Comment by stonethrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stonethrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of the “politicizing” of WFH vs. RTO mandates, I think the internet sphere of people that grew up on being able to communicate and absorb a tremendous amount of information through text mediums like BBS, IRC and the messaging platforms of old have a lot of lessons and wisdom to share here, but it will be a hard uphill climb to sell a proper semiasynchronous text-based communication pattern to people.

I bring this up because it’s the elephant in the room that nearly every open source team out there inherently knows, but that people in general do not want to discuss because it is to the greater population an alien subject matter. My own bias of course is I often do not want to watch videos or listen to podcasts. They are slow, give me a transcript and let me run through it in my own way to process the information in a non-linear/chronological format.

I’ve heard over many years now a kind of defeated attitude about it. Sometimes it’s things like “I can’t read emotions through text” to which I would honestly ask if the person ever read a novel and can say that with a straight face, but some of it is to do with people being comfortable with a particular medium and, maybe, being unwilling to adapt. Regardless, the internet in and of itself has had a tremendous impact which will far outweigh any particular (maybe flimsy) stance on peoples preferences when applied to market conditions/expectations. Companies that adopt the nature, constraints and perks of the internet will inherently do better than those that don’t.

I couldn't agree more. Having grown up on IRC, forums, and eventually voice chat, I have no problem with "forging meaningful relationships" while working together in a text-based online world.

That said, I think it's a challenge for people who didn't exist in that space from a young age and figure out the patterns that make it manageable.

The sad thing is that these are probably easy things to learn, but there's no real movement to try and teach them. Instead, we try to replace our amazing battle-tested text-based tools with crappy multimedia substitutes.

It's definitely good to jump on a call sometimes, but I'd much rather have an in-depth technical discussion via writing. History is full of brilliant written correspondence between legendary figures in art, science, engineering, and business—but somehow we've decided that letters are not good enough for us.

The exception that proves the rule is Amazon, who apparently require written content to be submitted and read prior to in-person meetings in order to improve the discussion.

Your mention of novels and emotion is a false equivalence because novels are richly authored, edited and long form.

We have an entire generation of people who grew up on short form text as their primary way to communicate electronically. In many cases they won’t even bother to read even a couple of paragraphs.

In a work setting, all the shorthand slang and emoji/meme based communication is unprofessional and in my experience many people actively remove emotion from their slack messages. We strive to be neutral and objective because slack messages are monitored and forever.

As much as I hate to say it, I am not completely opposed to some form of limited RTO because Zoom and Slack simply are not enough to get context in many environments, even if you are added to every thread and meeting.

>In a work setting, all the shorthand slang and emoji/meme based communication is unprofessional

Perhaps that's the problem? Texting pretty much killed phone calls, everybody has learned to communicate over text.

> Your mention of novels and emotion is a false equivalence because novels are richly authored, edited and long form.

It is not a false equivalence but rather a statement that there isn’t anything inherent about text that makes it devoid of emotional quality.

For people who aren’t reading between the lines: we need to get better at writing. My over all point is, in large part, about that. That the denizens of internet who have been around for decades already possess this skill because they have, I would hope, successfully applied it and shipped (in my example) open source software as a distributed text based communication team.

Most people I work with don't have those skilled writing that comes with open source involvement. Things like Release notes, releasing and versioning are often handled in a very sloppy way. They throw over some software or hardware and then they make some calls about how it is supposed to be used, forgetting to communicate all the caveats... Yeah you first need to set that jumper, wait 5 seconds and start the app... kind of communication.

I'd argue that effective written communication is a skill that can be learned and taught, and a best practice that can be enforced, rather than an innate property of a given human being.

If you can write code, you can create documents that include all the necessary details for a handover—without needing to be a brilliant writer—as long as you're aware that you're required to do so.

old fashioned systems really shine for functionality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter

To be fair writing a novel is an art. A lot of people struggle with communicating emotions over text.

So is verbal communication, whether poetry readings, speeches, presentations, or even just skilled conversation.

The problem is that if an employee's job involves giving presentations, they'll likely be explicitly trained on it and given additional tips of they're struggling. Most offices haven't established a training process for written communications - even emails, guidance is often "Do it right. No, not like that, right, like this."

Ironically, the worst offenders are often the most "technical" people. It's like the old "comments bad, code should be self-documenting" BS. No, code is written for people, and software is written for people. Technology will always eventually bump up against its social and human context.

To be effective, you need to be skilled at both the code AND the written word, because these are all vehicles which are ultimately used to communicate with other human beings. Just like it's a myth that you can get into software in order to avoid dealing with those pesky human beings. Truly effective people understand their weak points and work on them; they don't pick a job that they think will enable them to run away from them and avoid them.

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