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Comment by scottndecker | Hacker News Reader

The first four points are summarized in "Email is better than verbal communication." While email definitely has advantages, there are tons of downsides of having to rely on written communication. It's slower, you don't get the non-verbals, it's easy to misinterpret, you form less of a bond with the person on the other end, etc.

The last three points are much better (though I can't attest if they're true or not).

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> there are tons of downsides of having to rely on written communication

At the company I work for we use a combination of Slack and some video/voice tool (speak.io, hangouts, joinme, uberconf, teamspeak, etc. - we've used all of them) for any complex communication. Email is 100% external (customer) communication.

> It's slower, you don't get the non-verbals, it's easy to misinterpret, you form less of a bond with the person on the other end, etc

While I don't think forming a bond with a co-worker is at all important you can supplement this with quarterly "work weeks" where everyone is in the same place working together 4-5 times per year. Also, I have to disagree that it's slower. Face to face communication often leads to wheel spinning and shooting the shit. Hardly anything gets done. Remote work is defined by communication, so it's much faster, and more effective.

I agree with you. My experience with remote work has been touch-and-go, but it always helps when team members are mutually willing to communicate over the phone. Effective back-and-forth over email seems to be a rare skill. No matter how much time you put into refining a message, it is only ever one piece of a conversation. If there is more to say than just "Do this," or "I have done that"—if you need a back-and-forth—all email does is stretch the dialogue out. Answers come more slowly, and often as incompletely. And, as you say, tone is very hard to get right over email. I'm sure I've read at least a couple articles on HN about the tendency to read aggressiveness into concise emails.

Email is simply not a conversation medium, and rarely even a discussion medium. It's a medium mostly useful to propagate information and meeting requests (where discussion happens).

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