Absolutely agree. For some reason, empathy seems to be above average lacking in successful people, so they struggle to understand that what works for _them_ will not work for _everyone_.

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.

> I think we'd all do well to be more understanding and empathetic about the fact that different people are comfortable with different ways of communicating

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 was giving you the benefit of the doubt in the previous reply but this is so arrogant it's quite silly. If you want to force your preferences on others be my guest but don't be surprised when some people respond negatively. Verbal communication is often imprecise and vague. I can't count the number of times I've had to write up a detailed summary of a meeting to ensure that two different stakeholders didn't just take away what they wanted to hear from the conversation. There have been many times where having a paper trail of my conversations has me allowed to prove that, yes, I did indeed inform so and so about that problem weeks ago. There are also many people, myself included, who have difficulty processing and producing spoken language (either through speech and hearing impairments or ASD or any number of other conditions). Your preference is just that, a preference, not a universal truth.

I'm really curious what part of my previous post you are taking so much issue with that you're calling me arrogant for it. I don't feel like I said anything terribly controversial. Are you angry that I suggested that many people are actually not very good communicators? 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?

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.

Verbal communication may be the default option but there is a reason we often defer to (carefully constructed) written communication in complex domains. While emotional nuances may be clearer (to some) in verbal communication, the details of complex ideas often are not. Have you ever tried to "talk code" at someone without the aid of written code? It's woefully inefficient and prone to miscommunication. Writing allows you to externalize state and forces you to make explicit unstated assumptions that may simply go uncommunicated in verbal exchanges. Indeed, in your examples, the screen share on which the code can be read by both parties seems to be doing most of the clarifying work, that is, you are cheating and using written communication anyway.

>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.

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

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.

Between turnover and tech debt, a lot of our job is communicating with the future, not just with the peers we happen to have today.

This is definitely true, but I think there's a clear time-commitment component to it that you're missing in GP's answer: "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"

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.

I agree. IMHO It is "easier" for the person asking to go on a call because the effort will be offloaded to the person being interrupted, whereas if the person at least tries to explain it properly in written form, they are the ones making the effort.

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.