News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – researc... by sokoloff on Friday October 29, 2021 @04:02AM (#29036325)
It’s a round-trip latency difference. Standing in the same room, we can get perhaps 100, but certainly 50, responses in an hour from a small group. Video conferencing might be 15% less and that relatively slight difference is already frustrating. In asynchronous written form, it probably takes 3 days to get 100 “turns” and maybe a week or more if there’s timezone “smear”. The written async responses can be higher quality on average, but where reaching consensus in minimal wall clock time is important, face-to-face wins.

Why is Slack “better” than physically mailed correspondence? It’s roughly the same phenomenon, just on an even shorter timescale (including that Slack isn’t better for everything).

Re:Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – researc... by jonfw on Friday October 29, 2021 @09:45AM (#29038313)
If you're a proponent of written communication- you'll argue that 100 'turns' of written communication will have significantly more valuable discussion than 100 turns in a meeting. Most of the turns in a meeting can usually be avoided by a google search beforehand
Re:Remote-first work is taking over the rich world – researc... by sokoloff on Friday October 29, 2021 @12:39PM (#29040578)
Totally true. There are many cases where even 2 or 3 turns of written comms beats 100 of spoken (and I'm one of the biggest proponents of written work and async work at my company).

But there are situations where speed of alignment matters more than the specific direction of alignment and other situations where the nature of humans requires a live, synchronous discussion. I couldn't build a relationship with my family using only written feedback and requests.