I'm one of those people who almost always wants to immediately get on a call to solve a problem rather than typing it out. I get that it's tiring being on calls all the time but it's also much more effective to have a call for most types of work conversations, even as a software dev.
Here's the way I look at it.
If you are asking me a question where my reply isn't time sensitive, and it doesn't need to turn into a conversation about my answer, that doesn't need to be a call.
If you just want a status update on XYZ from me, which may be a short conversation, that probably does not need to be a call.
If you want my help with just about anything code related, that's a call. Screensharing is way easier for me to see what you are talking about, and it's much easier for us to be on the same page if we're both looking at the same thing.
It's also a massive peeve of mine when someone asks a question on messaging, refuses to have a call, and then proceeds to take forever getting back to me. It's one thing it I say something like "Try this, this, and this. Let me know what works" and then I can get back to my work.
But if I'm trying to step you through something and you sometimes reply immediately, sometimes in 5 minutes, sometimes in a half hour, then you get to have calls whenever you want my help from then on
I understand what you're saying, but for many of us, the threshold is much higher for a call.
I tend to, and I know I'm not alone here, accomplish most of my work in very focused blocks that often take me multiple hours to get into. Often I'll go a whole work day without being able to get there, and often when I'm in the flow, I'll work 12+ hours because that's how I'm most productive.
Your 5 minute call may cost me 3-6 hours of productivity. Once I've pulled my head out of what I'm working on, it's not a given that I can jump right back in. Sometimes that's worth it. It's possible not having that call may cost you 3 hours of productivity. But because some people have different work styles, people who focus easily (or are working on easier problems) often don't think of the costs for those who don't.
I’m having trouble following. Presumably the person you’re interrupting is also doing serious-business-focus work.
First off, since you’re the one interrupting them, common courtesy suggests you should try to accommodate their communication preferences.
Second, that five minute call is saving you 45m of text back-and-forth, which lets you get back to focusing faster. Not to mention saving the helper frustration, if you’re regularly leaving five minute gaps between replies.
And not even getting into the pernicious effects of having a culture where pseudo-synchronous instant messaging is broadly preferred over synchronous calls. In such cultures, all communication is so inefficient that everyone is in several conversations at all times; good luck ever achieving focus in that environment. There’s a reason why Cal Newport hates Slack, and he literally wrote the book on focused work.
Haven’t had that problem with calls. People have had to learn how to politely end conversations probably about as long as we’ve been using language. Once you learn that, the calls don’t drag.
On the other hand, if a call takes five, ten, fifteen minutes for good reason, it would have been hours or even days of messages. How many times have you spent ten minutes helping fix a newbie’s dev environment, and afterward they say “wow, thanks, I’ve been stuck all morning”?
And those calls aren’t rare! Knowing how (and when) to use calls over messages has been one of the most useful “soft skills” in my career toolkit.
I read the grandparent differently than you and nightpool.
I read the first two paragraphs as general policy, and then the following lines as specific cases. To come to the interpretation you guys had, you have to assume that the fifth paragraph supersedes the first. It's possible that's how the author meant it, but that's not obvious. The first paragraph implies virtually always preferring calling, independent of which direction the help is flowing.
Addendum:
I don't love Slack, but my company is small, and the number of messages per day is in the 10s. Nevertheless, I have notifications disabled for all messengers, because I also find them interrupting. I only see messages when I'm switching windows anyway. I have the same on my phone: I only have visual notifications. I disable sounds and vibrate. When I'm either being particularly productive, or particularly struggling to focus, I close all communications apps.
Okay, but in this situation you are the one that asked them for help with your code. There's no "interrupted productivity" here if you're already blocked and waiting for advice or help with something. And besides, if you spend 3-6 hours working on completely the wrong thing because you were "in the zone" and that misunderstanding could have been resolved with a 5 minute call, then the 5 minute call is worth it every single time.
The person you're replying to said "If you want my help with just about anything code related, that's a call. Screensharing is way easier for me to see what you are talking about, and it's much easier for us to be on the same page if we're both looking at the same thing."
I think that's an entirely reasonable position. How does this depend on "If both people are working on the same thing"? If I'm trying to help you debug something, and it feels like pulling teeth when I know I could solve your problem with a 5 minute screen-share, I'm probably going to choose the 5-minute screenshare over the hour-and-a-half of 10 different messages spread out over random intervals. The GP said the exact same thing:
It's also a massive peeve of mine when someone asks a question on messaging, refuses to have a call, and then proceeds to take forever getting back to me. It's one thing [if] I say something like "Try this, this, and this. Let me know what works" and then I can get back to my work.
But if I'm trying to step you through something and you sometimes reply immediately, sometimes in 5 minutes, sometimes in a half hour, then you get to have calls whenever you want my help from then on.
I really think "more effective" and "easier" are about communication styles and personality, not incontrovertible truths. I completely believe that to you it's much easier to handle these things on a call. Please believe that for me it's much easier to handle in a written format. Neither of these styles or preferences are wrong, and I reject the premise that either is better or worse. They're just DIFFERENT and people with a given preference proclaiming that it's THE easy way, or _the_ right way, is the source of a lot of conflict. I think we'd all do well to be more understanding and empathetic about the fact that different people are comfortable with different ways of communicating, and both sides (in reality there are many more than two sides) should try to meet each other in the middle more often.
> I think we'd all do well to be more understanding and empathetic about the fact that different people are comfortable with different ways of communicating
This isn't about being comfortable it's about communicating clearly and effectively.
Some (Many?) people are just not good communicators regardless of the medium. However we learn to communicate verbally long before we learn to write, and most people communicate verbally in almost 100% of the interactions in their lives.
Additionally we first learn to talk about things with a lot of visual association. We use the shared ability to point at a visible thing and understand this is what we are talking about. You can even use this to communicate crudely with people who don't speak or read any language that you do.
Beyond all of that, writing clearly and reading comprehension are both additional skills that are needed for good written communication to occur, and all parties involved in the conversation need to have both of those skills to make it an effective communication style.
Given all of that, I'd say that if good communication is your goal, and it should be, then defaulting to verbal communication with a shared context (screen sharing or in-person or something else) is realistically likely to be better than written communication in almost all cases.
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt in the previous reply but this is so arrogant it's quite silly. If you want to force your preferences on others be my guest but don't be surprised when some people respond negatively. Verbal communication is often imprecise and vague. I can't count the number of times I've had to write up a detailed summary of a meeting to ensure that two different stakeholders didn't just take away what they wanted to hear from the conversation. There have been many times where having a paper trail of my conversations has me allowed to prove that, yes, I did indeed inform so and so about that problem weeks ago. There are also many people, myself included, who have difficulty processing and producing spoken language (either through speech and hearing impairments or ASD or any number of other conditions). Your preference is just that, a preference, not a universal truth.
I'm really curious what part of my previous post you are taking so much issue with that you're calling me arrogant for it. I don't feel like I said anything terribly controversial. Are you angry that I suggested that many people are actually not very good communicators? You gave a bunch of good examples of people being bad communicators in your reply, so I feel like you agree with me on that?
I said most people learn to speak before they learn to write. Is that untrue?
How about the idea that you can communicate (crudely, sure) with gestures even with people you don't share a common language with?
How about the idea that both writing comprehensively and reading comprehension are high level skills that many people don't possess enough to truly communicate effectively via writing? Do you disagree?
I don't think it's unfair to say that verbal communication is a cornerstone of the (near) universal human experience.
This isn't just "my preference" is what I'm getting at. I'm pretty sure it's just the human default.
> This isn't just "my preference" is what I'm getting at. I'm pretty sure it's just the human default.
Not OP, but if I were to guess, the "arrogant" part is the sentiment you express here combined a little bit of what comes off as "talking down" in how you argue to support it.
> You gave a bunch of good examples of people being bad communicators in your reply, so I feel like you agree with me on that?
Many of the examples of "bad communicators" were showing how written communication can work around some of those flaws.
Good communication is hard, and it involves not assuming that your preferred/standard methods are the best in every context. You have to be willing to adapt based on who you are communicating with and what you are discussing. If someone is barely literate, written won't work well except for pretty simple things. If hearing, (or quality connectivity, social anxiety etc.) are an issue then you'll struggle using just verbal.
It also isn't always just one or the other. One person I work with really struggles with expressing ideas clearly in the written form, yet also struggles with understanding complex ideas if he doesn't have a written reference. Neither one of those issues is very uncommon in my experience.
While I'll agree that verbal does serve a large role (probably largest in this specific context/scale), I don't agree with you apparent suggestion that it should be the default / universal method nor that other preferences / needs are invalid.
Verbal communication may be the default option but there is a reason we often defer to (carefully constructed) written communication in complex domains. While emotional nuances may be clearer (to some) in verbal communication, the details of complex ideas often are not. Have you ever tried to "talk code" at someone without the aid of written code? It's woefully inefficient and prone to miscommunication. Writing allows you to externalize state and forces you to make explicit unstated assumptions that may simply go uncommunicated in verbal exchanges. Indeed, in your examples, the screen share on which the code can be read by both parties seems to be doing most of the clarifying work, that is, you are cheating and using written communication anyway.
>I said most people learn to speak before they learn to write. Is that untrue?
This is true but completely irrelevant. Most people also learn how to dance before they learn how to write, that does not mean interpretive dance is a suitable medium for conveying technical information.
>How about the idea that you can communicate (crudely, sure) with gestures even with people you don't share a common language with?
This is an edge case, and again, kind of cheating as you are attributing the benefits of visual aids to the verbal format. It does not provide any evidence that spoken communication is universally better.
>How about the idea that both writing comprehensively and reading comprehension are high level skills that many people don't possess enough to truly communicate effectively via writing? Do you disagree?
Reading comprehension and the ability to write cogently are basic skills of any knowledge work. I think people who are poor communicators are probably poor communicators regardless of medium, so this is a red herring. In general, the things you are saying are true to some extent but do not constitute an argument for verbal communication being universally better than written (your claim). Rather, even if I am charitable and ignore the clearly fallacious parts of your argument, at most you've shown that in some circumstances verbal communication has some advantages (a much weaker claim which does indeed seem rather uncontroversial).
>I don't think it's unfair to say that verbal communication is a cornerstone of the (near) universal human experience.
>This isn't just "my preference" is what I'm getting at. I'm pretty sure it's just the human default.
So, those of us with hearing problems or speech impediments are simply inhuman? This is the arrogance I was talking about. Your assumption that your preferences and the way that you work most efficiently is universal when it is clearly not. Again, you are free to conduct yourself in this fashion but it won't make you many friends.
Absolutely agree. For some reason, empathy seems to be above average lacking in successful people, so they struggle to understand that what works for _them_ will not work for _everyone_.
That's probably what happened here, and I see it so often: CEO can work best under pressure, can communicate best in a call, whatever: In an almost selfless gesture, they aim to produce these good (for them!) conditions for others.
And since they are unable to understand that this doesn't work for everybody else, they get (at least a bit) upset because the only remaining explanation is that those people don't _want_ to be productive, or don't _want_ to communicate effectively.
This is definitely true, but I think there's a clear time-commitment component to it that you're missing in GP's answer: "It's one thing it I say something like "Try this, this, and this. Let me know what works" and then I can get back to my work. But if I'm trying to step you through something and you sometimes reply immediately, sometimes in 5 minutes, sometimes in a half hour, then you get to have calls whenever you want my help from then on"
If the choice for me is going to be spending 5 minutes to help you debug something over screenshare where I can actually look at what's happening and get backtraces, context, poke at things , or it's going to be 10+ messages over an hour and a half, then I think the screenshare is going to be better for the team most of the time, EVEN IF in a vacuum i prefer text-based communication.
I agree. IMHO It is "easier" for the person asking to go on a call because the effort will be offloaded to the person being interrupted, whereas if the person at least tries to explain it properly in written form, they are the ones making the effort.
When I ask for help I try to be the one doing most of the work, at the very least describing the problem accurately, and not forcing others to solve it on my terms.
There are reasons to go on a call but to default to a call IMO is an expression of the dynamic above.
For one, calls don’t result in a searchable log. If I remember I talked to someone about Foo, I can search for that in my Slack history.
If someone else asks me the same question about Foo, I can just send them a screenshot from our earlier conversation and we’re done. I can also talk to 4 different people about four different issues at the same time in chat, but I can only be in a single call at a time.
I'm surprised more people aren't talking about this, I find it to be far and away the biggest reason for me to avoid calls. so many problems don't just happen once, and I find that the people who prefer to jump on calls are also the people who prefer not to write or share any documentation about what they know. I take notes often, but it's always easier to just have the logs available.
God, there's nothing worse than going back to find something I remember talking about in Slack and seeing the damn "call ended at..." thing right where I'm pretty sure it should be. Now let me go see if I took notes in some other program. OK even if I did I missed some stuff that would have been there if we'd just used the goddamn chat instead of having a call. Ugh.
Yeah but search in Slack and MS Teams both suck IME. The idea of what you're talking about makes sense and I'm sure it works out for somebody sometime or other. But I haven't found having that history particularly useful.
Disclaimer: I work at Slack. Yeah, search could be better sometimes. But for this particular problem, I personally find search useful in two contexts:
* Even if I can't remember the exact phrasing I used for something, I often remember the person I discussed it with and just check my DMs or threads with them.
* Half of my responses to "help me" questions include links to repos in files. So I search for the last time I typed out three paragraphs talking about a a given link and that works pretty well.
The other situation "type it out" is useful is when I think a particular problem is likely to be encountered by multiple people and essentially force someone to ask the question in a public channel so I can answer it there and everyone can see it (we have channels like and #new-eng-questions for this). Even if people don't find it via search, there are enough people checking the recent history of these channels that it's a useful exercise.
The other situation "type it out" is useful is when I think a particular problem is likely to be encountered by multiple people and essentially force someone to ask the question in a public channel so I can answer it there and everyone can see it
Agreed. Assuming it's the kind of question that's amenable to being answered in text-exchange format in the first place. I've gotten plenty of Teams / Slack messages where my response was "Can you ask this in the public team chat, so everybody can see it?" for that exact reason. That and it also opens up the pool of people who can potentially answer the question to more than just me, which is also a Good Thing.
But there are still plenty of questions where it quickly becomes apparent that having a call with screen-sharing and everything is going to be a much more efficient way of solving the problem at hand.
> It's also a massive peeve of mine when someone asks a question on messaging, refuses to have a call, and then proceeds to take forever getting back to me.
I agree. When someone asks for help, I want to give them my undivided attention so we can get the stuff worked out immediately instead of having split attention so I'm not helping you as effectively and I'm not able to focus on my work. I want to sort it with a call because it's MUCH faster. Let me call you so I can return my full attention to my own shit.
> I'm one of those people who almost always wants to immediately get on a call to solve a problem rather than typing it out. I get that it's tiring being on calls all the time but it's also much more effective to have a call for most types of work conversations, even as a software dev.
I find it interesting that something measurable like this feels (not saying it is) like an opinion.
It's my opinion (maybe because I'm a semi-effective text communicator?) that handling it "async" on chat is more often than not quicker. Maybe I'm wrong/biased? I wonder how something like this is measured. It does feel like people who want to not accept calls are in the minority based on my experience/the response this is getting.
handling it "async" on chat is more often than not quicker.
I'm sure there are times when it is better, and times when it isn't. I generally find that if a question is REALLY simple, then async is fine. Eg:
Q: What's the IP for the bumblefraxx gateway again?
A: 10.0.14.233
Ok, sure. Done, handled in a few seconds. But for anything that goes beyond about 2 Q/A "cycles", I generally find that a call is faster, because I can figure things out a lot faster when I can see all of the relevant details myself. Eg:
Q: The bumblefraxx gateway isn't working, can you help?
A: Did you make sure the IP is right?
Q: Yeah. Do you think the frozgibbit might be wedged?
A: ...
15 minutes later
Let's have a call so I can see this myself
/me looks at screen. Notices some trivial typo in config for bumblefraxx gateway. Problem fixed in 15 minutes and 15 seconds, when it could have been 15 seconds
I can understand the gripe about people who don't respond promptly during a chat and I too sometimes just call people like that, but in my experience much of the time when someone wants to "hop on a call" they essentially want me to hold their hand through something that can be easily and clearly explained in a few sentences of text (maybe with a link to an article). It seems to be more about personal comfort than any efficiencies in communication. Which is fine ultimately, but it should be recognized as a preference rather than some panacea for communication woes.
So how would you follow up in this situation when its you asking for help? Would you just say no and ask someone else, or try to figure the thing out by yourself?
For me, async conversations are a continuous drain on my attention over a longer period, rather than a call which I can devote 100% of my attention to for a shorter period and then get back to giving 100% of my attention to other things.
Imo when you go with async communication you pay the cost of that context switch over and over, with interest.
But it's not random. The context here is somebody calling person $A for help, and person $A saying "can we have a call to address this?" Saying "no" here is simply declining help from person $A.
My only counterpoint to this is that for some folks, particularly at the junior level, forcing them to write out their questions into text helps them focus their ideas and what they are trying to solve. This process often helps them find new avenues to search and helps them answer their own question
I don't just offer to have a call when someone says "Hey I need help"
My approach is to have them write out the issue in text, and say what they've tried.
Then I judge the urgency and if it's a barn burner I get on a call immediately. If it's a Junior blocked on something that I think they can solve I will tell them we can have a call in a half hour or something and very often they do solve it on their own.
Essentially I use the async communication methods as the gatekeeper to prioritize the incoming requests for my time, but when I do give people my time it's on a call so I can give them my full attention.
Here's the way I look at it.
If you are asking me a question where my reply isn't time sensitive, and it doesn't need to turn into a conversation about my answer, that doesn't need to be a call.
If you just want a status update on XYZ from me, which may be a short conversation, that probably does not need to be a call.
If you want my help with just about anything code related, that's a call. Screensharing is way easier for me to see what you are talking about, and it's much easier for us to be on the same page if we're both looking at the same thing.
It's also a massive peeve of mine when someone asks a question on messaging, refuses to have a call, and then proceeds to take forever getting back to me. It's one thing it I say something like "Try this, this, and this. Let me know what works" and then I can get back to my work.
But if I'm trying to step you through something and you sometimes reply immediately, sometimes in 5 minutes, sometimes in a half hour, then you get to have calls whenever you want my help from then on