Excellent books explaining the need for face-to-face communication are "The Village Effect" by Susan Pinker (humans need face-to-face socializing to enhance men

Excellent books explaining the need for face-to-face communication are "The Village Effect" by Susan Pinker (humans need face-to-face socializing to enhance mental health, and feel all the happy juices like endorphins, oxytocin, etc), and "The Master and his Emmisary", by Iain McGilchrist. Basically, all the techy geek work a dev does makes them very left-hemisphere (predominant brain region). And the left hemisphere is "sticky": once you over-use it, it's hard to stop using it predominantly. In the right hemisphere is where the empathy is, ability to catch nuance, metaphor, and facial micro-expressions, and the ability to use "Theory of Mind" - appreciating the unique individual perspectives of others. *Too much left-brain, and communication is doomed to suck!!*