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Comment by nnq | Hacker News Reader

> this manifesto seems built around the idea of minimizing communication

Of course, because communication is expensive (as in time wasted, brainpower wasted, decreased focusing-ability etc.). But I think they get it wrong with meetings: A few time boxed stand-up meetings are great instead of "full-time IM-ing" for distributed teams or "anytime possible interruptions for collocation ones.

I think the OP dreams of an "interrupt-less" work-mode, as opposed to the "interrupt-driven" ones most of us have now. In this view, rigorously time-boxing communication would serve the purpose better than avoiding all meetings.

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In my experience, lack of communication is way more expensive. But I don't think the manifesto was about minimizing communication, I think it was about minimizing synchronous communication. Issues and comments and emails and chat are all asynchronous - people can ignore them until they have time to deal with them - whereas in-person conversations and meetings and phone calls are synchronous.

I think synchronous communication is incredibly important for big-picture items - here is what we're building, here is what we think it should look like, here is how we think it should generally work - and often necessary for working through tricky problems (pair-programming is a great example of this), but that asynchronous is better for pretty much everything in between.

I once saw some meta-advice, that for almost all advice, there's people who need to hear it, and people who need to hear the exact opposite. I suspect that applies here; some teams communicate too much, others communicate too little.

(The original example I heard of for this is that people are usually advised to be less selfish, but some people have heard that messages so much that they think it's never ok to do things for themselves. If you're more selfish than you want to be, advising people to be more selfish sounds evil. If you're so unselfish that it's hurting you, advice to be less selfish might seem kind of unnecessary. So when advice to do more or less of something seems like bad advice, sometimes it's just because you're not the target audience.)

Cool, I like that. It reminds me of the tension I've felt between two oft-cited phenomena: the Dunning-Kruger effect and impostor syndrome.

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