The worst thing about this, IMHO, is that we had a chance to change this with the shift to remote work, but what happened instead of switching to more async-first and written communication styles, was that everything was moved to Zoom/Teams/whatever virtual meetings which IMHO are even worse than in-person meetings.

I also believe that many people, including developers, actually don't have very good reading comprehension skills. Obviously, this doesn't apply for most people who comment on forums such as Hacker News, but in general I believe that it's true.

Estimates of the literacy level of the adult population are doubtless wildly over-estimated. There's a reason that newspapers are targeted at a seventh-grade reading level, or at least used to be.

Writing skills are even more depressing. Just laying out bullet points coherently puts somebody in the top quartile of white-collar workers.

> Just laying out bullet points coherently puts somebody in the top quartile of white-collar workers.

I feel like a relatively intelligent person but I absolutely struggle with writing concise emails / docs that are well organized. It's an agonizing process and I feel my results are hit or miss with little inbetween.

Was it Samuel Johnson who wrote "I would write a shorter letter but I don't have time" or something along those lines

Writing good documentation takes time! There's no way around it other than practice.

> Just laying out bullet points coherently puts somebody in the top quartile of white-collar workers.

To be fair, that's not my forte either as my writing tends to be sort-of meandering at times. Just recently I wrote a longer message to my PM and he told me "yo, bullet points please".

The literacy and writing of my colleagues has always been good, but sometimes it's in a different language, and their English literacy and writing are not as good.

There's definitely a problem there in that we often assume that "fluent in English" means "mastery of the language", but these two are different things.

I'm often firmly in the "this meeting could have been an E-mail" camp, and have sadly sat through my share of those. Unfortunately, often the reason this meeting isn't an E-mail is because the people who need to know and need to act don't read their damn E-mail. Or they don't read it completely, or they read it and don't comprehend it, or they read it but don't take the needed action, or for lots of other reasons. I'd love to treat people like grown-ups and reap the benefits of purely asynchronous office communication, but it's so rare that this happens.

My method now is as follows:

1. Send the E-mail asking for whatever, and an expected time frame

2. If I don't get the requested reply or action in the time frame, gently ping with a chat message

3. If still nothing... Well, here we go: it's meeting time, regrettably

> don't read their damn E-mail

I also never fully understood this problem, but the other day, someone shared their screen and I saw, I kid you not, 5000+ unread emails. Granted, these were both private and work emails, but still.

I think when something like that happens (and I don't think it's an isolated case), we've completely lost the ability to deal with email in any sort of non-random way. There's a couple of questions I would ask myself there:

- Why am I being CC'd on so many things? (unfortunately, this can often be outside of one's control)

- Why don't I use automatic filtering and tagging?

- Why don't I unsubscribe from marketing emails?

- etc.

For 1. (for me) I think the ever present feeling of having no time to read documentation stems from being in a desktop support role and an ops role. If the phone's not ringing - it has a good chance of ringing any moment. There's also monitoring all the things I'm expected to monitor. Those build in a kind of moment to moment thinking that outright stops deeper thinking.

>>> or think they do not have the time

fwiw - As a lead engineer I tried to influence meeting formats as being "review only". The idea is to distribute ideas as wiki or markdown prior and review/comment prior to meeting. It failed spectacularly. I believe the demands of multi-tasking (meeetings, chat, meetings+chat+work at the same time) have caused a lot of people to not have the will power to sit and read. Reading is considered "not-productive" when you can just go to a call and ask the person to explain.

In short, its really hard to change bad habits.

Some companies are famous for explicitly dedicating 20 minutes at the beginning of the meeting for silent reading in order to address this.

Add in the use of PowerPoint to make everything worse.

That's part of why Amazon famously banned PowerPoint.

This is actually a very compelling theory.