Asynchronous communication has its place, and it's amazing what has been accomplished over the LKML and similar. Software projects tend to make this sort of communication ideal, since they are amenable to individualized contributions. But the prescription that efficient digital communication must be asynchronous and textual is incorrect.

My feeling is: video conferencing took hold for two main reasons (in the university context):

1. It is the most straightforward continuation of whatever existed before (those who talk, talk and those who listen, listen)

2. People have desire for beeing close with others

However in terms of efficiency, I noticed that the raw educational value of some (often 4h+ long) meetings could have been summarized by watching a well produced 15min video and reading a 10 page PDF, if one were to skip all the chitchat and pointless hollow remarks. In terms of information density the seemingly unlimited nature of video conferencing doesn't work out well in practise (especially if paired with people who like to hear themselves speak).

Most of our educators are certainly not happy with what it does to the way they have to teach (less interactivity — anything other than a 3-way conversation is nearly impossible, the rest has to be passive). They say it leads to more frontal and less communicative education.

As musician, artist and programmer i know async collaborations and projects — the best stuff was always a combination of sync and async. This is why I tend to recommend to our educators to view video conferences not as the replacement for their usual seminars, but as part of a strategic mix with synchronous (video conferences) and asynchronous components (email, collaborative text editing, etc).

It is surprisingly difficult to create a useful 15 minute video. Go ahead and be rich if you find it easy. It takes me about 8 hours to produce 15 minutes of truly information-packed video content. And it is not as re-usable as you think.

> if one were to skip all the chitchat

Many people need the social chitchat to feel OK. It is not a negative side of video conferencing, it is added value.

It is an added value for some, and it is a negative value for others.

Every minute that you're feeling great because of being "social" at work is a minute that someone else dreads, because they're feeling as if they were in a circus and would prefer to reserve being social for people they like spending time with, not the people they are forced to spend their time with.

This is the problem. Why does it matter if it takes 8 hours?

What this comment replies to talks about 4 hour meeting but just with 3 people it nets 3 hours saved as a collective (assuming all 3 watch the 15 minute video).

This past week there was an article on HN that talked about the benefits of written communication. The argument of effort to produce such "memos" was throughout the discussion but it is the very same as the conversation about video here.

I've seen this at multiple places that contributors don't want to put the upfront additional work for the collective benefit. Human nature at it's best, selfishness.

It matters because letting impatient people get rid of social conventions placing boundaries on their access to others' time is a dangerous thing to do, doubly so when the pretext for doing so is dumping responsibility for creating deliverables on small subsets of an org, which they will never be able to escape once the expectation is established.

The thing about synchronous is that the important people who refuse to read anything all have to sit in a chair and fidget at the same time to get the answers they want. There is no fiction that I will produce an artifact allowing me to disseminate information 1-to-M, and each important person enforces with the others that they can't interrogate me out-of-band and skip the meeting. There's only collective benefit if the document author can tell people "fuck you, read the memo." Otherwise, you're just spending hours putting up a sign-post for lazy people to bother you.

If it's truly collaborative, with each person contributing on the fly, then there's no way to make that 15 min video without all participants anyhow.

I think that's exactly the point. Makes someone think about what they want to say. At least only one person has to do it, rather than all the participants doing the same work in their heads.

Apparently at Amazon you have to write a document/essay before every meeting.

I think this aspect really needs more attention. Personally, I have never felt much need for much of social bonding at work but I am fully aware that many people have stronger desires in this area.

We ignore human psychology at our own peril. Even very technical people with low social requirements remain human and, more importantly, work with other humans that may have different needs.

i would consider that short!

the benchmark i have is 1 minute of video is 1 hour of production time.

So that would be 16 hours per minute of airtime, although admittedly that particular format was higher-than-average production quality.

I also have some personal experience producing scripted podcasts, and there I have about 0.5 hours per minute of airtime. It's a lot less work since I'm doing it as a single person and I don't have to care about video.

When you're saying "1 hour per minute" for video content, I actually find that incredibly efficient.

haha, i am only including editing of video (and may be the script). Not the research or anything like that.

The 1hr per minute is from professional editors for video production companies. it's like i, as a professional programmer, can probably get about 100 lines of debugged code per day, excluding thinking/research time.

And I never said chitchat isn't okay. I clearly said that this is part of why people do it. We have to realise that people sit at home, and can get very easily distracted. If you are an educator your goal should be to counter that by creating a clear structure. Let's say: 15mins of focused introduction, 20 mins on free chitchat, then watching a video collectively, then discussion about it, etc. This is what successful educators in our university do. If you don't structure it (e.g. I witnessed 4 hours of unstructured chitchat), you are exhausting everyone, and they would have gained more from just watching one youtube video on the topic.

In person 4h+ meeting would have equally low value. In all seriousness. Plus, people would be all antsy due not inability to go to bathroom or get the drink.

When you are at 4h+ meeting, the video conferencing is the least of problems.

Personally I find the "chit chat and hollow conversation" far more pleasurable than spending those hours alone reviewing notes, obviously with the caveat that most of the discussion is related to the material at hand in some way

If you are talking about 4 hour meetings of collaboration, then you are creating something together. And while it's quite often more efficient to see a distilled version of something rather than going through all steps as it's developed (kind of like reading a review article in a journal as opposed to all of the original research), the problem is that you need to go through that original stuff (the 4 hour meeting) to get to the outcome. If you aren't participating then you aren't helping create that information.

On the other hand, if you are talking about 4 hour presentations that can be distilled to 15 minutes of actual value, that's a different problem entirely.

Balancing efficiency and normal social contact can be tricky to get right even in a physical office setting, but I'm fairly sure aiming for peak efficiency to the exclusion of all casual conversation is not a good plan. Those friendly chats when everyone is getting to work in the morning or while the coffee is on matter. One of the downsides of remote working, particularly in the current situation with the virus, is the sense of isolation and potentially loneliness it creates if you don't take active steps to stay connected to your colleagues, and video chat allows that in a way no glorified mailing list ever will.

Sorry this was deep inside me and had to come out :D

And simple factual information belongs in good documentation, not being asked in Slack as a crutch and then claim "but it's searchable"

If we're doing it interactively, I can verify your comprehension and limit my need to elaborate, saving us both time.

And if we need back-and-forth collaboration, interactive is likely to be much better than multiple interruptions and context switches.

My general rule is, if it's going to be more than 2 back-and-forth exchanges, do a voice call.

And waiting while someone types a response is pure waste.

You really don't join the kind of video conferences I'm called into, where an hour long meeting might easily have been done in a few minutes by email.

Edit: Typo, and on a sidenote, I'm glad I hear about these sorta meetings from others, my boss does his best to keep us out of useless cruft.

this has never been my experience. group meetings devolve into explaining the same thing in many different ways, for every item that is discussed.

“We need to be async only yada yada. It’s how the Linux kernel is developed”

We do that until our projects are late or we have an outage, then it’s just endless synchronous calls until we get our smug on again.

Just have both in moderation.

It’s a model I’m thinking about quite a bit lately given how distracting I’ve been finding a lot of IM/chat apps lately. I’m with you, both forms in moderation, and ideally with the sync stuff concentrated into reasonably-sized reasonably-spaced chunks.

> I'm not sure what you meant by "blargh". If you meant foo then [long explanation, probably with bullet points]. If you meant bar then [a different long explanation].

This isn't an efficient use of either of our time. Also, if the explanation was already a bit intimidating (in terms of amount of content) then double that is even worse, even if half of it is actually irrelevant.

The alternative is that I ask what they meant by "blargh" but often the response doesn't get the heart of the difference, probably because the difference is subtle enough they didn't realise there was one in the first place. So it takes a few messages to sort out, by which point the whole conversation has dragged on for a few extra hours precisely because the communication is asynchronous so messages aren't replied to instantly by either of us, which is distracting us (or me, at least!) for that long.

In a conversation where there's likely to be some ambiguities in what you're saying, it's just much faster and less wasteful to iterate your joint understanding with a synchronous conversation. I often have highly technical conversations that are like this, but it's probably true even of lots of non-technical conversations.

Of course what I've said is mostly true of one to one conversations. But depending on the nature of a meeting, often lots of these happen between pairs of people in the meeting.

You get one sentence addressing the simplest interpretation of the simplest interrogative clause across the body of the message and as far as they're concerned it's off their to-do list.

For these people I need to physically impose my presence (or at least heavy breathing over audio) to elicit the minutes of time spent on task required to obtain the information I need.

And there are people you just can't collaborate with in that way - you'll never get back what you need.

The Library of Congress has ~38 million books in it. Imagine you could search it, it's easy to say that would make it more useful. And it probably would for some people - but a human has very little processing power and slow reading speed, if you got 38 million books reduced to 1,000 context-free paragraphs, that's still too many to read through.

This leaves "search" as a tool for limited situations such as: You remember roughly who put the content there and when and close-enough exactly what it said. Often in this situation that's still not enough to find it. Or, you want something popular like "iTunes Store Login" or "$Restaurant opening times". Or you are a researcher/archeologist.

Outside those kinds of usecases, "it's searchable" is more of a tragedy of the commons style problem - people who are best placed to do it (those making decisions) don't want to do it, and offload the problem to everyone else saying "it's searchable". This leaves decisions, documentation, and history scattered over an ever-increasing wasteland and intermingled with countless book-equivalent-volumes of chat, jokes, memes, flamewars, "donuts in the breakroom" trivia, outdated status updates, and all sorts.

Slogging through 1,000 paragraphs from the Library of Congress search results is still possible. Increasingly, every move is dogged by the weight of "search the 10,000 GitHub issues and read all the screens and screens of backlog" and "search the mailing list archives", the Slack archives, the IRC archives, the email threads, the forum threads, skim-reading junk and junk and junk, only to have to do it again 5 minutes later when your boss says "what was the status of X project?" and 20 minutes later when your coworker says "any reason X was changed?" and 10 minutes later when you want to know if X library should be behaving this way or not.

"Do nothing and let the search be our panacea" has always won over "big-organize up front" but it should be clear to everyone by now that Google search results get worse year on year. Nature lets things rot, unless you put maintenance effort in to keep them. We burn some money and a LOT of people's time keeping junk by default, on the "it might come in useful oneday" principle that leads to hoarder houses.

We act as if data can't cause disease and can't attract cockroaches, but ignore the fact that it piles up, clutters things up, gets in the way, it's the arterial plaque, the drainpipe sludge, the rust, of computer systems.

The power of digital communication is space travel - it's possible for people far away to be involved, and time travel - people who weren't there see what happened. "Searchable" is the Siren's call, that's not its power, that's its road to Hell paved with good intentions.

And by big, I mean 40+ inches and resolution of 1080p or greater.

If you’ve ever tried it, you’ll see how incredible videoconferencing can actually be. It’s as different of an experience as Wolfenstein 3D was from the previous 2D map version. Totally different.

FYI, helps to have it to the side of you instead of in front of you for best results, so that it’s like sitting beside someone.