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Comment by n3storm | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. The reason is that some people is not educated in async or just lazy. It takes just one person that refuses to go async to make everybody use video. I heard it thousand of times: "let me call you cause I explain better by phone" No, you don't. You just use many resources to keep conversation going until you find terms and produce proper phrases. You could perfectly have elaborated this by your own and wrote it down in an email or chat group.

Sorry this was deep inside me and had to come out :D

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I have the exact opposite observation: In my company developers/engineers over use chat (in this case Slack) and email compared to other groups which causes unnecessarily long discussions. It's great that it's async, it works very well for simple factual information, but it doesn't work for topics where not everyone agrees. Those drag out over time, and cause a lot of misunderstandings, while a short standup meeting or video call would have solved it in less time.

And simple factual information belongs in good documentation, not being asked in Slack as a crutch and then claim "but it's searchable"

I’m not sure I’d call Slack async, it’s somewhere between async and slow synchronous. There’s a cultural expectation in many places that you respond to Slack messages ASAP that I’ve never experienced using email.

That's only for single message info-dumps or single query-response. If I need to tell you something, it will save your time if I distill it. But note that it may be more efficient overall to do it by voice, or maybe my time actually is more valuable than your time. (or vice versa).

If we're doing it interactively, I can verify your comprehension and limit my need to elaborate, saving us both time.

And if we need back-and-forth collaboration, interactive is likely to be much better than multiple interruptions and context switches.

My general rule is, if it's going to be more than 2 back-and-forth exchanges, do a voice call.

And waiting while someone types a response is pure waste.

One important factor that this statement doesn't take into account is that you can only approximate understanding what the other person is going to understand when they read what you expressed. This becomes harder when it's more than one person receiving the message.

I can sympathize with this take. Although I'm generally fine with either async or sync--whichever is most efficient--it seems that individuals don't usually know which is right for them.

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