Re:The Death of the Telephone Call: 1876–2007
by nitrogen on Sunday September 25, 2016 @01:34PM
(#12576297)
I respectfully disagree. Nothing feels like a greater waste of time when working remotely than when someone can't be bothered to think about their problem enough to ask via text and demands a phone call. Maybe it's just the teams I've worked with, but voice calls almost invariably end up as 99% noise, taking forever for people to figure out what they actually want to ask and never getting to the point.
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Re:The Death of the Telephone Call: 1876–2007
by toasterlovin on Sunday September 25, 2016 @01:59PM
(#12576431)
Synchronous voice communication is much higher bandwidth than text. Probably by an order of magnitude. And it allows nuance (tone, inflection, emotion) that is not possible with pure text (kind of like how emoji adds a dimension to text that isn't really possible in its absence). Surely you can imagine topics that could benefit from this increased bandwidth, no?
Re:The Death of the Telephone Call: 1876–2007
by nitrogen on Sunday September 25, 2016 @08:48PM
(#12578380)
I can imagine such topics, but nearly none of them occur in a software development workplace. As I said before, it has been my experience that the extra bandwidth of a voice channel is nearly always wasted. IMO the best case for voice calls as a developer is brief daily status/standup meetings, and you've probably seen how many people around here dislike those.
I think what's really going on is that people who grew up analog don't see textual decisionmaking as "real", and need a familiar voice call to make things feel "official".