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I really think "more effective" and "easier" are about communication styles and personality, not incontrovertible truths. I completely believe that to you it's

I really think "more effective" and "easier" are about communication styles and personality, not incontrovertible truths. I completely believe that to you it's much easier to handle these things on a call. Please believe that for me it's much easier to handle in a written format. Neither of these styles or preferences are wrong, and I reject the premise that either is better or worse. They're just DIFFERENT and people with a given preference proclaiming that it's THE easy way, or _the_ right way, is the source of a lot of conflict. I think we'd all do well to be more understanding and empathetic about the fact that different people are comfortable with different ways of communicating, and both sides (in reality there are many more than two sides) should try to meet each other in the middle more often.

fhd2 4y ago
Absolutely agree. For some reason, empathy seems to be above average lacking in successful people, so they struggle to understand that what works for _them_ will not work for _everyone_. That's probably what happened here, and I see it so often: CEO can work best under pressure, can communicate best in a call, whatever: In an almost selfless gesture, they aim to produce these good (for them!) conditions for others. And since they are unable to understand that this doesn't work for everybody else, they get (at least a bit) upset because the only remaining explanation is that those people don't _want_ to be productive, or don't _want_ to communicate effectively.
bluefirebrand 4y ago
> I think we'd all do well to be more understanding and empathetic about the fact that different people are comfortable with different ways of communicating This isn't about being comfortable it's about communicating clearly and effectively. Some (Many?) people are just not good communicators regardless of the medium. However we learn to communicate verbally long before we learn to write, and most people communicate verbally in almost 100% of the interactions in their lives. Additionally we first learn to talk about things with a lot of visual association. We use the shared ability to point at a visible thing and understand this is what we are talking about. You can even use this to communicate crudely with people who don't speak or read any language that you do. Beyond all of that, writing clearly and reading comprehension are both additional skills that are needed for good written communication to occur, and all parties involved in the conversation need to have both of those skills to make it an effective communication style. Given all of that, I'd say that if good communication is your goal, and it should be, then defaulting to verbal communication with a shared context (screen sharing or in-person or something else) is realistically likely to be better than written communication in almost all cases.
- erik_seaberg 4y ago
  Between turnover and tech debt, a lot of our job is communicating with the future, not just with the peers we happen to have today.
- evanwise 4y ago
  I was giving you the benefit of the doubt in the previous reply but this is so arrogant it's quite silly. If you want to force your preferences on others be my guest but don't be surprised when some people respond negatively. Verbal communication is often imprecise and vague. I can't count the number of times I've had to write up a detailed summary of a meeting to ensure that two different stakeholders didn't just take away what they wanted to hear from the conversation. There have been many times where having a paper trail of my conversations has me allowed to prove that, yes, I did indeed inform so and so about that problem weeks ago. There are also many people, myself included, who have difficulty processing and producing spoken language (either through speech and hearing impairments or ASD or any number of other conditions). Your preference is just that, a preference, not a universal truth.
  - bluefirebrand 4y ago
    I'm really curious what part of my previous post you are taking so much issue with that you're calling me arrogant for it. I don't feel like I said anything terribly controversial. Are you angry that I suggested that many people are actually not very good communicators? You gave a bunch of good examples of people being bad communicators in your reply, so I feel like you agree with me on that? I said most people learn to speak before they learn to write. Is that untrue? How about the idea that you can communicate (crudely, sure) with gestures even with people you don't share a common language with? How about the idea that both writing comprehensively and reading comprehension are high level skills that many people don't possess enough to truly communicate effectively via writing? Do you disagree? I don't think it's unfair to say that verbal communication is a cornerstone of the (near) universal human experience. This isn't just "my preference" is what I'm getting at. I'm pretty sure it's just the human default.
    - 4y ago
nightpool 4y ago
This is definitely true, but I think there's a clear time-commitment component to it that you're missing in GP's answer: "It's one thing it I say something like "Try this, this, and this. Let me know what works" and then I can get back to my work. But if I'm trying to step you through something and you sometimes reply immediately, sometimes in 5 minutes, sometimes in a half hour, then you get to have calls whenever you want my help from then on" If the choice for me is going to be spending 5 minutes to help you debug something over screenshare where I can actually look at what's happening and get backtraces, context, poke at things , or it's going to be 10+ messages over an hour and a half, then I think the screenshare is going to be better for the team most of the time, EVEN IF in a vacuum i prefer text-based communication.
mejutoco 4y ago
I agree. IMHO It is "easier" for the person asking to go on a call because the effort will be offloaded to the person being interrupted, whereas if the person at least tries to explain it properly in written form, they are the ones making the effort. When I ask for help I try to be the one doing most of the work, at the very least describing the problem accurately, and not forcing others to solve it on my terms. There are reasons to go on a call but to default to a call IMO is an expression of the dynamic above.

fhd2 4y ago

Absolutely agree. For some reason, empathy seems to be above average lacking in successful people, so they struggle to understand that what works for _them_ will not work for _everyone_. That's probably what happened here, and I see it so often: CEO can work best under pressure, can communicate best in a call, whatever: In an almost selfless gesture, they aim to produce these good (for them!) conditions for others. And since they are unable to understand that this doesn't work for everybody else, they get (at least a bit) upset because the only remaining explanation is that those people don't _want_ to be productive, or don't _want_ to communicate effectively.

bluefirebrand 4y ago

> I think we'd all do well to be more understanding and empathetic about the fact that different people are comfortable with different ways of communicating This isn't about being comfortable it's about communicating clearly and effectively. Some (Many?) people are just not good communicators regardless of the medium. However we learn to communicate verbally long before we learn to write, and most people communicate verbally in almost 100% of the interactions in their lives. Additionally we first learn to talk about things with a lot of visual association. We use the shared ability to point at a visible thing and understand this is what we are talking about. You can even use this to communicate crudely with people who don't speak or read any language that you do. Beyond all of that, writing clearly and reading comprehension are both additional skills that are needed for good written communication to occur, and all parties involved in the conversation need to have both of those skills to make it an effective communication style. Given all of that, I'd say that if good communication is your goal, and it should be, then defaulting to verbal communication with a shared context (screen sharing or in-person or something else) is realistically likely to be better than written communication in almost all cases.

erik_seaberg 4y ago
Between turnover and tech debt, a lot of our job is communicating with the future, not just with the peers we happen to have today.
evanwise 4y ago
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt in the previous reply but this is so arrogant it's quite silly. If you want to force your preferences on others be my guest but don't be surprised when some people respond negatively. Verbal communication is often imprecise and vague. I can't count the number of times I've had to write up a detailed summary of a meeting to ensure that two different stakeholders didn't just take away what they wanted to hear from the conversation. There have been many times where having a paper trail of my conversations has me allowed to prove that, yes, I did indeed inform so and so about that problem weeks ago. There are also many people, myself included, who have difficulty processing and producing spoken language (either through speech and hearing impairments or ASD or any number of other conditions). Your preference is just that, a preference, not a universal truth.
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  I'm really curious what part of my previous post you are taking so much issue with that you're calling me arrogant for it. I don't feel like I said anything terribly controversial. Are you angry that I suggested that many people are actually not very good communicators? You gave a bunch of good examples of people being bad communicators in your reply, so I feel like you agree with me on that? I said most people learn to speak before they learn to write. Is that untrue? How about the idea that you can communicate (crudely, sure) with gestures even with people you don't share a common language with? How about the idea that both writing comprehensively and reading comprehension are high level skills that many people don't possess enough to truly communicate effectively via writing? Do you disagree? I don't think it's unfair to say that verbal communication is a cornerstone of the (near) universal human experience. This isn't just "my preference" is what I'm getting at. I'm pretty sure it's just the human default.
  - 4y ago

nightpool 4y ago

This is definitely true, but I think there's a clear time-commitment component to it that you're missing in GP's answer: "It's one thing it I say something like "Try this, this, and this. Let me know what works" and then I can get back to my work. But if I'm trying to step you through something and you sometimes reply immediately, sometimes in 5 minutes, sometimes in a half hour, then you get to have calls whenever you want my help from then on" If the choice for me is going to be spending 5 minutes to help you debug something over screenshare where I can actually look at what's happening and get backtraces, context, poke at things , or it's going to be 10+ messages over an hour and a half, then I think the screenshare is going to be better for the team most of the time, EVEN IF in a vacuum i prefer text-based communication.

mejutoco 4y ago

I agree. IMHO It is "easier" for the person asking to go on a call because the effort will be offloaded to the person being interrupted, whereas if the person at least tries to explain it properly in written form, they are the ones making the effort. When I ask for help I try to be the one doing most of the work, at the very least describing the problem accurately, and not forcing others to solve it on my terms. There are reasons to go on a call but to default to a call IMO is an expression of the dynamic above.