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Written communication is remote work super power

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Re: Written communication is remote work super power

#111

Post by Aeolun »

RHSeeger wrote: post #25
Buttons840 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's still phone calls. Any co-worker you trust enough to have an "off the record" conversation with wouldn't turn down a "hey, can I call you?" request. They might think it's weird at first, but would understand later I'm sure.

I've called coworkers literally just to rant to someone before. Sometimes, you need to complain, but having a record of that is not helpful in any way.

Private chat works for me. Corporate IT might be able to see it, but I’m not saying anything there that my boss isn’t already aware of.

Re: Written communication is remote work super power

#112

Post by Aeolun »

xpe wrote: post #89
cmarschner wrote: post #68

Peter F. Drucker, influential author of countless books on management, once made a very simple argument: there are reader types, and there are listener types. If you are dealing with a partner you better know which type they are. It doesn‘t make sense to hand a listener type a manuscript without talking about the subject, and it doesn‘t make sense to set up meetings with a reader type before you hand off the written…

Whatever people’s preferences in terms of reading or listening, I am inclined to think teams get better results when a high quality meeting summary goes out ahead of time. I don’t claim this is an absolute truth, but I also don’t think many organizations have given it proper try.

If you send out a high quality summary you cover the reader types, then during the meeting you cover the listeners.

Re: Written communication is remote work super power

#113

Post by mjevans »

starfallg wrote: post #98
jackjeff wrote: post #9

Async communication is suitable to resolve some kind of issues. But it has two drawbacks: participants need to be competent at writing and reading prose (it’s harder than it sounds) and even with the best of care your ideas can easily be misinterpreted resulting in the loss of an async cycle. For problems which are not well defined, and where a lot of decisions need to be taken, especially when they verge toward the…

> For problems which are not well defined, and where a lot of decisions need to be taken, especially when they verge toward the arbitrary, it’s a lot easier to have people in a room and hash it out. AKA when random I/O is needed, minimizing latency is the key.

Brainstorming can be a chatroom; this is a better meeting because note-taking is automated.

However that should generate a list of items to follow-up on, and there need to be chances for validating, correcting, and following up on that process.

Re: Written communication is remote work super power

#114

Post by throwdbaaway »

Chat is only problematic if all you have is slack, with the lousy threading UX, and the prevalence of DM and private channel.

Still, slack is miles better than wiki pages (go staled immediately), emails (even more broken threading interface), and heaven forbids google docs (impossible for collaboration, may work for bosses).

I think the best solution is something like zulip chat, complemented by wiki pages for "immutable" information.

Re: Written communication is remote work super power

#115

Post by phendrenad2 »

There's a reason Technical Writing is a class offered in engineering courses in college. When you've read good documentation (HP user manuals from the 90s) and bad documentation (most open-source projects, no judgement, they're crowdsourced and we're lucky to have contributors willing to document things at all), you really get a sense for how valuable this skill is.

Re: Written communication is remote work super power

#116

Post by dpacmittal »

nine_k wrote: post #43

Real-time, spoken communication is on-site work super power. When uncertainty is high, and an intense discussion is needed, spoken word is much more efficient, from my experience. People are fundamentally better at speaking quickly and taking proper turns. This all is much slower and more cumbersome in video call, phone call, or a text chat. The perceived sequence breaks, the turn-taking protocol breaks (unless enfor…

In argument of text, it's storable, searchable, updatable, and copy-pasteable.

Re: Written communication is remote work super power

#117

Post by somurzakov »

Aeolun wrote: post #94
Kaze404 wrote: post #93

This article is great because it puts into words the relationship I've had with Slack since the beginning of my career. I've been working professionally for 4 years and I cannot remember a single time where I thought "I'm so glad we have Slack". Don't get me wrong, I think the platform itself is a great interpretation of IM, but IM is the absolute last thing I want to use in a work environment. One of the reasons I d…

> It sure doesn't help that people think they need to greet me and wait for a response before they actually say what they want to say. This is indeed intensely frustrating. It is so ridiculous that when you just don’t respond, you’ll end up with a person just saying only ‘hello’ to you three days in a row...

in cases like this, i just reply "sup" and switch back to my main window, until sender formulates his/her question

Re: Written communication is remote work super power

#118

Post by somurzakov »

briandear wrote: post #95
Kaze404 wrote: post #93

This article is great because it puts into words the relationship I've had with Slack since the beginning of my career. I've been working professionally for 4 years and I cannot remember a single time where I thought "I'm so glad we have Slack". Don't get me wrong, I think the platform itself is a great interpretation of IM, but IM is the absolute last thing I want to use in a work environment. One of the reasons I d…

> Coworker needs my attention immediately? Call me. I despise unsolicited phone calls. It’s figuratively kicking in your door. I can delay a Slack response for a few minutes. I can’t delay some jackass barging into my “office.”

+1. if somebody needs my attention - look at my calendar and send me a calendar invite with zoom link attached and if I accept it - you can get some attention. your urgent is not my urgent, it is your poor planning.

unless it is live production support, for which I get incident notification from ServiceNow anyways

Re: Written communication is remote work super power

#119

Post by johndoe42377 »

So, writing rfcs, standards, articles and Usenet (boomer's tech, you know) was not that bad after all?

The absurdity of synchronous realtime communication is most evident when taking to an extreme of online coding. Nothing but crap is being produced.

https://karma-engineering.com/lab/wiki/Remote

Re: Written communication is remote work super power

#120

Post by paragraft »

xpe wrote: post #89
cmarschner wrote: post #68

Peter F. Drucker, influential author of countless books on management, once made a very simple argument: there are reader types, and there are listener types. If you are dealing with a partner you better know which type they are. It doesn‘t make sense to hand a listener type a manuscript without talking about the subject, and it doesn‘t make sense to set up meetings with a reader type before you hand off the written…

Whatever people’s preferences in terms of reading or listening, I am inclined to think teams get better results when a high quality meeting summary goes out ahead of time. I don’t claim this is an absolute truth, but I also don’t think many organizations have given it proper try.

I agree, but think the virtue is as much as in the actual process of writing the summary forces the summoner to clearly work out ahead of time what the meeting is actually about and what it is aiming to achieve.
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