No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda

Remember that old advice to email the boss with a summary of what he told you to do verbally - asking for confirmation that you understood it right as a cover - to cover your ass?

I tend to favor calls with people who prefer calls, and text with people who prefer text. But if it starts getting abused, the situation becomes different.

I don't mind agreeing to a bare zero-effort "hi, can we go on a call?" from time to time. And I give a lot of leeway to juniors and new hires, bending over backwards more than I probably should. But if it becomes a habit you can bet I'll start delaying my responses until the other party starts putting some upfront effort.

I usually expect mutual respect. Helping each other as fellow professionals working towards the same (company) goal, is one thing. Asking for hand-holding, or expecting zero-effort to be repaid with non-zero effort, is a completely different thing.

If someone asks another to go out of their way to ignore their other responsibilities and give you their undivided attention right now in a way that's uncomfortable to them, then it's only fair for this to be a two-way street. At some point, maybe not now, maybe not soon, but at some point, some sort of reciprocation is expected if this trend continues.

My previous comment was mostly just me ranting of places where that reciprocation wasn't the case because people only ever expect things to be done in the way that's comfortable for them specifically; which in my bubble, it has been mostly with the "only-calls" people, unable to hold any semblance of conversation over text. (EDIT: The actual topic might not be the same, but the mood definitely came from there.)

A pair programming session where we're both doing something, bouncing ideas, you check stuff on your end while I also check stuff here on my end, okay, that's a good thing.

But if it's just me remote-controlling that other person with my voice, I can't call that productive, and I'd rather play that pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game while also working on my current task.

In my bubble, when people preferred only-calls it was usually also the case that they put almost zero effort when asking for help and just didn't want to bother spending literally 2 additional seconds to take a screenshot.

I can rant for even longer, for example how those same people (again, in my experience so far) prefer to go to the office to use a whiteboard in the name of efficiency, and somehow aren't bothered by the fact that you can't Ctrl+Z, that you can't move stuff around, that you can't rotate stuff, that you block the view while modifying, etc. And if you say that a few 90 EUR digital tablets would actually be more efficient, they say they can't afford it, but at the same time the managers travel (flights+hotels+transportation) to several countries in person to introduce themselves to their teams in person because this is actually more efficient.

And the people who prefer calls, and know that will be requesting calls frequently, and sharing screen frequently, and talking about stuff in their screen frequently, don't even purchase a cheap drawing tablet to make it easier for them to explain stuff graphically.

So yeah, take that as additional context for my rant.

TL;DR: If you prefer calls, I will tend to use calls with you until you abuse this, and this abuse usually happens eventually if I stay in a company long enough (fortunately not always).

In my experience, once people know each other well (whether via direct face to face communication, or via observing each other's slack messages and PRs), it's much more efficient to put things in writing.

Then everything is in the open, for everyone to see and discuss/comment on. People can go back over previous decisions, people can see the context over why something was done, people can check previous votes. And, most importantly, people can do so when they need to do so, preserving their individual flow state.

By the way, when I said "flow state", I also mean the team's overall flow state, not only ICs.

E.g if we break down a feature in two parts, can we efficiently sync so the parts we make fit well together. Do we pair program, do we each take our chunks, how often do we sync and how, that's also "flow". My point is that "flow" here is still the most important thing for developer productivity. If you want to be doing your own part of the task, but I keep interrupting you with "hey, got 5 min", obviously something is wrong in our flow.

What is more, I can't be convinced that allowing these interruptions is the proper way, the price of achieving flow. I see that more as a symptom that we didn't agree on the ground rules, and that's where our flow goes wrong. Maybe we can batch the multiple 5 min interruptions into longer planned sessions, with agendas, where we go over your concerns and questions, which you spend the time to formulate and put on paper. That way we have a focused time with an agenda and we both can prepare for it, and there are no context switches for the rest of the workday.

I think the problem is that you consider "alignment" a thing on its own, but to me it's merely one of the components needed to achieve a good flow. In experienced teams where members are attuned to each other's communication styles, and respectful of each other's time and attention span, alignment doesn't necessarily need to be attained by meetings and interruptions.

Hence my point still stands that flow (individual and team) is the most important thing for developer productivity (and happiness)