Ah yes, damn those people who would rather have a 5 minute Zoom call instead of getting carpal tunnel bike shedding over Slack. I bet they’re the same people that talk in the cafeteria instead of texting across the table.

I get that it’s fun to bash excessive meetings, but trying to hash out a complex topic by lobbing Slack message grenades back and forth over the wall is often the worst idea.

I prefer typing over slack because it’s easier to be rigorous and concise in exposition in writing than it is when speaking (you can’t erase what you already said without breaking a train of thought). Writing can be consumed at the consumer’s pace rather than the producer’s. Additionally, writing can be searched later, so there’s no fog of memory.

But, typing can be a bottleneck for people I suppose, both in speed and pain as you say. I wonder if there’s a WPM inflection point for chat vs call preference.

I mean you can always have the best of both worlds. Do the zoom meeting by all means but never forget to send a meeting summary to all parties with an agreed statement about the objectives and assignments.

This way there are no ambiguities and no one can evade responsibility. This avoids a he-said vs she-said situation as well.

Until you have disagreement on the summary because it turns out not everyone came to the same understanding verbally - they erroneously thought they did. I’ve come to prefer having as much as possible of the common, written reference come before, not after the meeting - with time to consume and digest prior.

A meeting has value beyond just the words themselves, which is where writing meets its limit.

> Until you have disagreement on the summary because it turns out not everyone came to the same understanding verbally

This itself is a victory. This means the subject needs more discussion or is too complex for a 5 minute meeting.

I prefer to spend 2 hours to make a subject clear to all parties rather than developing under a false interpretation and having to fix the issue through a grueling 5 day back and forth.

I think writing before and after the meeting is both desirable. Before to specify the object of the meeting and to limit its scope, afterwards to conclude and archive the decisions made.

Or that if you wrote it in the first place you wouldn't have agreed?

Sure, it really depends on the subject. I have a slight preference for the quick meeting (5 minutes) -with a followup email- rather than a long come and go in slack.

I value zoom for 1 to 1 or small group interactions. It's very suited for work on something specific where you need live interaction and where a shared screen tells more than a 1000 words.

For general coordination, a written medium is better, especially since one can take the time to be precise, and the content is searchable later as you say.

You inserted detail here not present originally. I know anything said in a zoom worth remembering will be written down. Why not save some steps?

Agreed, I switched to call this morning and quickly realised I was banging my head against a brick wall, I gave up the fight we were having (the guy didn't understand something very basic) and switched to doing some actual work. This would have gone on for hours in a text chat. face to face can be much quicker at times.

As you see at this person's calendar, they all take 30 minutes at least.

Incapable of synthesising ideas. Decision by exhaustion.

> Seems overly hostile.

I find that invasive too. For me, this often turns a 5 minute interaction that fits in the middle of a task into a 30 minute interaction with the same outcome, but with a huge interruption of my workflow, which may mean that I lost an hour or more.

I don't mind if it's something that does actually require more discussion.

However, pre-slack there used to be a certain type that would never read e-mail, but instead would call 5 seconds after the e-mail and want to be walked through the e-mail rather than read it themselves. Also had one time about 15 years ago where someone literally tried to break through a secure door to ask about an e-mail I had sent 3 minutes ago. I was on VPN @ home, and they got pissed off thinking I was just ignoring the call to my desk.

set some boundaries. say "no".

Why would someone use Zoom all of a sudden when they're already using a calling app (slack). I don't get this.

Habit. It's quite easy for me to type, "/zoom" and click a button. I'm used to Zoom. I rarely use Slack's audio/video features.

Slack video meetings aren't as mature yet as Meet (for instance), in my experience.