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Comment by pts_ | Hacker News Reader

> there's no substitute for the high-bandwidth, low-latency medium of personal communication.

Only for people who can't read.

Tone is notoriously hard to communicate in written form. Body language is never conveyed. Intonation is non-existent. At best you get some word choice signaling, but while I think low latency may be over-rated in the "catalogue" above, high-bandwidth is exactly the point vs reading an email/slack/etc.

If you seriously think written text is as communicative as face to face communication, I would consider being evaluated by a professional for a social interaction disorder of some sort.

What you are saying is that written communication is also a lot less noisy.

Of course, you could learn to write better and convey the same information over text.

It’s only noisy if you don’t know what you’re looking at. Watch a professional poker game sometime and you’ll see the lengths people go to avoid non-verbally communicating the strength of their hand. Table talk is completely casual up until someone is involved in a monster hand and suddenly they go catatonic.

Of course there’s still noise. Just like in text. Professional writers struggle just as hard to get their word choice and phrasing -just so-.

For someone with autism (raises hand) body language might not be well conveyed anyway, or gets misinterpreted.

I'm looking forward to AR/VR taking over more cake of the need for physical needs.

There is a huge difference between a conversation over text and a conversation over the phone. And even bigger difference to a conversation in person.

Non-verbal communication is a huge part of social (and this includes work) interactions.

We're working on an always-on voice chat tool for remote teams addressing your point around text v. voice. Testing a private alpha if you want to try it out- https://www.presence.so

Hence my point.

I think you're trying to say that written communication is more efficient, but your responses here just read like "No" without any supporting argument.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latency_(engineering)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_(computing)

Here's some information on terms you're clearly unfamiliar with that I used in the part you quoted. In the future I suggest you try and understand the words you're reading _before_ making a fool of yourself, but you do you. Hope that helps!

Have you never spent a few hours (or even days) on a back and forth over email, only to solve things in two minutes by giving the person a call? Spoken communication is way more efficient for certain things

For certain things, yes. For other things, no. For instance, I find "all hands" meetings at work to be a complete waste of time, except maybe for the possibility of socializing or getting a free lunch. I could learn everything I need to know from these meetings in a few minutes just by reading an email, instead of wasting an hour of my time listening to bosses drone on and on about stuff or show photos of their families and dogs.

Basically, I think the key is latency. If you need to communicate two-way to work out issues, then you want low latency (because each response of yours depends on the other party's last response), so speech is quickest. (There's also texting, but that sucks because the data entry method is so slow; I don't know why so many people prefer it to talking, even for conducting intimate relationships.) However, if the communication is one-way (like your company disseminating some general information for all employees), then at least for me, reading is much, much faster than listening to someone talk.

I WFH all the time. I was able to design the product that our company now sells, write the initial code, hire the team that built it and sometimes manage some of them, all remotely. I dunno, the things I read about WFH imply that shouldn't have been possible but it was.

I find almost all meetings to be a waste of time. Maybe 1:1s are the exception, but they're also pretty much optional - good to have a catch up with team members sometimes but if someone can't make it that day no big deal.

The problem with meetings is that a well run meeting needs to have an agenda and ideally written minutes, I don't think anyone disputes that (except for casual 1:1 catch-ups which don't). So you end up writing anyway, or wish someone had. Without the writing aspect meetings are often poorly disciplined, achieve little, run over and end with an agreement to organise another meeting.

In the end, work - the production of useful artifacts customers will buy - gets done alone. It doesn't get done in meetings with colleagues.

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