What about when you are working on something but you also message somebody on Slack/Teams a question and they instantly hit you back with "hey, instead of talking through it on chat, let's both stop everything we're doing and join a call"?

By all means, I get it that sometimes (not sure how to measure it/what the answer is) it's quicker to "bite the bullet", hop on a call, screenshare, etc.

but it does seem almost like a communication style preference. some people are super quick to want to jump on a call no matter what. and then the question becomes does it "impede" those whose communication style is not to jump on a call. it's like "rude" to say "i'd prefer not to jump on a call with you", forcing them to go from "call communication style" -> "type communication style"

it really makes me wonder if some people are on 1 on 1 or small group calls basically 4+ hours out of the day (by choice. not scheduled meetings or on call incidents)

I think this misses the point. How do you navigate this if you never want to do the voice call and always just handle it over text? I'd have to lie (every time they want to call me) saying "I'm busy". It's like you accepting the call is insisted/expected.

I'm talking about preferring to never do a voice/video call.

It's fine to have preferences but to expect your company and team to let you always do things your personal preferred way is pretty unrealistic. I don't think even the CEO of any company gets to have their way 100% of the time (although they almost certainly get their way more than anyone else in the company does)

Another way to say this is "if you work a remote coding job, it is expected that you hop on a video/voice call pretty much whenever one of your teammates/managers/co-workers wants you to whenever they have a question they don't feel like typing out" because it's basically just a socially accepted norm. The majority of people prefer you stop what you're doing, get into a socially uncomfortable/awkward situation, and you're "the victim" until the person on the other end will let you hang up.

Repeat that 4+ times a day on average 5 times a week and that $120k/yr comfortable soft 8am-5am "IT" job starts looking less attractive/more soul sucking/5-10 years in you're dreaming of buying a van and moving into a cabin in the woods.

That would drive me crazy.

I think you'll have to accept that somethings have to be face to face. And some companies prefer to do things that way.

I guess you adapt or go to a company that can guarantee you'll never have to speak to someone at all.

But face to face is the oldest form of human interaction. Its going to be hard to get along in the real world if you really don't like it.

I'm trying to imagine how you'd do something like a lay off over chat or an interview or a performance review? That just seems like living life on the hardest possible mode.

I for one prefer actually face to face, then text chat, then voice chat, video chat never. Screen shares are almost always a signal that this call will be a huge waste of time, but I suppose it’s fairly necessary if you insist on voice chat.

Video chat is obviously here to stay in the software industry, which is why I’ve left it. I worked started working remotely from 2015 onward, felt ambivalent about it, but the the proliferation of video meetings with the pandemic really made it bad. I worked in office in 2021 and 2022, but once the genie was out of the bottle, you’d get calls all the time. Used to be you could just send a status report to sync up with overseas teams, but now, why not a daily video call? just a bizarrely irritating and draining way to spend your day.

If you're talking about just sharing images of each other's faces, then sure. But if you're talking about an actual screen, with an editor, and code, and config files, and debug logs, or whatever, then "hard disagree" here. I can't even count the times somebody has pinged me for help with something, made it sound super mysterious and unsolvable while explaining through text chat, and then we had a Teams call and I saw something in (their code|their config|their debug logs|etc) that let me solve the problem for them in like 2 minutes.

That shit is exactly why I agree with the person up-thread who said "I almost always want to jump on a call ..." IME, things get done quicker when I can actually see what's going on for myself instead of having to read someone else's abridged / misinterpreted / whatever version of events.

Why? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Someone else could probably explain (or disagree & explain) better than I can.

It's because we've built an industry-wide culture of never broaching a topic of feedback that might be even a little uncomfortable. So it's frowned upon to say the thing that would actually help both the other person and yourself — and, often, the other person would have no idea how to hear such a thing anyway.

What we mean:

"The exercise of writing out what you want/mean will help you clarify your own thoughts and end up saving us both a lot of time. It would make the whole company better if we were all disciplined about doing that first, genuinely trying to make progress asynchronously, and then only jumping on a call if really needed."

Instead, we say:

"My internet has been weird all week. Do you mind if we do this one over chat?"

And then we hope that, after the 25th time we say this, they'll figure out the common-sense basics of human communication and empathy on their own.

</cynical-but-true>

On a whole people tend to do a good job of working together in a way that minimizes instances of anger, dislike, or irritation. Not everyone is good at it, and few people are aware of what behaviors contribute to this cohesion.

This is one of those behaviors.

Here's the way I look at it.

If you are asking me a question where my reply isn't time sensitive, and it doesn't need to turn into a conversation about my answer, that doesn't need to be a call.

If you just want a status update on XYZ from me, which may be a short conversation, that probably does not need to be a call.

If you want my help with just about anything code related, that's a call. Screensharing is way easier for me to see what you are talking about, and it's much easier for us to be on the same page if we're both looking at the same thing.

It's also a massive peeve of mine when someone asks a question on messaging, refuses to have a call, and then proceeds to take forever getting back to me. It's one thing it I say something like "Try this, this, and this. Let me know what works" and then I can get back to my work.

But if I'm trying to step you through something and you sometimes reply immediately, sometimes in 5 minutes, sometimes in a half hour, then you get to have calls whenever you want my help from then on

I tend to, and I know I'm not alone here, accomplish most of my work in very focused blocks that often take me multiple hours to get into. Often I'll go a whole work day without being able to get there, and often when I'm in the flow, I'll work 12+ hours because that's how I'm most productive.

Your 5 minute call may cost me 3-6 hours of productivity. Once I've pulled my head out of what I'm working on, it's not a given that I can jump right back in. Sometimes that's worth it. It's possible not having that call may cost you 3 hours of productivity. But because some people have different work styles, people who focus easily (or are working on easier problems) often don't think of the costs for those who don't.

You're also assuming there's only one task the developer could be working on. That's a very rare scenario.

I think that's an entirely reasonable position. How does this depend on "If both people are working on the same thing"? If I'm trying to help you debug something, and it feels like pulling teeth when I know I could solve your problem with a 5 minute screen-share, I'm probably going to choose the 5-minute screenshare over the hour-and-a-half of 10 different messages spread out over random intervals. The GP said the exact same thing:

    It's also a massive peeve of mine when someone asks a question on messaging, refuses to have a call, and then proceeds to take forever getting back to me. It's one thing [if] I say something like "Try this, this, and this. Let me know what works" and then I can get back to my work.

    But if I'm trying to step you through something and you sometimes reply immediately, sometimes in 5 minutes, sometimes in a half hour, then you get to have calls whenever you want my help from then on.

First off, since you’re the one interrupting them, common courtesy suggests you should try to accommodate their communication preferences.

Second, that five minute call is saving you 45m of text back-and-forth, which lets you get back to focusing faster. Not to mention saving the helper frustration, if you’re regularly leaving five minute gaps between replies.

And not even getting into the pernicious effects of having a culture where pseudo-synchronous instant messaging is broadly preferred over synchronous calls. In such cultures, all communication is so inefficient that everyone is in several conversations at all times; good luck ever achieving focus in that environment. There’s a reason why Cal Newport hates Slack, and he literally wrote the book on focused work.

I read the first two paragraphs as general policy, and then the following lines as specific cases. To come to the interpretation you guys had, you have to assume that the 5th paragraph supersedes the first. It's possible that's how the author meant it, but that's not obvious. The first paragraph implies virtually always preferring calling, independent of which direction the help is flowing.

Except five minute calls tend to last 60 minutes...

> pseudo-synchronous instant messaging is broadly preferred over synchronous calls.

Yep, you should go fully async.

On the other hand, if a call takes five, ten, fifteen minutes for good reason, it would have been hours or even days of messages. How many times have you spent ten minutes helping fix a newbie’s dev environment, and afterward they say “wow, thanks, I’ve been stuck all morning”?

And those calls aren’t rare! Knowing how (and when) to use calls over messages has been one of the most useful “soft skills” in my career toolkit.

That's probably what happened here, and I see it so often: CEO can work best under pressure, can communicate best in a call, whatever: In an almost selfless gesture, they aim to produce these good (for them!) conditions for others.

And since they are unable to understand that this doesn't work for everybody else, they get (at least a bit) upset because the only remaining explanation is that those people don't _want_ to be productive, or don't _want_ to communicate effectively.

This isn't about being comfortable it's about communicating clearly and effectively.

Some (Many?) people are just not good communicators regardless of the medium. However we learn to communicate verbally long before we learn to write, and most people communicate verbally in almost 100% of the interactions in their lives.

Additionally we first learn to talk about things with a lot of visual association. We use the shared ability to point at a visible thing and understand this is what we are talking about. You can even use this to communicate crudely with people who don't speak or read any language that you do.

Beyond all of that, writing clearly and reading comprehension are both additional skills that are needed for good written communication to occur, and all parties involved in the conversation need to have both of those skills to make it an effective communication style.

Given all of that, I'd say that if good communication is your goal, and it should be, then defaulting to verbal communication with a shared context (screen sharing or in-person or something else) is realistically likely to be better than written communication in almost all cases.

I said most people learn to speak before they learn to write. Is that untrue?

How about the idea that you can communicate (crudely, sure) with gestures even with people you don't share a common language with?

How about the idea that both writing comprehensively and reading comprehension are high level skills that many people don't possess enough to truly communicate effectively via writing? Do you disagree?

I don't think it's unfair to say that verbal communication is a cornerstone of the (near) universal human experience.

This isn't just "my preference" is what I'm getting at. I'm pretty sure it's just the human default.

>I said most people learn to speak before they learn to write. Is that untrue?

This is true but completely irrelevant. Most people also learn how to dance before they learn how to write, that does not mean interpretive dance is a suitable medium for conveying technical information.

>How about the idea that you can communicate (crudely, sure) with gestures even with people you don't share a common language with?

This is an edge case, and again, kind of cheating as you are attributing the benefits of visual aids to the verbal format. It does not provide any evidence that spoken communication is universally better.

>How about the idea that both writing comprehensively and reading comprehension are high level skills that many people don't possess enough to truly communicate effectively via writing? Do you disagree?

Reading comprehension and the ability to write cogently are basic skills of any knowledge work. I think people who are poor communicators are probably poor communicators regardless of medium, so this is a red herring. In general, the things you are saying are true to some extent but do not constitute an argument for verbal communication being universally better than written (your claim). Rather, even if I am charitable and ignore the clearly fallacious parts of your argument, at most you've shown that in some circumstances verbal communication has some advantages (a much weaker claim which does indeed seem rather uncontroversial.

>I don't think it's unfair to say that verbal communication is a cornerstone of the (near) universal human experience.

>This isn't just "my preference" is what I'm getting at. I'm pretty sure it's just the human default.

So, those of us with hearing problems or speech impediments are simply inhuman? This is the arrogance I was talking about. Your assumption that your preferences and the way that you work most efficiently is universal when it is clearly not. Again, you are free to conduct yourself in this fashion but it won't make you many friends.

Not OP, but if I were to guess, the "arrogant" part is the sentiment you express here combined a little bit of what comes off as "talking down" in how you argue to support it.

> You gave a bunch of good examples of people being bad communicators in your reply, so I feel like you agree with me on that?

Many of the examples of "bad communicators" were showing how written communication can work around some of those flaws.

Good communication is hard, and it involves not assuming that your preferred/standard methods are the best in every context. You have to be willing to adapt based on who you are communicating with and what you are discussing. If someone is barely literate, written won't work well except for pretty simple things. If hearing, (or quality connectivity, social anxiety etc.) are an issue then you'll struggle using just verbal.

It also isn't always just one or the other. One person I work with really struggles with expressing ideas clearly in the written form, yet also struggles with understanding complex ideas if he doesn't have a written reference. Neither one of those issues is very uncommon in my experience.

While I'll agree that verbal does serve a large role (probably largest in this specific context/scale), I don't agree with you apparent suggestion that it should be the default / universal method nor that other preferences / needs are invalid.

If the choice for me is going to be spending 5 minutes to help you debug something over screenshare where I can actually look at what's happening and get backtraces, context, poke at things , or it's going to be 10+ messages over an hour and a half, then I think the screenshare is going to be better for the team most of the time, EVEN IF in a vacuum i prefer text-based communication.

When I ask for help I try to be the one doing most of the work, at the very least describing the problem accurately, and not forcing others to solve it on my terms.

There are reasons to go on a call but to default to a call IMO is an expression of the dynamic above.

I agree. When someone asks for help, I want to give them my undivided attention so we can get the stuff worked out immediately instead of having split attention so I'm not helping you as effectively and I'm not able to focus on my work. I want to sort it with a call because it's MUCH faster. Let me call you so I can return my full attention to my own shit.

I find it interesting that something measurable like this feels (not saying it is) like an opinion.

It's my opinion (maybe because I'm a semi-effective text communicator?) that handling it "async" on chat is more often than not quicker. Maybe I'm wrong/biased? I wonder how something like this is measured. It does feel like people who want to not accept calls are in the minority based on my experience/the response this is getting.

I'm sure there are times when it is better, and times when it isn't. I generally find that if a question is REALLY simple, then async is fine. Eg:

Q: What's the IP for the bumblefraxx gateway again?

A: 10.0.14.233

Ok, sure. Done, handled in a few seconds. But for anything that goes beyond about 2 Q/A "cycles", I generally find that a call is faster, because I can figure things out a lot faster when I can see all of the relevant details myself. Eg:

Q: The bumblefraxx gateway isn't working, can you help?

A: Did you make sure the IP is right?

Q: Yeah. Do you think the frozgibbit might be wedged?

A: ...

15 minutes later

Let's have a call so I can see this myself

/me looks at screen. Notices some trivial typo in config for bumblefraxx gateway. Problem fixed in 15 minutes and 15 seconds, when it could have been 15 seconds

I say 'no' to random requests for calls every single time, I'm sure I'm not alone.

Imo when you go with async communication you pay the cost of that context switch over and over, with interest.

For one, calls don’t result in a searchable log. If I remember I talked to someone about Foo, I can search for that in my Slack history. If someone else asks me the same question about Foo, I can just send them a screenshot from our earlier conversation and we’re done. I can also talk to 4 different people about four different issues at the same time in chat, but I can only be in a single call at a time.

Yeah but search in Slack and MS Teams both suck IME. The idea of what you're talking about makes sense and I'm sure it works out for somebody sometime or other. But I haven't found having that history particularly useful.

* Even if I can't remember the exact phrasing I used for something, I often remember the person I discussed it with and just check my DMs or threads with them.

* Half of my responses to "help me" questions include links to repos in files. So I search for the last time I typed out three paragraphs talking about a a given link and that works pretty well.

The other situation "type it out" is useful is when I think a particular problem is likely to be encountered by multiple people and essentially force someone to ask the question in a public channel so I can answer it there and everyone can see it (we have channels like and #new-eng-questions for this). Even if people don't find it via search, there are enough people checking the recent history of these channels that it's a useful exercise.

Agreed. Assuming it's the kind of question that's amenable to being answered in text-exchange format in the first place. I've gotten plenty of Teams / Slack messages where my response was "Can you ask this in the public team chat, so everybody can see it?" for that exact reason. That and it also opens up the pool of people who can potentially answer the question to more than just me, which is also a Good Thing.

But there are still plenty of questions where it quickly becomes apparent that having a call with screen-sharing and everything is going to be a much more efficient way of solving the problem at hand.

I don't just offer to have a call when someone says "Hey I need help"

My approach is to have them write out the issue in text, and say what they've tried. Then I judge the urgency and if it's a barn burner I get on a call immediately. If it's a Junior blocked on something that I think they can solve I will tell them we can have a call in a half hour or something and very often they do solve it on their own.

Essentially I use the async communication methods as the gatekeeper to prioritize the incoming requests for my time, but when I do give people my time it's on a call so I can give them my full attention.

Self improvers are the ones reading Hacker News, going to conferences, and generally trying to hone their skill.

Dark matter developers are a class I've shamelessly stolen from https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un... - which is definitely worth a read for the context, but the gist is that they're in this as a 9-to-5.

The trouble comes where the two groups meet. We can all learn about how to ask better questions and more generally improve our communication skills, but it's vastly more difficult to _make someone care_ to do so. We've all seen and empathized with https://www.nohello.com/, but if you link it to a dark matter coworker who behaves exactly this way, chances are they will see it as an attack, not as a recommendation - and that attack reflects poorly on you, rather than on them.

I've had a lot of luck with "Hey, I appreciate that you always ask how I am when you're reaching out to me, but when you need something from me you can just ask upfront. You don't need to say Hi and wait for me to reply before asking. That way I don't keep you waiting and I can answer you as soon as I see your message"

You don't have to tell them that you actually want to prioritize them based on their question, and absolutely will keep them waiting if you don't think it's urgent.

So dark matter developers then are the most important kind of developer: doing the vital work that keeps the company going but which nobody else sees because they're just doing the job properly.

And then of course their are the flashy visible developers who want everyone to know and see that they're working, because ultimately what they do doesn't really matter even though it may generate a lot of flash and noise.

It has happened plenty of times that I had a simple question during my research, and the other person very helpfully decided to help me solve the problem, instead of just answering. The result is always that it takes hours of both of our times to get little done, and the problem actually gets solved afterwards because the research was not all done yet.

I think he just wanted shit to stick on his calendar for the sake of having a (more than) full calendar, which I'm guessing he found useful for advancement or deflecting criticism. Given some of the other stuff he did and said I think an awful lot of his behavior was one kind of career-hack or another.

To talk with "foreign" team, you have to figure out if they are teams / meeting driven, slack driven, use webex, only reachable via email, have their own weird thing, ignore everything that doesn't come through a manager, or only respond to service now tickets, or require a ticket AND and followup (via one of the above methods) to get them to look at the ticket.

Figuring out how to talk to all the different people you need to takes several months and a lot of people leave before working it out.

If you stay long enough you end up with an informal network of people in the company you know and trust and work with them to get anything done. Often these are helpful ICs working around non-responsive management.

Even for devs who didn't have a lot of external meetings it was a pain because the executive leadership is basically just undercutting the authtority of managers. When I was there Shopify's middle management was extremely ineffectual because devs basically had free reign and executives didn't put any effort into top-down management, they just focused on "vision" (like joining the doomed Facebook crypto project, or hiring interns based on their esports experience)

I never worked under Tobi directly (or even close), but I was almost always thoroughly impressed with his communication and direction. I think I have a totally different take than the one you stated. The only axis I could see Elon & Tobi both sitting on is being members of the tres comas club.

Your experience reminds me of the saying, sometimes "the best people to work WITH are the worst people to work FOR".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaOSCASqLsE

Kylo Ren as Matt: "He said Kylo Ren has an 8-pack. That Kylo Ren is shredded."

I've worked on projects within the last year that had (pretty heavy) direct involvement from Tobi.

/s

https://writingexplained.org/free-rein-or-free-reign-differe...

The reason I speculate this may be better is that it respects the agency of employees more, isn't such a shock to the system, and allows a buffer time to correct serious issues such as those mentioned in the top level comment.