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Comment by i_love_retros | Hacker News Reader

Also if your preferred method of non urgent communication is message based such as slack, good luck in an enterprise.

Sure you'll get messages, but every one will be "quick call?"

A “quick call” usually means a re-org or a layoff in my experience.

I once had a boss who used to day, “got a second” every time he was pulling someone out to lay them off. He said it to me once and my stomach dropped… turned out he was just giving me my review. I told him to never say that to me again. He had no idea the entire team picked up on that phrase and it had a reputation.

If it is a higher up, someone I am actively working with, or someone I know well, then I take the "quick call". Otherwise, I push back and ask them to write out their question somehow.

This ends up a few outcomes, usually positive:

  - They give up (pretty common)
  - Writing it down helps them to answer the question themselves
  - I can directly answer with a response or link to the relevant docs
  - We have an actual agenda for the meeting they want to have

I do this in a startup. Mostly when we have an ongoing conversation and it gets too tedious to explain something elaborate in text, when we could just talk it over and maybe share the screen or look at something together.

I get the text-based communication preference, but I’ll stand by calls being far more efficient sometimes.

I generally like text even if it might take slightly longer to communicate, as it can then be referred back to later easily, and often the mental effort and time required to put it into words in the first place often means you have a clearer mental model of what you're trying to convey in the first place.

One thing I've seen work well is to write up the conclusions of the call, then ask the other person or people in it to review/edit.

That way, you get the benefits of higher bandwidth on the back and forth getting to those conclusions and then still get most or all of the benefits of written communication that you mention.

It sucks when your communication preferences are overridden! To be fair though, many valid reasons to prefer a quick call over a message (a potentially infinite sequence of messages, really). Even on the receiving end of a request: perhaps I want to poke around the context behind their non-urgent ask, like what they are _actually_ trying to achieve, why not do X instead etc. -- often easier to call and solve all the follow-up questions interactively on the spot.

I understand that async communications has some benefits, but I am continually flabbergasted that instead of weighing async & sync comms suitability for different situations, we've landed in a place where everyone is terrified to make or receive a phone call.

People adopt the communication style of others. If the “quick call?” method is common, it means that many of its users don’t want their communications logged, meaning they commonly ask for sketchy stuff. Act accordingly; i.e. always send a follow-up email summarizing what they asked you to do, and give them the opportunity to change their tune.

>If the “quick call?” method is common, it means that many of its users don’t want their communications logged, meaning they commonly ask for sketchy stuff.

In my experience, the reason for most "quick calls" isn't quite this nefarious. It's usually just about making a request for which the asker wants immediate confirmation of handoff, and/or for which they haven't done much thinking or built a good justification, and they are proficient at controlling synchronous conversations to avoid questions and clarifications while still getting to yes.

/cynicism And, there are plenty of people out there who genuinely do prefer the personal touch and talking to others.

The cynic view is so true. Quick calls are so often made to not have to meddle with actual requirements, and indeed to have the freedom to change the requirements in a future "quick call".

I mean conversely you will absolutely get advised by lawyers to not use email for discussions about things which might be litigated. But this happens at any scale: it's evergreen advice.

Agreed. I've seen multiple large enterprises where messaging was common (perhaps with a bit more emphasis on emails than normal) and calls were not. It's not an inevitable consequence of scale.

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