> But for me, it becomes the event my whole day starts to revolve around. I have to break out of my flow, put my tasks on hold, take the call, and then get back into context. In the end, a 10-minute call can cost me several hours of focus.
Occasionally I get this feeling for a large customer meeting or a public talk, because there are consequences and serious prep. But this is just trying to normalize extreme social anxiety and call it a management style.
One reason you get together to talk is so you can hash out details on potentially ambiguous topics, so you don't head in the wrong direction causing net negative contribution.
Another is that people are not automata. Humans require inspiration and motivation and you need to reinforce the vision of what you are building and why. Its also even sometimes a reasonable idea to ask about how their life is going and check up on their family and pets and career aspirations.
In general, some people should not be managers, and there is plenty of room in the world for super ICs.
This ignores the human side of things - people want relationships, empathy and sometimes just to be listened to.
A call with your manager where they say "yes, I agree with everything you said - go ahead and do it, I trust you" can mean much more than the same thing said in a text message.
English is vague, even when accounting for that fact. It's much more difficult to detect or correct misunderstandings over text.
My biggest issue with this concept is time. You write your wall of text, I see that you've failed to account for some factor, so I write my wall of text. You don't completely understand my wall of text and ask for clarification. Back and forth, asynchronously. In a call this can be resolved in minutes. Over text this could take days
While I agree Scrum and agile are overkill and somewhat performative for the managers. I also like how OP gets that being an effective manager means understanding what the engineers are doing, as in, you rose through engineering into management, which is also a good thing!
But some teams, and some people, and some work is more effective with regular scheduled human interaction. People who need direction, guidance, or just to feel more physically connected with their work and team.
I'm so glad you are able to remove all "live human interaction" from your management style. I'd miss having a boss that felt like I was worth face-time. This feels like going too far for async work, I don't know how you wouldn't feel disconnected.
- Some people cannot communicate via written text. At all.
- Other people always prefer voice over text. Why should our preferences trump theirs?
- Text is low bandwidth, audio/video is high bandwidth (in that it can convey emotions & tonality much more easily)
- People are much more open with issues they're encountering when face-to-face. Text is too impersonal for that.
But how do you find others developers like yourself ? Most people need calls. They might say they don't like it, but they're more productive once they have them. They need to feel there is a human on the other side that cares about the results, that is waiting for them and pushing them. Most people need deadlines, even if they're fake. They need to tell people around them they have to do X before Y, they wouldn't be able to justify what they're doing to themselves and their surrounding without that fake deadline. They wouldn't think about telling coworker about a similar piece of code or feature they're working on without that daily standup.
All those boring useless things, all those methods, those rules, those office politics, they're here for a reason
Using your analogy, imagine it's the year 2026. Two armies are fighting. One uses letter to communicate. One uses phones. Which army do you want to fight in?
Are we avoiding leaving RF spectrum traces? Are we worried about compromised digital channels? What is the reasoning?
In 2026 I'd rather be fighting for the army that evaluates all options to come up with the most effective way to accomplish an objective rather than one that dogmatically clings to ineffective methods.
In other words: if the winning side uses letters and the losing side uses phones, I'd rather be on the letter writer's side.
The top one reason I want to retire so bad is because of useless meetings and calls. I had a boss for 6 months that would call me randomly during the day "just to check how things are going", I mean wtf.
But as I age, I see that there are people out there that NEED to talk and to speak to other people. And of course, you have those doing micromanagement.
There is a clear difference drawn here between a team manager and a team leader, the latter being able to actually handle persons tone, manner of speaking, their emotions, without fear of ruining their whole own day.
Some kind of work can live in this "put it in a well structured & considered ticket" mode, some cannot. If this is your style and you've found a place where it works, fantastic, but I don't believe this to be generalizable.
The problem is literacy. Even if you can read and write, that does not mean you can reduce a complicated idea into text. It also doesn't mean you can decode ambiguously worded and poorly structured writing. A meeting is often needed; not because the relevant people can't be bothered to write their thoughts down, but because they literally are not capable of doing it.
I've seen many grotesque misunderstandings go through 30 iterations of confusion across teams because nobody is good at communicating clearly. Then one 20 minute in person meeting clears it up.
I don't begrudge anyone management practices that work for them, but this doesn't seem like a complete analysis.
> I can’t even imagine a task or question that can’t be discussed over text.
Can't is a strong word. I can easily imagine, and the author earlier in the article did imagine, cases where someone does not want to discuss an issue over text. Issues like:
* I have broad concerns about the direction of the company and I'm not quite sure how to frame them.
* Coworker X keeps not doing the things that he's promised to do, to the point that I'm beginning to consider him untrustworthy.
* I need you to pay me more money, and I'm not explicitly threatening to quit yet, but I'd like to create some informal common knowledge that I could have a higher paying job next month if I wanted.
If you have a stable team where everyone's well-aligned on the roadmap, no personnel issues ever arise, and nobody's slacking? Sure, no calls can work. But without the calls you may not notice when those stop being true.
> But for me, it becomes the event my whole day starts to revolve around. I have to break out of my flow, put my tasks on hold, take the call, and then get back into context. In the end, a 10-minute call can cost me several hours of focus.
Occasionally I get this feeling for a large customer meeting or a public talk, because there are consequences and serious prep. But this is just trying to normalize extreme social anxiety and call it a management style.
One reason you get together to talk is so you can hash out details on potentially ambiguous topics, so you don't head in the wrong direction causing net negative contribution.
Another is that people are not automata. Humans require inspiration and motivation and you need to reinforce the vision of what you are building and why. Its also even sometimes a reasonable idea to ask about how their life is going and check up on their family and pets and career aspirations.
In general, some people should not be managers, and there is plenty of room in the world for super ICs.
This ignores the human side of things - people want relationships, empathy and sometimes just to be listened to.
A call with your manager where they say "yes, I agree with everything you said - go ahead and do it, I trust you" can mean much more than the same thing said in a text message.
Seems like a local maximum or organizing around an individual’s quirks.
Like all team building I feel like the fundamental question is, “what works for this group of people?”
Rather than “teams with/without calls is superior,” and slamming every team you work with into it.
It is so comforting to deal with known unknowns particularly when the unknown unknowns are the ones that get you.
English is vague, even when accounting for that fact. It's much more difficult to detect or correct misunderstandings over text.
My biggest issue with this concept is time. You write your wall of text, I see that you've failed to account for some factor, so I write my wall of text. You don't completely understand my wall of text and ask for clarification. Back and forth, asynchronously. In a call this can be resolved in minutes. Over text this could take days
While I agree Scrum and agile are overkill and somewhat performative for the managers. I also like how OP gets that being an effective manager means understanding what the engineers are doing, as in, you rose through engineering into management, which is also a good thing!
But some teams, and some people, and some work is more effective with regular scheduled human interaction. People who need direction, guidance, or just to feel more physically connected with their work and team.
I'm so glad you are able to remove all "live human interaction" from your management style. I'd miss having a boss that felt like I was worth face-time. This feels like going too far for async work, I don't know how you wouldn't feel disconnected.
>In the end, a 10-minute call can cost me several hours of focus. And I might spend the entire day thinking about it.
does anyone else have their entire day sidelined by a 10-minute call? is that common?
to me, it hints at something else, but i am not sure if i am the odd one out or not.
- Some people cannot communicate via written text. At all. - Other people always prefer voice over text. Why should our preferences trump theirs? - Text is low bandwidth, audio/video is high bandwidth (in that it can convey emotions & tonality much more easily) - People are much more open with issues they're encountering when face-to-face. Text is too impersonal for that.
I also work without calls, deadlines, schedules, scrums https://orchidfiles.com/building-without-booking-time/
But how do you find others developers like yourself ? Most people need calls. They might say they don't like it, but they're more productive once they have them. They need to feel there is a human on the other side that cares about the results, that is waiting for them and pushing them. Most people need deadlines, even if they're fake. They need to tell people around them they have to do X before Y, they wouldn't be able to justify what they're doing to themselves and their surrounding without that fake deadline. They wouldn't think about telling coworker about a similar piece of code or feature they're working on without that daily standup.
All those boring useless things, all those methods, those rules, those office politics, they're here for a reason
Using your analogy, imagine it's the year 2026. Two armies are fighting. One uses letter to communicate. One uses phones. Which army do you want to fight in?
This is an obviously poor policy.
Why are we using letters?
Are we avoiding leaving RF spectrum traces? Are we worried about compromised digital channels? What is the reasoning?
In 2026 I'd rather be fighting for the army that evaluates all options to come up with the most effective way to accomplish an objective rather than one that dogmatically clings to ineffective methods.
In other words: if the winning side uses letters and the losing side uses phones, I'd rather be on the letter writer's side.
This is why I dislike most wartime analogies. Most day jobs just aren't that urgent or important.
The top one reason I want to retire so bad is because of useless meetings and calls. I had a boss for 6 months that would call me randomly during the day "just to check how things are going", I mean wtf.
But as I age, I see that there are people out there that NEED to talk and to speak to other people. And of course, you have those doing micromanagement.
Building a team to operate based on your own personal preferences is selfish leadership... or even dictatorship.
There's a very strong "focus culture" which relies on the idea that work is not done in meetings. This is wrong. Progress comes in many forms.
Is it even possible to build a team and _not_ operate based on own personal preferences?
There is a clear difference drawn here between a team manager and a team leader, the latter being able to actually handle persons tone, manner of speaking, their emotions, without fear of ruining their whole own day.
Seems like the author has anxiety issues. Not much else of substance in the post.
Some kind of work can live in this "put it in a well structured & considered ticket" mode, some cannot. If this is your style and you've found a place where it works, fantastic, but I don't believe this to be generalizable.
The problem is literacy. Even if you can read and write, that does not mean you can reduce a complicated idea into text. It also doesn't mean you can decode ambiguously worded and poorly structured writing. A meeting is often needed; not because the relevant people can't be bothered to write their thoughts down, but because they literally are not capable of doing it.
I've seen many grotesque misunderstandings go through 30 iterations of confusion across teams because nobody is good at communicating clearly. Then one 20 minute in person meeting clears it up.
I don't begrudge anyone management practices that work for them, but this doesn't seem like a complete analysis.
> I can’t even imagine a task or question that can’t be discussed over text.
Can't is a strong word. I can easily imagine, and the author earlier in the article did imagine, cases where someone does not want to discuss an issue over text. Issues like:
* I have broad concerns about the direction of the company and I'm not quite sure how to frame them.
* Coworker X keeps not doing the things that he's promised to do, to the point that I'm beginning to consider him untrustworthy.
* I need you to pay me more money, and I'm not explicitly threatening to quit yet, but I'd like to create some informal common knowledge that I could have a higher paying job next month if I wanted.
If you have a stable team where everyone's well-aligned on the roadmap, no personnel issues ever arise, and nobody's slacking? Sure, no calls can work. But without the calls you may not notice when those stop being true.
So much time more to play Doom…