unrelated. Both are trainable. Not to mention that in my experience it's the native speakers (of English i guess?) have the worst spelling :) > Also, human contact and informal communication make life and working more enjoyable. And... informal communication has to be in a video call? It can't be in writing? As for the human contact, I do recommend having a social life outside work. Distributed or not distributed work. Source of statements: been working in distributed teams for 20 years, not since this pandemic.
    • papaf 5y ago
      And... informal communication has to be in a video call? It can't be in writing? On video calls and in meatspace, you get to see peoples facial expressions, their smiles, they can move their hands and make gestures. I much prefer that to text. As for the human contact, I do recommend having a social life outside work. Distributed or not distributed work. You are correct but, personally, I think spending 8 hours a day without seeing faces is too much.
  • tluyben2 5y ago
    We work with people from all over the world, most not native speaking. For technical stuff, in our experience, voice or video calls are the most inefficient thing possible. Because spoken bad English is far worse than written, a lot of people have less than optimal internet bandwidth and latency and, worst, after the call the details are kind of lost. So first writing the main points in chat, if then some people (usually this is 1 person) want a call, we do a call and then flesh the details out over chat and in docs/wiki. Informal comms is also via chat; far more so then in video as, because of the overchatter and bad connections, jokes and quips get lost far easier. Ymmv of course but we avoid vid/voice like the plague, so far it hurt us with large amounts of miscommunication and time loss. By the way, been doing this and like this for 25 years now.
    • nottorp 5y ago
      > By the way, been doing this and like this for 25 years now. Yeah, he must be new to distributed work :)
  • f6v 5y ago
    The assumption that text is always superior to a sync conversation is too strong. Often you get the crucial bits by interrupting someone mid discussion and asking for specifics.
    • baash05 5y ago
      But you can do that in text too. I mean if it's wall of text dump, no; but if people keep their chat blocks short, then it's a two way convo. (or more)
    • throwaway98797 5y ago
      Text suffers from being precise but accurate. Voice is accurate but not precise. Different problems are resolved better by one than the other. Brain storming better in voice. Technical details of an app that needs to be coded, writting is better.
  • smallerfish 5y ago
    > in theory writing stuff in a wiki is useful but then try finding the information with, say, Confluence search. If the company/team wiki isn't organized to optimize for browsing to relevant documentation, then you might as well use google docs (which excels at search and is terrible for browsability). A reasonable percentage of effort documenting something in a wiki should be devoted to making sure that people actually can find it, otherwise you're in cleaning-closet-in-disused-bathroom territory.
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    > I find that there is less chance for misunderstanding and aggression if you disagree over a video call. If you put me in a video call with someone not more or less capable of communicating in our chosen common language I can practically guarantee that I’m going to want to murder them. There’s nothing worse than sitting on a long call waiting for someone to finally understand what button you want them to click. Even better if you have 500ms delay too.
    • marcodave 5y ago
      500ms ? you have it lucky , try 2000ms next time for real frustration. Bonus points if you can hear yourself back unless the recipient is muting him/herself
• TheGigaChad 5y ago
  Autist idiot.
• bob229 5y ago
  It doesn’t necessitate asynchronous working at all if you all work the same hours in the same time zone as many people will be
• formerly_proven 5y ago
  I've done like three or four video calls at work since corona (=full remote). I don't get the US obsession with video calls. Voice is perfectly cromulent for almost everything (see: those 3-4 exceptions). In distributed teams involving people from multiple countries you probably want to avoid both video and voice calls because on average everyone is much better at writing and reading English compared to speaking and listening.
  • Hamuko 5y ago
    Most of the meetings that I attend as a full-time remote employee are ones where someone is sharing a screen anyways. There's little screen real estate for anyone's webcam and I wouldn't really be interested in staring at them since I'm primarily looking at the shared screen.
    • Scoundreller 5y ago
      That’s where voice comes in handy. I’d hate to have to type while demonstrating the issue or solutions in the screenshare. Then the difficulty on the other side of having to read since the host’s typing shows up in a side box instead of like a TV subtitle. Sometimes we’ll have stakeholders call in on their iPad or whatever, but they’re passive so it’s best to avoid text if they do need to jump in.
  • bgatl 5y ago
    The obsession is clear at least: Video calls are the narcissist's prime weapon of choice to fake useful involvement in a project. Many managers grade people on presence and eloquence in meetings. What is not clear is why the actually productive people don't push back.
    • nottorp 5y ago
      > What is not clear is why the actually productive people don't push back. Easier to change jobs until the culture fits. Especialy with remote jobs.
  • vaylian 5y ago
• natmaka 5y ago
  Albeit I agree with the author on nearly every point, some challenges seem neglected. "Write. Things. Down." may let a a competitor obtain some company's efficient ways/tools, especially such information is shared among departments ("view permissions") and with the high employee turnover rate. Even if it is not a real risk (in most cases it IMHO isn't) some (especially among senior managers) will think it is, and fight against this convention. If you like the approach described in this article AND are able to hire you will probably describe your ways during job interviews, and in many ways attract candidates similar to yourself. Leading an old existing team not build by yourself towards this approach is a totally different matter because pertinent habits are among the most difficult to change. Most pertinent tools (wiki and bugtrackers alike) publish each piece of information's history (who wrote what/when). It sometimes becomes a metric: people committing numerous or very useful information obtain consideration. Many organizations, especially large ones, have people unable to produce such input BUT nonetheless useful as 'crossroads': they usually have all most recent important info and are also able to say who may answer to a question. Other ancillary challenges include shyness (some are able to talk or write a mail to a direct colleague but won't commit any potentially widely-read wiki article) and 'weird' syntax/orthograph.
• peakaboo 5y ago
  What's up with this guy repeating what he says is not science so it could be wrong? Is he unaware that science is wrong all the time too? Science is not a religion! It bothers me how people think "science" is something not to be questioned when it's actually the opposite - always question science. Because not only are scientists funded by corporations with motives, they also like to get rich as much as politicians.
  • theduder99 5y ago
    yep, global warming, no wait its global cooling, no wait back to warming now lets just rebrand as climate change so nobody can disagree with whichever direction we choose to go with this thing.
  • Aicy 5y ago
    I think by science he more means "established science" that has lots of evidence and is peer reviewed. Sure, science can be wrong, but peer reviewed resesrch is a lot more reliable than just some guy's opinion.
• alephu5 5y ago
  Everyone I know uses YouTube as a de facto reference. They don't read blogs, Wikipedia, news articles or company documentation, rather they look for explainer videos or tutorials. I mention that because I think it overflows into work interactions. I've had to deal with many complex problems, technically complex but also with business complexity needing collaboration to manage the objectives and risk. In these circumstances it really warrants a document or detailed email to tell others everything they need to know and consider, and yes it's going to require effort to absorb it. In recent years I've noticed that people almost never read these and ask for a video call. They want you to present it as if it were a YouTube video and you lose an hour trying to explain everything and losing much of it, because it's too much to absorb in real-time. Maybe I'm a bad writer but I think few would dispute that it's the best way to transfer a block of information. As a rule of thumb calls only make sense for Q & A or discussions.
  • yarcob 5y ago
    > Everyone I know uses YouTube as a de facto reference. They don't read blogs, Wikipedia, news articles or company documentation, rather they look for explainer videos or tutorials. This comes as a complete surprise to me because I don't know anybody who uses Youtube for technical information. Everyone I work with primarily uses Google or DuckDuckGo to find answers on blogs or on stack overflow. If that doesn't work they check the official docs.
    • lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Same for me. YouTube is for projects like car repair or home improvements.
  • duped 5y ago
    I've noticed this too but I don't think it's because of YouTube. I think some people just communicate differently. There are a few people on my team that won't engage with written communication. Similarly, I have difficulty with video communication. It's just something you need to look out for when hiring and building teams.
• jasode 5y ago
  The author wants to educate people on the benefits of (more) text communication, but I don't believe it will change minds. Reading the sibling comment from papaf[1] and also a previous reply to me by jakubp[2] about talking things out instead of email, it seems like the higher meta-analysis is that some people have a predisposition to prefer synchronous (videoconference, phone call, cubicle visit) over asynchronous communication (email, chat). One group really prioritizes synchro comm for "emotional nuance" etc. The other group prioritizes written text's dense information content and searchability. So if the company has folks like papaf and jakubp, it doesn't matter if you have a blog article recommending structured emails over video calls. Some employees prefer not to communicate that way. In fact, the blog article just makes them express their disagreement with it. E.g. papaf saying we're not "efficient robots" and jakubp advising me that I should accommodate his communication style of in-person cubicle visits. To prevent clashing, I guess the higher-level advice is to hire a team where everybody likes to communicate the same way. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28651678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28651678 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20583427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20583427
  • GravitasFailure 5y ago
    >One group really prioritizes synchro comm for "emotional nuance" etc. The other group prioritizes written text's dense information content and searchability. Don't forget the usefulness of email when you need the ability to reference past conversations. For some people, a faulty memory is a finely honed art.
    • wirrbel 5y ago
      that's why I send around meeting notes regularly. THEY hate it.
      • gtirloni 5y ago
        I stopped doing that because people take it the wrong way. Initially, I was just trying to be helpful with the notes (so people wouldn't forget what was discussed, people who could participate could catch up, etc). But I started noticing some people were looking at the meeting notes as if I was holding a gun at their heads for what they said during the meetings.
• onion2k 5y ago
  I find people don't like calls if they don't have an opportunity to prepare for them well. A call that has a clear agenda, a clear purpose, a set of well defined outcomes, and (ideally) a document sent ahead of time for people to read and think about makes calls significantly more effective. Otherwise everyone just says they'll think about stuff and then you need a second call to get people's reactions. Sometimes setting everything out in a document and an agenda can even make the actual call redundant, if people respond with their input early enough.
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    Indeed. A call often is an ambush to drag you into things you barely understand.
• mkl95 5y ago
  One of my clients employees struggles massively with asynchronous communication. He constantly spams one-liner after one-liner and demands immediate answers. Anything that involves working together on a sheet or a document becomes a pain in the butt. Having to work with someone like this has caused our current project to take longer and become more expensive. I really wish corporations gave these people some basic training and tips on async communication. Some people just don't get it.
• notRobot 5y ago
  I prefer written communication because I like to think while absorbing information. As a result, when it's on a call, often I'll space out for a bit if I suddenly get a thought -- and then I'll have to ask the speaker to repeat themselves, which isn't very fun for anyone involved. Plus, I don't have the best memory when it comes to conversations. Just the fact that written communication can be referenced (and searched!) at any point in the future makes it magnitudes better for me. Even if a call is recorded (which it never is at my workplace), it takes a lot more time to go through a recording to find the bit you need, as compared to a quick and simple ctrl+F. But people all work differently, so... :shrug:
• lbriner 5y ago
  I think there is space for more disruptive approach to meetings. Remember Elon Musk saying if he didn't find meetings productive, he would walk out? Stuff like that. How about saying to people that if they don't see the value of a meeting, they shouldn't turn up. You start to see problems arise and people should then start to see why some of those "boring" meetings are actually important or perhaps how the same problems can be solved in another more productive way. The difficult part is sometimes teaching devs that they do not exist in a vacuum and the business is more important than the tech. Sometimes they need to be in meetings to help others understand and sometimes they need to hear some non-tech truths, neither of which they would necessarily appreciate by default.
  • BlargMcLarg 5y ago
    >I think there is space for more disruptive approach to meetings. Remember Elon Musk saying if he didn't find meetings productive, he would walk out? Stuff like that. The last time I even suggested doing this, I was swiftly met with a "then I'll report it to HR" by the manager. Even though this was in video, with a clear tongue-in-cheeks approach. The majority of my colleagues had nowhere near the audacity to make such a suggestion, let alone actually do this. Reality is most developers aren't working together enough to make it a serious risk for managers not to listen, as the average dev is still replaceable enough. >The difficult part is sometimes teaching devs that they do not exist in a vacuum and the business is more important than the tech. You don't really need meetings for this though. Unless you're trying to convince a stubborn dev by showing him just how much more stubborn stakeholder X, who controls the money, truly is. >Sometimes they need to be in meetings to help others understand I fail to see how pulling the majority of the dev team to the meeting, while at the same time giving them zero time to prepare and zero development in their presentation skills, helps others understand much more if it wasn't something that was so trivial, you could've explained it in a short message. I'm all for helping the client, the higher-ups or any other non-dev who wants to know more and meet the business ends. However, the kneejerk reaction seems to be "let us meet". In reality, they want me to bridge the gaps between their perceived needs, their actual needs, my/our jargon and a way of communication they understand. New-age meetings with barely any preparation or research beforehand, being mostly a back-and-forth, no-holds-barred discussion, have barely ever been a suitable medium for that.
• Aeolun 5y ago
  This really struck a chord wit me. But my biggest takeaway is that Slack DM’s are not private any more.
• FeepingCreature 5y ago
  This is so weird for me. Where I work (backend software development), we do video calls and meetings all the time. Probably an hour every day or more is spent in direct contact. I see this as absolutely essential to get people on the same page - but none of the reasons that people have listed in this thread for why people prefer personal meetings apply to me. For instance, I am extremely grateful if someone writes up meeting notes, I read text documents all the time, and I often require continuous uninterrupted time and respect it in others, and I still prefer voiced meetings. I think the primary reason is if I am trying to clarify an idea for a design or an approach, I will go to the people who have also touched that field of difficulty, and try to explain what I am trying to do to them in advance. The spoken medium in that case gives room for interruptions, immediate elaborations and feedback. A write-up either convinces or it doesn't; it can be edited but it has feedback cycles on the order of tens of minutes to hours. Spoken communication has feedback cycles of seconds, so even if I was going to write something up, I'd talk it through verbally first, anyways.
  • urthor 5y ago
    Going out on a limb. 95% of all substantial corporate meetings would be vastly, vastly improved if someone wrote up some dot point notes of said meeting, and circulated the document as a courtesy. In my time in the workplace I've seen this done in maybe 5% of meetings. The entirety of that 5% involved team leaders having a regularly scheduled catch-up with our divisional overlord, and I sat in or saw the memo. Why don't these very basic things that would vastly improve productivity take place? Garden variety laziness. Unless you get over that very basic hurdle of couldn't give a damn, what's the point of all these other solutions?
    • jodrellblank 5y ago
      > "Garden variety laziness." This is the kind of lazy non-explanation I was complaining about in the recent HN thread on "laziness doesn't exist". There are people who have perosnal incentives and counter-incentives, they work in groups which bring their own incentives. Things like: - Socially, writing up notes and sending them out is often seen as secretarial work, women's work, low status work. People think their personal interests are better served by taking high status tasks, not low status tasks. - As well as being a low status task, it could be seen as trying to usurp your manager's authority, if you want to be the one sending out "here is what we decided and who is going to be taking followup actions". - Socially it could be "goody-two-shoes" behaviour if you weren't asked to do it, and lose the respect of some people. - Socially, if a coworker got lumbered with a task nobody wanted, they might resent you sending an all-hands email "gloating" and making sure everyone knows about it, or you fear they might. - Writing memo notes invites you to open-ended future scrutiny if anyone thinks the notes unfairly represented what they said or their participation. Coworker who thinks management is getting an unfair view of their contribution because of your biased notes, for example. - There are power imbalances and adversarial relationships among people in meetings; writing memo notes may be seen as "I'm going to write down what you say so I can take it out of context and use it against you" or in an "I'm going to hold my seniors to account" way. Maybe some things in the meeting are spoken, deliberately so they are "off the record". - If you think the notes will not be read, writing them feels like pointless make-work. - It misunderstands the purpose of meetings as "productivity" when they are often for avoiding blame, feeling important, or pushing something back and forth because the people in the meeting don't have the authority to make the decision(s) which need to be made. - If the company sees meeting records as important, it should be explicitly someone's job. If it's not someone's job, the company doesn't value it, so why should you? In the YosefK "Employees can read their manager's mind"[1] sense, employees are not there to make the company productive, they are there to make their managers happy. - If meeting memos aren't regularly taken, and you want to start, you face all the possible problems of trying to push a change into an existing system and people's reluctance to change no matter what the change is. - If tasks are assigned in the meeting, they should go into wherever the teams track work, not into generic forgettable group emails. If decisions are made, they should be logged in whatever documentation logs decisions, not generic email. If those are done the memo is redundant. There are only a couple of quick ways through this, the first is an enthusiastic junior who wants to be seen to be helping and has little to lose because the worst case is a manager asking them to stop. The other is a high-status employee (socially, e.g. wealthy white male, contractor, friend of the boss) or organizationally (e.g. senior title, manager, leader) secure in their skills and life who have respect and can damn the consequences - although they would be more likely to use their power to skip the junk meeting or have the memo taking task assigned to someone less busy. For everyone else, all changes have risks, especially ones which include increasing your visibility while making the implied statement "you weren't doing things properly and I have a better way". These things which really exist and do bother people casually dismissed as "garden variety laziness" is, I repeat, a lazy non-explanation. [1] https://yosefk.com/blog/people-can-read-their-managers-mind.html https://yosefk.com/blog/people-can-read-their-managers-mind....
• chrisweekly 5y ago
  See also PG's classic "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
• picodguyo 5y ago
  Hard disagree here. In practice, corporate wikis are always graveyards of outdated and incomplete information. The process usually looks like this: 1. Someone is excited about a new project and creates a wiki page with a lot of aspirational introductory content and a sketch of the rest of the page with TBD everywhere 2. Author gets busy on other things, leaves the company, or the project quickly diverges from the original vision 3. The original page stays in the wiki, adding negative value
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    I think this strongly depends on how much time everyone spends on the wiki and how much love it is given in the first place. I’ve had companies where it is exactly as you say. Which is especially frustrating because a search for the term you need yields 19 graveyard pages and 1 actual result. But also companies where the wiki was a bastion of well kept and up to date information. What I think it mostly comes down to is structuring. If you have little wiki fiefdoms, where every project gets it’s own page, and nobody gets to edit other projects, then you quickly end up with huge heaps of garbage. If there is one space that the entire company has access to, which is well organized, it’s much easier to get rid of (or restore) information.
  • Dudeman112 5y ago
    Documenting is like exercising or eating healthy: doing it an average of once per month isn't worth crap. It's not a problem with documenting stuff, it's a problem with corporations. Somehow very few companies have technical writers whose main job is keeping their docs healthy.
• PeterisP 5y ago
  I have an objection to the author's blanket disregard for "pings" in chat - while the request could/should be worded a bit more clearly than just "ping", IMHO they're a valid way of requesting if an opportunity for synchronous communication is available in the (not that rare!) cases where asynchronous communication would be worthless. If someone's blocking on some unclear thing which requires external input for progress, making an asynchronous request (i.e. writing the question directly) is not helpful since in such a case an answer is valuable if and only if it's synchronous. Writing a chat question that gets answered the next day has negative value, since it has the extra cost of the answerer reading the question and preparing the (now useless) answer. If the other person is available for synchronous communication, that's great, there's an opportunity for a useful communication. If the other person is not available for synchronous communication right now, that's fine as well, but then the replacement is not asynchronous communication with that person but instead something else that can actually be done right now - contacting someone else who is available, or doing some redundant experimentation/research, or just proceeding with an assumption that may later be falsified, etc, all of which aren't optimal but still clearly preferable to blocking until an asynchronous response arrives. Sure, things can be done 100% asynchronously eventually, but that's not an optimal flow, going 100% async requires giving up many opportunities for helpful communication. Especially in international organizations I've far too often seen things delayed by days or even weeks where literal ten minutes of a synchronous comms (no matter if it's a phone call or chat or video) was completely sufficient. Perhaps I'm looking at 100% async as an optimization on allocating time for communication that has some benefit of throughput - having more efficient schedules for people working - at a horrific sacrifice of latency - having much less effective schedules for resolving individual tasks. Pings would be useless (and I'd concede that even harmful) in a world where status indicators in a chat app reasonably match actual availability for synchronous communication right now, but I don't live in such a world, people are routinely marked as "active" while they're working in meetings or deep work and don't want to be disturbed, and the opposite way around; so there needs to be some protocol of requesting synchronous communication - are there any ways that are substantially better than "pings"?
  • Macha 5y ago
    Even in the case where the explanation of the question is quite long, I think the onus is still on the asker to give information for the reciever to prioritise it. Because sometimes my availability for the discussion depends on how important that is versus my current task. Need help debugging your CI build while I'm just churning out unit tests for my run of the mill work? Sure, I'll take up that discussion. But hey, what if I'm working on a gethering data for a presentation to stakeholders tomorrow? Then your CI build has to wait. But wait, what if you're debugging production being down? Well then you know what, my feature can wait. So "I need help with <X> so that I can <Y>, are you around for a chat?" is ok. I can make a judgement call here and give you an answer. "Ping"/"yt"/"Can we talk?" is not. You give me no information to prioritise your request.
• ilaksh 5y ago
  I feel like Discord can work OK for a small team. People can answer things asynchronously in the chat, organize in different channels or threads. And usually it is possible to sync up every now and then, and that can be useful. I think its easier for people to start putting things in an issue tracker and then forget about them, and the other person doesn't even know about it, or dismisses part of it, writes a comment, the first person doesn't see the comment, etc. So people often need to discuss things directly and tools like an issue tracker can make it too easy to avoid resolving issues or talk past each other. It depends though. I am talking about really small teams.
• 3np 5y ago
  One thing I personally hard disagree with is the author's view on chat/DMs; that they are by default and expected to be synchronous and immediate. Unless urgency is indicated somehow, I see chat as asynchronous - an incoming question doesn't carry an expectation of immediate feedback. This is in contrast with, say, a phone call. Some of the negatives of chat-heavy comms disappear under that mode. Like, why does encrypted e-mail need to have benefits over chat (apart from the interoperability, maybe). Chat is new to society and we don't (yet) have strong cultural norms and expectations around how it should work. I think things like this are important to talk about when forming a team or starting to work on a project or in a new context.
• mmarq 5y ago
  In my experience, many people prefer meetings over asynchronous communication because they can't write. I'm not referring to grammar or to spelling, but to being able to communicate effectively without a continuous feedback from the recipient of the message. When these people are asked to write documentation, the result is usually very sparse text with too many bullet points, table and images. Good asynchronous communication requires a high degree of introspection, clarity of mind and empathy, that not everybody has. A meeting allows you to pass your message through successive approximations, as in adjusting what you are saying based on the reactions of the listeners and being pushed in the right direction by their questions. Unfortunately it is also much more time consuming, because everybody has to stop whatever they are doing and listen for 1-2 hours, while reading 2 pages of text would taken them 30 minutes and they could have scheduled it at their convenience. I don't see much of a difference between older vs younger generations nor between native and non-native English speakers. I'm open to accept that it's just my own experience and that it doesn't generalize.
  • mobjack 5y ago
    I prefer documentation with sparse text and lots of diagrams and images. It provides the high level context and I can fill in any gaps with a short follow up conversation. For most people, the high level information is all they really need. The few who need to dig in more can hash out the details in a smaller more effective meeting without wasting everyone else's time.
    • mmarq 5y ago
      Do you find it easier to learn something new from pictures and bullet points or from a long-form document? That kind of documentation is not necessarily bad, but it depends heavily on context, which is not always shared across readers. So when the author and those they talked to are not available anymore, it quickly becomes useless. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think people should write War and Peace. Usually a good 2-3 paragraph introduction improves the quality of a document/email significantly. There you can provide the context that is necessary to fully understand the pictures and lists and diagrams you add after.
  • 5y ago
• ivraatiems 5y ago
  This is a well-written, cogent, and carefully considered article whose conclusions I disagree with almost completely. Many of the specifics have already been discussed, but a major benefit of video calls has been missed: Screen sharing. Computer interaction is largely a visual medium in modern times. It is so much easier to look interactively, together, at something than to try to type out what's going on. This applies to both instructions on using or doing something, and especially to code review or discussion. That doesn't mean you screenshare or call for most problems - you don't. But for some things it just ends up taking infinitely less time, especially when you are having trouble getting one side to understand via text. I work for a fully remote engineering team that has been remote for more than a decade - COVID changed very little of my organization's culture, as far as I know (I joined after the pandemic started). One of our core rules is "if a conversation is not going well, or people don't understand what's being said, take it to video," and that has served us well.
• xzlzx 5y ago
  We optimize to get things done. If a video call is warranted, we all hop on and get to the answer much faster than text. If the convo is inherently asynchronous, we use Slack. I don’t see the benefit in drawing lines in the sand. Each situation is different. We use impromptu meetings in most cases, not scheduled ones. It works like a charm. Being rigid about process is a classic productivity killer.
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    > is warranted Significant disagreements likely arise about what this means. The problem isn't so much that video calls can be warranted, but that different people can have wildly different understandings of what that means.
• satisfice 5y ago
  You know what, I am smart and experienced, too. I do a lot of meetings on Zoom. The idea that I should instead carefully craft documentation for much of the work I do is an incredibly bad one. The ideas I develop are easy to misunderstand, and constantly in flux. Meanwhile, my teammates have other things to do than keep up with my confluence pages. Usually such intensive documenting ideas are promoted by people with no respect for good documentation. But also, people with little understanding of how working relationships are formed and maintained.
  • randomdata 5y ago
    Whereas I'm stupid. I do a lot of meetings on Zoom too, and by the time you're finished explaining yourself I've forgotten what you said. It's not just about you. Write it down so that everyone can benefit.
  • ThalesX 5y ago
    > But also, people with little understanding of how working relationships are formed and maintained. I didn't form and maintain a relationship with the team picking up the project after I left. Last I heard they formed a pretty useful relationship with all the documentation I left.
• nonameiguess 5y ago
  One thing I never see considered in these discussions is the terrible state of high-speed residential broadband in the United States. Whether or not my team wants to do constant video calls, I can't. One of the things I did when I first started working from home is set up my router with OPNSense in preference to the ISP-provided router, which gives me some visibility into fine-grained details of traffic. Early on, the defense program I'm working on was big into pair programming. With a distributed team, this meant screen-sharing through Teams for hours per day. I could see turning on HD screen sharing and video feeds causes Teams to eat up 90%+ of my bandwidth, and additionally by tracking the data rates I'm getting through the WAN at different times of day and different times of the week, I can see very clearly that my ISP is throttling me when I'm using that much bandwidth. I may be paying for 400 mbps, but if I actually try to use that, I won't get it for more than a few minutes a day, or I'll get it for Netflix and Amazon Video, which are clearly paying for preferential treatment now that net neutrality is still not a thing (it will be interesting to see if they'll just started getting throttled as well if the FCC chooses to reinstitute net neutrality). Unless and until my employer or whatever acquisition office for the contract we're working on is going to run a dedicated leased line to my house that guarantees me consistent high-speed access, or they're willing to pay the ISPs for preferential treatment like streaming services do, nonstop HD audio and video is simply not going to happen. An hour a day is fine. I don't want to say never have any primarily voice-based meetings. Talking to people is important for many reasons. But at some point, when you've made a design decision, write it down. When you've begun implementing something, write down why you did it the way you did, how it works. It's easy enough to say documentation grows stale, so why bother? Then keep it up to date. Block out time in your work planning to do that. You wouldn't learn how to use the programming language you're learning, the operating system you're using, how TCP/IP and HTTP works, how a browser renders html, by asking the original creators of those tools. They wrote down how those things worked, and committed to a public interface, and you learn by reading as you're doing. I've been bit far too often by organizations that want to deliver fast and scrimp on documentation, and all the knowledge of why a particular design decision was made rest entirely in one person's head, and that person leaves, and the rest of us are left to reverse engineer whatever it is they did. You gain speed up front for your very first delivery, but then permanently cripple yourselves forever after. Maybe the vast majority of developers are just making screwdrivers and it doesn't really matter. The plan is to deliver anything quickly, generate some hype, and get acquired, and they don't care about product longevity because they won't be around for it anyway. But at least some people are making jet turbine engines, or something worthy of being included in that rebuild civilization from scratch archive that documents how to create all of the lasting and essential technologies that enable modern life. That has to outlive you. It's already not scalable or workable to try to contribute to the Linux kernel by asking Linus Torvalds personally how it works. Thankfully, it has great documentation. But imagine if you were at Google trying to work on Android and wanted to ask Robert Love why it is doing a particular thing. He's not even there any more! Thankfully, he not only contributed to the wonderful kernel documentation project. He also wrote books about it! And they won't grow instantly stale because the design decisions were well thought out and the APIs are fairly stable because of it. Writing out the rationale behind your design decisions is one way to force yourself to make sure they are actually well thought out.
• jimmytucson 5y ago
  Calling remote work "distributed" is a buzzword. The work is distributed to different people, whether they're in the same building or not. The physical distance decreases the communication bandwidth between them.
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    I always took it to mean that the people are spread out rather than co-located.
  • maxk42 5y ago
    "Distributed" teams are teams where everyone works remotely whereas "remote" roles may include those where some workers are in an office together. It's an important distinction.
• lordlic 5y ago
  I just scanned this, but some of it seems ludicrously wrong. Like rating chat a neutral face for "find" when honestly one of the biggest advantages to chat in my mind is being able to search for key terms long in the future and be able to turn up the exact transcript of the discussion you're thinking of. Or like this quote: > Using interactive chat is a good idea for the kind of communication that requires immediate, interactive mutual feedback from two or more participants. If that is not the case, chat is not a good idea. No. Just... no. This is so wrong it's absurd. The point of text chat instead of in-person chat is that it's asynchronous and it doesn't require immediate, interactive feedback. I'm honestly just baffled at how someone could actually use chat and come to this kind of conclusion.
  • nzmsv 5y ago
    The chat that doesn't require immediate feedback is called "email". Otherwise you are stuck with "hey, can you help?" with zero details for when you actually get to take a look. Then you have to say "yeah, what's wrong?" and wait another hour. A properly written email would have solved the issue in a tenth of the time.
    • lordlic 5y ago
      No, I'd argue that there's basically no use case for email beyond stuff that you want the other person to be able to ignore. If you're expecting a response, but don't care when it comes, that's ideal for chat.
  • duckmysick 5y ago
    I think neutral is a good rating for chat searchability. It's better than video or face to face chat. It's good for recalling the conversations you were part of. It's bad for discovering information you don't know about and you weren't part of.
• keskival 5y ago
  People keep saying reading body language and expressions is important and so in-person or video meetings are crucial. However in my experience in the software industry experienced people don't show their emotions from behind their poker-face. If people show emotions, they are mostly fake smiles and fake enthusiasm. If you don't get honest feedback from your team in text, you're not going to get it from body language either.
  • monocasa 5y ago
    There's levels to body language, and engineers aren't typically great at hiding it. It's a soft thing, yeah, but definitely there.
• pyrale 5y ago
  In my experience, both asynchronous teams and teams of people doing highly synchronized work, some spending most of their time together in voice chats or calls have worked great. I appreciate the experience feedback from that article, but I wish some of the feedback was contextualized rather than presented as universal. The antithesis laid at the end of the talk helps a bit, but it is a bit reductive about the effectiveness being limited to ops.
• bananamerica 5y ago
  One of the reasons for having a meeting is knowing that most people won't read or watch anything you send them, and even if they read they won't recall much. That is why in film school my teachers screened films in class instead of just assigning them.
• glacials 5y ago
  Async communication is great and it should be the default. but knowing its flaws and when to switch to sync is important. Async is: Low bandwidth: Writing doesn't have inflection or body language, so you need more words to convey the same idea. More: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bFsqk84frI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bFsqk84frI High latency: An idea that takes 30 back-and-forths to resolve may take minutes in a meeting but weeks in writing. Meetings really have negative latency because you see people react before you've finished speaking. High effort: Even if you account for low bandwidth and reach the same % chance of being understood as when speaking, when that % "misses" the cost is high because of the round-trip-time. To counteract this, you spend even more time editing than you did getting your meaning across. Emotional: I perceive people as meaner in writing than in meetings, and in response I become meaner. I don't want to and I try not to, but it can still happen.