Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

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>When it works, it's a great experience. However, async communication isn't appropriate for every situation, as the article admits. Some times, the most efficient way forward is to schedule a call where all parties can work out the solution in 15 minutes of real-time conversation rather than 3 days of back-and-forth e-mails.

I always hated "15 minutes of real-time conversation", not because of being an introvert or anything, but because it's fuzzy, nobody remembers what it was exactly said, and usually ends up with people wasting each others time (like Diltert-style meetings).

I'd much rather people knew how to communicate effectively on chat.

But people don't, so you get messages like:

"The service is broken!"

"[panicked] What do you mean? Is it down?"

"It doesn't show anything"

[still panicked] Really? Let me see... Hmm, I see it working properly, loaded the first page and everything. What do you see?"

"I don't see anything"

"[???] On the first page? On some specific panel? Have you entered something?"

"Entered? I clicked and got nothing"

... and after 20 more minutes you realize they are on the third tab of a particular page, which nobody ever uses, have entered some search term people seldom enter, and got no results there, and everything else is working fine...

"I always hated "15 minutes of real-time conversation", not because of being an introvert or anything, but because it's fuzzy, nobody remembers what it was exactly said, and usually ends up with people wasting each others time (like Diltert-style meetings)."

I'd say the solution is to attack those problems directly.

There are some things that just work poorly asynchronously. I find heavy-duty explanations of something, where you need the highly-interactive back-and-forth is necessary, and honestly, even just trying to type something is wasting minutes vs. saying it, is a common use case for me. Getting 4 half-distracted managers who are lobbing emails at each other into a quick conference to resolve the matter is sometimes a really good idea, too, because the "lobbing emails at each other" is a political minefield. A lot of potential for hurt feelings and miscommunication that can be avoided just getting everyone in live voice chat, with their full attention, for even just 5 minutes sometimes.

4 managers to one dev is a ratio that warrants a very quick change of jobs.

No, I mean, some sort of cross-team functionality where you need broad agreement, not four managers all trying to manage literally the same thing.

I probably do more cross-team stuff than the average dev, but in anything beyond a trivially-sized organization, managers are doing it all the time.

> I'd much rather people knew how to communicate effectively on chat.

> But people don't, so you get messages like:

So what you're saying is that you don't actually mind the 15 minutes of real-time chat, what you mind is that some people don't know how to effectively communicate.

I actually enjoy real-time meetings, as long as a few conditions are met:

1. A concise, realistic agenda is distributed to all attendees beforehand, and actually followed 2. A single person takes concise notes, with a heavy focus on action items and official decisions; the notes are distributed promptly at the end of the meeting (or better yet, real-time via a shared document) 3. Each action item is given a single assignee and realistic deadline

Your chat example seems like it could be solved with a 5-minute screenshare.

This is one of those cases where a picture is worth a thousand words. It's amazing to me sometimes how many support requests I get where there is no information about what is wrong, no screenshots, no log files, not even a couple sentences about what they were trying to do and what they expected to happen.

Although it's almost worse when they send along a JPEG screenshot that has been downsampled >50%, so all the details are too blurred to make out.

It's especially frustrating when you're dealing with timezone shifts that make the average time to get a round-trip email reply from the other person take a dozen hours or more

"Hi"

[says they're typing, work on something while I wait]

[6 minute pause]

"Are you there?"

"Yes"

"I'm getting an error when using [tool]"

"What's the error?"

[2 vague barely related lines in a long error message or traceback]

"Could you show me the full error message and the command you tried to run, please?"

By the time the full troubleshooting process is over (which usually amounts to "follow the instructions in the error message"), I've lost track of whatever I was doing and wasted who knows how much time.

This is the thesis of http://www.nohello.com/

Better to figure that out in a 15-minute sync up than to get a pager duty alert from a Blocker level ticket that your "service is broken"

I think the chat in this example still basically counts as synchronous, and the issue is more to do with people being poor at organizing their ideas in text vs. spoken conversation.

Truly asynchronous communication would force them to put their whole thought down on paper at once and perhaps organize it better, or at least allow you to skim. But then of course, async is poor for time sensitive issues anyway.

Many years ago, I did some volunteer work at a homeless shelter. The second highest person there was not tech savvy but had to fill out a lot of their paperwork.

She once thought she had "lost" her entire spreadsheet because she scrolled too far down to a blank section of the spreadsheet.

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