> 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.
Yes, the "10-minute call becomes the event my whole day starts to revolve around" is very ADHD and/or autism coded (I'm non-neurotyopical and also mountain this molehill), and there's a lot of rationalization about this in the article. Being a manager means accommodating neurotypical people, too. I agree that the author should think hard about whether management is the best place for them.
I can relate to being distracted for a time before a meeting and unable to focus on something else in preparation for it, but these lines stuck out in a way I can't relate:
> unpleasant if I end up not liking the person
> Their tone, manner of speaking, their emotions. That can ruin my whole day.
Why should this person demand that they like or are liked by everyone, and why should it ruin their day to keep things professional? That sounds extremely highly-strung.
“In all that time, I’ve never met a single person who sincerely wanted more dailies, syncs, and meetings.” Oh, I guarantee that OP has met these people, and that they have told him this multiple times in ways that he does not understand.
> 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.
And you need meetings to do all of this? There are so many other ways to communicate which you make more use of when you are less dependent on meetings. It's not a binary choice between meetings and extreme social anxiety.
> And you need meetings to do all of this? There are so many other ways to communicate which you make more use of when you are less dependent on meetings. It's not a choice between meetings and extreme social anxiety.
Yes, "this meeting could have been an email", async communication and all that jazz. Nonetheless stating that a 10 minutes quick chat is going to be the center of that day for you definitely signals social anxiety.
> stating that a 10 minutes quick chat is going to be the center of that day for you definitely signals social anxiety.
It really doesn't. You may not be aware of it but you quite literally have to structure your work day around your meetings because the meetings are fixed time blocks where you have to go and do something else. If you were in the zone, having a productive day, you are absolutely going to have a big slump (maybe) leading up to the meeting and after the meeting.
> Yes, "this meeting could have been an email", async communication and all that jazz.
That would be ideal for most cases! But even informal calls (messaging "can we hop on a call?) could be better because they are less overhead to book, not a commitment, have some preparation/context already in messages, etc.
Yeah, I'm totally in favor of minimizing calls. It's easier to reference text, and I have more time to formulate my thoughts. But calls have value, too.
It's important to show a client that you care by being there in person, it's important to see your coworkers once in a while and ask them how they're doing.
I believe there is a middle ground here. Quick calls can definitely mess with your flow in your day to day work, but ruining multiple hours of “in the state” is either an overstatement or the author may be best suited for a different role that demands less communication.
On the other hand modern application of agile methodology is borderline ruinous for team productivity and most of the time exists for a specific stakeholder to feel less anxious rather than for a team member to raise a blocker or a dependency.
I work in a fairly big company and there is the notion of extracting people from their agile teams to have them work uninterrupted on large tech initiatives. Which is in my opinion a subtle way to signal that if you know what you want to build, agile methodology at least in the perverted way most companies apply it doesn’t work.
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.
For me the best moments at work have been when the direct manager was sick or on a very long holiday. We're adults, why would I need someone to tell me 'I agree with you', 'go ahead, I trust you'. Maybe if you don't know what you're doing, or you can't manage the stakeholders, but otherwise, the manager just gets in the way, unless they know how to make themselves invisible, or they have the connections and will to propel your career forwards I've had plenty of managers in 20+ years
I think it’s good if the phone call heavy people can find their way to phone call heavy managers, while the people who communicate well without constant phone calls can group together and work that way.
There’s a third category of people who actually need a lot of communication for different reasons (constant reassurance like you highlighted or maybe contestant management to keep them on track) but who also avoid communications like the plague. These are the hardest to manage without some rhythm of mandatory check ins.
There have been times when a founder was constantly on calls but allowed me to manage teams without them. He also continued to hold occasional calls with the team, but I wasn't present for those calls. I provided him with written progress reports. I didn't try to convince him to stop holding calls, and he didn't try to convince me that calls were mandatory. But such cases are rare.
I hate video calls, but sometimes is so much easier (and really faster) to align with someone over a complicated issue. feels almost counter intuitive but the more complicated the matter the easier to align over voice / video than text in my view
I think it depends on the person. For me, for example, text work best for any kind of question, no matter how complex. On the other hand, for simple questions, when I just want to chat, I'll opt for a call or meet in person.
Richard Dawkins, coined the concept of extended phenotype which proposes that genes do not just build physical bodies, but actively shape the outside world to ensure their propagation.
I would counter that abstracting out several levels to cite Dawkins on a story about management styles isn't about management styles as much as it is about the friends you make along the way. :)
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.
Yes. I worked in an agile shop some years ago. We did daily stand-ups at 10:00. So, you arrive in the morning, and can't really get deeply into anything because stand-up is coming up. Then stand-up ends and you maybe have a sidebar conversation at the coffee machine, you get back to your desk and now lunch is coming up, so you look for some stuff you can do quickly, maybe read your email, check HN, whatever. After lunch you might get a few unbroken hours to really make progress on something, but half the time it's interrupted by code reviews, planning poker, or some other agile ceremony and the same sort of effect occurs.
> does anyone else have their entire day sidelined by a 10-minute call? is that common?
It's extremely common for me.
It really comes down to the point made in the article. If you have five or six calls already, the marginal cost of one more call is very low. If you have no calls, the marginal cost of one more call is very high.
I used to be like that early in my career around 25. By now I am nearly 40 and that doesn’t remotely cross my mind. I’ve had to do so many social events that I am numb to it. It used to cause tons of anxiety/rumination though. When in doubt vape hella weed and you will forget about your worries. That seems to be the solution to all of my life’s problems.
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
I have the opposite experience. Phone calls almost always leave me feeling that something important has been left out. But there is no record so I can't re-read it to find out if I forgot or if it was just not mentioned. Luckily I rarely had to deal with such things because most of my work required written specifications and technical standards anyway, plus our teams were scattered in widely different time zones so the windows for live contacts were small.
>It's much more difficult to detect or correct misunderstandings over text.
I really couldn't disagree more strongly. I think it's much easier to correct misunderstandings over text. In a spoken discussion, there is a high degree of temporal entropy - the longer it's been since you made a point, the worse my recollection of your exact point may be. Detail and nuance is lost. But if you write your point down, I can refer to it at any point without any real loss of information.
In my experience, it's relatively common for two people to leave a spoken discussion thinking they have a strong, shared understanding, and only much later do they realize that's not the case.
yeah i agree. i’ve had so many instances where i’ve got off a call and then a week later the person
* has a fundamentally different understanding of the facts discussed [0]
* has forgotten the important facts even when they were highlighted as important
* has completely forgotten most of the conversation, sometimes even forgetting we had a conversation
* has just made some shit up in their head that was never even talked about
… and once again i’d have to go over the whole thing again for an hour, so we’re back where we started a week later. this is normal “fuzzy human brain stuff”. people forget details over the course of a week, especially new details.
but yeah; if it’s not written down it doesn’t exist is my mantra now.
[0]: note to say this was not because they went and spoke to someone else and got more detail, other opinions etc. the detail would just get warped in their brain over the course of a week.
I work with stakeholders that come from different backgrounds (different countries, non-engineers). No way that we can get aligned using just text. Or if we try, it will take a tremendous amount of back and forth, annoying everyone in the process.
I'd much rather talk for 30~60 mins and get everything hashed out. It also allows you to build rapport, so next time it will be much easier to do something together again.
I'm all for fewer (and smaller) meetings, but there is a time and place for synchronous communication. Especially quick informal communication can be incredibly high leverage. Optimizing for heads down time is great if everyone knows exactly what they should be heads down on and thinks the same way, but that is not always the case.
If you call yourself a manager--which is a questionable role at startups--then you need to be optimizing for the entire output of the team. Rigidly declaring everything must be async text is no better than scrum by numbers.
This reminds me of another HN post where someone complains that they don't want extraneous information in their emails. No "Hey, how are you?", no "I know you're busy, but...", just straight to the point: "Send me the TPS report by EoD."
To me this is just a case of, "I hate X and prefer Y, therefore Y is correct and X is wrong."
It makes me wonder about times when I've confused my own preferences for managerial wisdom. I need to not dash off a blog post about how "I've finally figured it out" until at least two other people have tried my prescription and found it helpful.
I completely agree with you. I was just writing about my approach to project management and manage teams. It works perfectly for me. I suggest this approach at the companies where I work, but I don't recommend it to absolutely everyone. Everyone manages projects in their own way.
Usually if you’re a manager, your job IS the meetings - or a large portion of it. You’re responsible for a remit and the performance of people inside the group and what is delivered. I think it’s unlikely that can be done of high quality without meetings, but ymmv
In a world where most teams are remote and members don't see or meet each other, sometimes throughout their entire tenure, I think a bit of human contact is worth the time sacrifice. Corporate productivity is does not trump this in my opinion.
I write an email with extensive detail, but none of the recipients read a single line. They expect a call invite from me to read it out to them. People find it easier to hear things from other than read the same, if the option os hearing out is available. Q&A is another thing. You can avoid Q&A only if you are fully aware everyone's context. Otherwise questions sprig up from their own context which may not have been addressed in your email.
It really depends on the people on the team. If they prefer to call each other and hear each other's voices, there's no need to push them to read emails. If you need people to read text, then you need a different kind of team.
Every team simply needs its own management style.
People like calls because there is no accountability. "Oh, I was just spitballing" or "This is how I interpreted what they said despite doing a left turn at Albuquerque". An email or memo can be skimmed, or searched, for context thereby holding people's feet to a proverbial fire. Even if a call is being recorded for posterity, each party on the call runs the risk of inciting the ire of whoever was forced to listen and judge both participants. Nobody wins because someone was forced to listen to ten minutes of meaningless crap that could have been an email, much like a YouTube video intending to be helpful but has 5 minutes of sponsor shout-outs, like, rate, and subscribe, an unnecessary explainer before getting to the topic at hand that some Bulgarian uploaded ten years ago and lasts fewer than ninety seconds.
You can work without calls for sure and choose to avoid them if that works for you, please don't be in the position of managing team for the teams sake. This is a blatant misunderstanding of how the teams are built and run. Being in a role and doing a good job in your role are completely two different things.
If one wants to be a good manager then you do not have the luxury of being in good or bad mood, you are required to context switch between more than one person with entirely different motivation and problems.
If you don't like calls, then ask the person requesting it to email/message you want you want to discuss and any decisions that you're hoping to make it from it before accepting it. It's not much, but at least you now have a focus for the call. If you disagree that a call is needed, tell them and request to handle it over async comm lines.
It's possible the other party is dealing with some complex or ambiguous and a call is often helpful to talk through and get them focused quickly. If you still hate calls though, as them to send a write up summary of the call and continue any further conversations that way.
There are so many ways to handle these interactions with just a little give and take.
+1 - So many times you can avoid the meeting by simply asking the person to specify the topic. Then often it turns out you can clarify their big topic either directly over chat or its not a topic for you at all..
The majority of the software development related communications are trivial enough, emotionless, and do not require calls, but there are cases where one quick call resolves ambiguity much faster than hours of typing.
While I do know a feeling of dreading the upcoming call, especially if this is a call that I know won't be useful or rewarding for me personally ("let's quickly go through this infinite list of jira tickets", "let's do a quick round table"), it's important to remember that texting, including all sorts of corporate messengers, is one of the worst media to transmit emotions. Seeing another person's face while talking to them and their reactions to your jokes or struggles is sometimes as important as the message being transmitted. Of course, the camera must be turned on for this to work.
> As a manager, you should learn to change this about yourself rather than imposing your work style on your team.
I think we need a different approach here. I shouldn't have to change anything about myself, because we're slaves to our habits. I shouldn't force this on people who don't want to work this way. I just need to work with teams that are willing to work this way. And so far, I've always managed to find such teams and such people.
When I've been an engineering manager my policy has always been that I can work on code but only if that code is not on the critical path to shipping something my team is responsible for.
That's because management is an interruption-driven position. You just can't guarantee you can get 2-4 hours of productive, uninterrupted time.
Which means you shouldn't take on engineering responsibilities which, if delayed, will hurt your team.
So I'd still build stuff but it would be internal tools, or exploratory prototypes, or stuff that was absolutely not linked to any deadlines.
As far as I can tell coding agents have changed this quite a bit: I know a lot of engineering managers who are getting back into code now because they can carve out 30 minutes, and 30 minutes is now enough time to get something useful done.
I still think most managers should stay off the critical path to production though, at most organizations.
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
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.
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.
- 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 even remember the days when dailies were actually held standing up in the office.
I switched my team to text based daily updates submitted anytime before ~10am.
A nice perk was it gave people the option to do it at the end of the day to help plan their following day so they hit the ground running in the morning. It was especially useful for Mondays where people spent time filling dead air on calls trying to remember what they were doing on Friday.
Everyone could see what was happening, stalled work and people going off track were really obvious if the updates weren't specific enough. "still working on" and "I couldn't solve it so I'm going try and run git bisect over 10 years of commits to see where it breaks"
Management, allergic to looking in Jira, were happy that they were getting their status updates and we could all stay in the zone for the whole morning.
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.
Is this feeling about a call being such a potential meteor strike on your day normal and acceptable? I’ve always been of the mind it’s a skill I need to improve, but this reads like it’s an acceptable but insurmountable personality quirk to work around, am I too much of a perfectionist and stressing myself out? Feels like a soft skill but maybe I’m just burning myself out trying to get good at everything.
What I have learned is that there are different people and project managing strategies for differently competent or motivated people.
Purpose driven mature developers do not need complicated project management or Jira. Famously, the Google Chrome team is an example. All the ceremony is only for plebs like us who are somewhat of cattle that need constant guidance.
> But many years ago I gave up Scrum completely in my teams. What’s more, over time I almost stopped coming across startups where Scrum is used in its classic form at all. Many distributed teams are gradually moving toward an async approach ...
It is my personal opinion that Scrum/Agile is just a rather dramatic/over-the-top system for fixing dysfunctional teams that have fallen into poor or absent communication anti-patterns.
(I also think the general trend towards async among distributed teams is that more people have gone through this and have picked up the "better" communication habits.)
After you've done it for a while you start to find that many of the individuals are talking to each other without the various contrivances.
Planning poker isn't really about project sizing, it's about surfacing issues that the team members might not find out about if they don't talk to each other. I've been on teams where someone has spent 2 months working on something only to find that someone else had 90% of the work done in a private branch.
After the third of fourth time during planning poker that someone is reminded that they need to consider the testing/docs aspect they start to factor that in without being prompted.
The daily standup is similar. "I'm going to frobnicate the foobar today" and someone will say "Ah, have you spoken to Alice in that other team as she did the same thing with Bob's team last week, she's got a load of scripts that should save you a load of time."
Retrospectives are about acknowledging people who did good work, what worked well within the team, and also raising the things that held people back. If you have a good team leader they should be wondering why on Earth this is the first time they're hearing about any of this stuff. (A bad team leader will continue to blunder on not learning anything and being blissfully unaware that they're missing the really big neon signs, or they'll find some other way to dismiss the concerns/findings.)
Eventually you may get to a point where there is very little face to face communication required because the team starts to use the async communication systems properly, they communicate freely between team members and also upwards. But this is often a precarious situation, it doesn't take much for the boat to be rocked, new people coming in, trusted people leaving, new projects, new directions, unrealistic deadlines, etc. Every so often it requires more communication than before to get things back on track.
Once you're over the "scrum/agile solves all" hill people tend to pick/choose what continues to add value, and they discard the rest. (For the teams I've worked on in the past it was the "don't interrupt or change course mid sprint" rule that worked best for us - so many times the urgency had disappeared once we had got to the end of the sprint and we'd been saved from ultimately unnecessary distractions.)
Back to the management style in the article, even though I could work somewhere with little or no regular verbal communication I know I would quickly find I absolutely despised it.
I've done long solo projects in the past with no real colleagues or technical leadership/reporting. I found it far less rewarding than being part of a team (although it was often more financially rewarding). I get that some people thrive on this kind of thing and I'm happy for them. Every so often I like to go deep on something but how long I can tolerate this for is becoming shorter and shorter as I get older. There's a big difference between going a full day or so in focus/flow mode to extending this for days/weeks/longer.
I used to seek out 1:1s with random people in the company. I'd join the "watercooler" video call a few times a week to just chat random stuff with random people. As for async comms, although we were all good at starting off with well thought out full initial message/question on Slack (not just a "hello" and then silence) many of these were better off resolved via a quick video call once it was clear that async wasn't the most efficient method. Pretending or hoping that everyone is so eloquent, clear and exact with their language that you can do everything async is just fantasy in my experience. If the question was raised in a channel (rather than a DM) then someone would go back and provide a brief summary so that anyone finding the initial conversation by search didn't just hit a "let's jump on a call" cliffhanger with no resolution. (Then the company grows big enough that Slack retention policies become a limiting factor.)
I've definitely worked with people who can work with little or no interaction but even in workplaces with a greater than average concentration of introverts and neuro-divergence such people (who can work like that) are in the great minority (again, IMHO). Most people work better with direct access to empathy, reassurance and even just someone to listen to them ranting. The trick is to find the right balance as too much communication can be stifling, but I'd rather be in that situation and working on dialing it back.
> 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.
Yes, the "10-minute call becomes the event my whole day starts to revolve around" is very ADHD and/or autism coded (I'm non-neurotyopical and also mountain this molehill), and there's a lot of rationalization about this in the article. Being a manager means accommodating neurotypical people, too. I agree that the author should think hard about whether management is the best place for them.
I can relate to being distracted for a time before a meeting and unable to focus on something else in preparation for it, but these lines stuck out in a way I can't relate:
> unpleasant if I end up not liking the person > Their tone, manner of speaking, their emotions. That can ruin my whole day.
Why should this person demand that they like or are liked by everyone, and why should it ruin their day to keep things professional? That sounds extremely highly-strung.
Yes, this post is one half of “Maker’s schedule, manager’s schedule” — https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
“In all that time, I’ve never met a single person who sincerely wanted more dailies, syncs, and meetings.” Oh, I guarantee that OP has met these people, and that they have told him this multiple times in ways that he does not understand.
> 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.
And you need meetings to do all of this? There are so many other ways to communicate which you make more use of when you are less dependent on meetings. It's not a binary choice between meetings and extreme social anxiety.
> And you need meetings to do all of this? There are so many other ways to communicate which you make more use of when you are less dependent on meetings. It's not a choice between meetings and extreme social anxiety.
Yes, "this meeting could have been an email", async communication and all that jazz. Nonetheless stating that a 10 minutes quick chat is going to be the center of that day for you definitely signals social anxiety.
> stating that a 10 minutes quick chat is going to be the center of that day for you definitely signals social anxiety.
It really doesn't. You may not be aware of it but you quite literally have to structure your work day around your meetings because the meetings are fixed time blocks where you have to go and do something else. If you were in the zone, having a productive day, you are absolutely going to have a big slump (maybe) leading up to the meeting and after the meeting.
> Yes, "this meeting could have been an email", async communication and all that jazz.
That would be ideal for most cases! But even informal calls (messaging "can we hop on a call?) could be better because they are less overhead to book, not a commitment, have some preparation/context already in messages, etc.
Yeah, I'm totally in favor of minimizing calls. It's easier to reference text, and I have more time to formulate my thoughts. But calls have value, too.
It's important to show a client that you care by being there in person, it's important to see your coworkers once in a while and ask them how they're doing.
I believe there is a middle ground here. Quick calls can definitely mess with your flow in your day to day work, but ruining multiple hours of “in the state” is either an overstatement or the author may be best suited for a different role that demands less communication.
On the other hand modern application of agile methodology is borderline ruinous for team productivity and most of the time exists for a specific stakeholder to feel less anxious rather than for a team member to raise a blocker or a dependency.
I work in a fairly big company and there is the notion of extracting people from their agile teams to have them work uninterrupted on large tech initiatives. Which is in my opinion a subtle way to signal that if you know what you want to build, agile methodology at least in the perverted way most companies apply it doesn’t work.
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.
For me the best moments at work have been when the direct manager was sick or on a very long holiday. We're adults, why would I need someone to tell me 'I agree with you', 'go ahead, I trust you'. Maybe if you don't know what you're doing, or you can't manage the stakeholders, but otherwise, the manager just gets in the way, unless they know how to make themselves invisible, or they have the connections and will to propel your career forwards I've had plenty of managers in 20+ years
Expecting everybody else to be like you is the issue.
> why would I need someone to tell me
This isn't about you. It is about working with others that are not exactly like you.
> Maybe if you don't know what you're doing . . .
Making up insulting reasons doesn't help either.
I think it’s good if the phone call heavy people can find their way to phone call heavy managers, while the people who communicate well without constant phone calls can group together and work that way.
There’s a third category of people who actually need a lot of communication for different reasons (constant reassurance like you highlighted or maybe contestant management to keep them on track) but who also avoid communications like the plague. These are the hardest to manage without some rhythm of mandatory check ins.
There have been times when a founder was constantly on calls but allowed me to manage teams without them. He also continued to hold occasional calls with the team, but I wasn't present for those calls. I provided him with written progress reports. I didn't try to convince him to stop holding calls, and he didn't try to convince me that calls were mandatory. But such cases are rare.
I hate video calls, but sometimes is so much easier (and really faster) to align with someone over a complicated issue. feels almost counter intuitive but the more complicated the matter the easier to align over voice / video than text in my view
I think it depends on the person. For me, for example, text work best for any kind of question, no matter how complex. On the other hand, for simple questions, when I just want to chat, I'll opt for a call or meet in person.
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.
There are many survival strategies in nature.
Richard Dawkins, coined the concept of extended phenotype which proposes that genes do not just build physical bodies, but actively shape the outside world to ensure their propagation.
I would counter that abstracting out several levels to cite Dawkins on a story about management styles isn't about management styles as much as it is about the friends you make along the way. :)
Patterns patterning - Zen mode. Beat this abstraction.
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.
Yes. I worked in an agile shop some years ago. We did daily stand-ups at 10:00. So, you arrive in the morning, and can't really get deeply into anything because stand-up is coming up. Then stand-up ends and you maybe have a sidebar conversation at the coffee machine, you get back to your desk and now lunch is coming up, so you look for some stuff you can do quickly, maybe read your email, check HN, whatever. After lunch you might get a few unbroken hours to really make progress on something, but half the time it's interrupted by code reviews, planning poker, or some other agile ceremony and the same sort of effect occurs.
A twenty-minute call probably costs me an hour in prep and follow-up and resuming a task, but not a whole day.
> does anyone else have their entire day sidelined by a 10-minute call? is that common?
It's extremely common for me.
It really comes down to the point made in the article. If you have five or six calls already, the marginal cost of one more call is very low. If you have no calls, the marginal cost of one more call is very high.
I used to be like that early in my career around 25. By now I am nearly 40 and that doesn’t remotely cross my mind. I’ve had to do so many social events that I am numb to it. It used to cause tons of anxiety/rumination though. When in doubt vape hella weed and you will forget about your worries. That seems to be the solution to all of my life’s problems.
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
I have the opposite experience. Phone calls almost always leave me feeling that something important has been left out. But there is no record so I can't re-read it to find out if I forgot or if it was just not mentioned. Luckily I rarely had to deal with such things because most of my work required written specifications and technical standards anyway, plus our teams were scattered in widely different time zones so the windows for live contacts were small.
It's very easy today to transcribe and summarize every call that you have.
>It's much more difficult to detect or correct misunderstandings over text.
I really couldn't disagree more strongly. I think it's much easier to correct misunderstandings over text. In a spoken discussion, there is a high degree of temporal entropy - the longer it's been since you made a point, the worse my recollection of your exact point may be. Detail and nuance is lost. But if you write your point down, I can refer to it at any point without any real loss of information.
In my experience, it's relatively common for two people to leave a spoken discussion thinking they have a strong, shared understanding, and only much later do they realize that's not the case.
yeah i agree. i’ve had so many instances where i’ve got off a call and then a week later the person
* has a fundamentally different understanding of the facts discussed [0]
* has forgotten the important facts even when they were highlighted as important
* has completely forgotten most of the conversation, sometimes even forgetting we had a conversation
* has just made some shit up in their head that was never even talked about
… and once again i’d have to go over the whole thing again for an hour, so we’re back where we started a week later. this is normal “fuzzy human brain stuff”. people forget details over the course of a week, especially new details.
but yeah; if it’s not written down it doesn’t exist is my mantra now.
[0]: note to say this was not because they went and spoke to someone else and got more detail, other opinions etc. the detail would just get warped in their brain over the course of a week.
I work with stakeholders that come from different backgrounds (different countries, non-engineers). No way that we can get aligned using just text. Or if we try, it will take a tremendous amount of back and forth, annoying everyone in the process.
I'd much rather talk for 30~60 mins and get everything hashed out. It also allows you to build rapport, so next time it will be much easier to do something together again.
I'm all for fewer (and smaller) meetings, but there is a time and place for synchronous communication. Especially quick informal communication can be incredibly high leverage. Optimizing for heads down time is great if everyone knows exactly what they should be heads down on and thinks the same way, but that is not always the case.
If you call yourself a manager--which is a questionable role at startups--then you need to be optimizing for the entire output of the team. Rigidly declaring everything must be async text is no better than scrum by numbers.
This reminds me of another HN post where someone complains that they don't want extraneous information in their emails. No "Hey, how are you?", no "I know you're busy, but...", just straight to the point: "Send me the TPS report by EoD."
To me this is just a case of, "I hate X and prefer Y, therefore Y is correct and X is wrong."
It makes me wonder about times when I've confused my own preferences for managerial wisdom. I need to not dash off a blog post about how "I've finally figured it out" until at least two other people have tried my prescription and found it helpful.
I completely agree with you. I was just writing about my approach to project management and manage teams. It works perfectly for me. I suggest this approach at the companies where I work, but I don't recommend it to absolutely everyone. Everyone manages projects in their own way.
Usually if you’re a manager, your job IS the meetings - or a large portion of it. You’re responsible for a remit and the performance of people inside the group and what is delivered. I think it’s unlikely that can be done of high quality without meetings, but ymmv
> your job IS the meetings
No
> You’re responsible for a remit and the performance of people inside the group
Yes
One is not the cause of the other.
In a world where most teams are remote and members don't see or meet each other, sometimes throughout their entire tenure, I think a bit of human contact is worth the time sacrifice. Corporate productivity is does not trump this in my opinion.
I write an email with extensive detail, but none of the recipients read a single line. They expect a call invite from me to read it out to them. People find it easier to hear things from other than read the same, if the option os hearing out is available. Q&A is another thing. You can avoid Q&A only if you are fully aware everyone's context. Otherwise questions sprig up from their own context which may not have been addressed in your email.
It really depends on the people on the team. If they prefer to call each other and hear each other's voices, there's no need to push them to read emails. If you need people to read text, then you need a different kind of team. Every team simply needs its own management style.
People like calls because there is no accountability. "Oh, I was just spitballing" or "This is how I interpreted what they said despite doing a left turn at Albuquerque". An email or memo can be skimmed, or searched, for context thereby holding people's feet to a proverbial fire. Even if a call is being recorded for posterity, each party on the call runs the risk of inciting the ire of whoever was forced to listen and judge both participants. Nobody wins because someone was forced to listen to ten minutes of meaningless crap that could have been an email, much like a YouTube video intending to be helpful but has 5 minutes of sponsor shout-outs, like, rate, and subscribe, an unnecessary explainer before getting to the topic at hand that some Bulgarian uploaded ten years ago and lasts fewer than ninety seconds.
You can work without calls for sure and choose to avoid them if that works for you, please don't be in the position of managing team for the teams sake. This is a blatant misunderstanding of how the teams are built and run. Being in a role and doing a good job in your role are completely two different things.
If one wants to be a good manager then you do not have the luxury of being in good or bad mood, you are required to context switch between more than one person with entirely different motivation and problems.
If you don't like calls, then ask the person requesting it to email/message you want you want to discuss and any decisions that you're hoping to make it from it before accepting it. It's not much, but at least you now have a focus for the call. If you disagree that a call is needed, tell them and request to handle it over async comm lines.
It's possible the other party is dealing with some complex or ambiguous and a call is often helpful to talk through and get them focused quickly. If you still hate calls though, as them to send a write up summary of the call and continue any further conversations that way.
There are so many ways to handle these interactions with just a little give and take.
+1 - So many times you can avoid the meeting by simply asking the person to specify the topic. Then often it turns out you can clarify their big topic either directly over chat or its not a topic for you at all..
The majority of the software development related communications are trivial enough, emotionless, and do not require calls, but there are cases where one quick call resolves ambiguity much faster than hours of typing.
While I do know a feeling of dreading the upcoming call, especially if this is a call that I know won't be useful or rewarding for me personally ("let's quickly go through this infinite list of jira tickets", "let's do a quick round table"), it's important to remember that texting, including all sorts of corporate messengers, is one of the worst media to transmit emotions. Seeing another person's face while talking to them and their reactions to your jokes or struggles is sometimes as important as the message being transmitted. Of course, the camera must be turned on for this to work.
This seems like a version of: https://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html but taken to extreme dogmatic-ness.
I get it - I’ve fixed problems like this before and you’re so excited you found a hammer, now everything looks like a nail.
> a 10-minute call can cost me several hours of focus. And I might spend the entire day thinking about it.
As a manager, you should learn to change this about yourself rather than imposing your work style on your team.
> As a manager, you should learn to change this about yourself rather than imposing your work style on your team.
I think we need a different approach here. I shouldn't have to change anything about myself, because we're slaves to our habits. I shouldn't force this on people who don't want to work this way. I just need to work with teams that are willing to work this way. And so far, I've always managed to find such teams and such people.
When I've been an engineering manager my policy has always been that I can work on code but only if that code is not on the critical path to shipping something my team is responsible for.
That's because management is an interruption-driven position. You just can't guarantee you can get 2-4 hours of productive, uninterrupted time.
Which means you shouldn't take on engineering responsibilities which, if delayed, will hurt your team.
So I'd still build stuff but it would be internal tools, or exploratory prototypes, or stuff that was absolutely not linked to any deadlines.
As far as I can tell coding agents have changed this quite a bit: I know a lot of engineering managers who are getting back into code now because they can carve out 30 minutes, and 30 minutes is now enough time to get something useful done.
I still think most managers should stay off the critical path to production though, at most organizations.
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
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.
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.
This is why I dislike most wartime analogies. Most day jobs just aren't that urgent or important.
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.
- 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 even remember the days when dailies were actually held standing up in the office.
I switched my team to text based daily updates submitted anytime before ~10am.
A nice perk was it gave people the option to do it at the end of the day to help plan their following day so they hit the ground running in the morning. It was especially useful for Mondays where people spent time filling dead air on calls trying to remember what they were doing on Friday.
Everyone could see what was happening, stalled work and people going off track were really obvious if the updates weren't specific enough. "still working on" and "I couldn't solve it so I'm going try and run git bisect over 10 years of commits to see where it breaks"
Management, allergic to looking in Jira, were happy that they were getting their status updates and we could all stay in the zone for the whole morning.
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.
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.
I am an introvert myself - but sometimes it’s good to get out of your comfort zone.
It is so comforting to deal with known unknowns particularly when the unknown unknowns are the ones that get you.
Sad world.
Seems like the author has anxiety issues. Not much else of substance in the post.
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.
Me too. And I love it
Is this feeling about a call being such a potential meteor strike on your day normal and acceptable? I’ve always been of the mind it’s a skill I need to improve, but this reads like it’s an acceptable but insurmountable personality quirk to work around, am I too much of a perfectionist and stressing myself out? Feels like a soft skill but maybe I’m just burning myself out trying to get good at everything.
So much time more to play Doom…
What I have learned is that there are different people and project managing strategies for differently competent or motivated people.
Purpose driven mature developers do not need complicated project management or Jira. Famously, the Google Chrome team is an example. All the ceremony is only for plebs like us who are somewhat of cattle that need constant guidance.
> But many years ago I gave up Scrum completely in my teams. What’s more, over time I almost stopped coming across startups where Scrum is used in its classic form at all. Many distributed teams are gradually moving toward an async approach ...
It is my personal opinion that Scrum/Agile is just a rather dramatic/over-the-top system for fixing dysfunctional teams that have fallen into poor or absent communication anti-patterns.
(I also think the general trend towards async among distributed teams is that more people have gone through this and have picked up the "better" communication habits.)
After you've done it for a while you start to find that many of the individuals are talking to each other without the various contrivances.
Planning poker isn't really about project sizing, it's about surfacing issues that the team members might not find out about if they don't talk to each other. I've been on teams where someone has spent 2 months working on something only to find that someone else had 90% of the work done in a private branch.
After the third of fourth time during planning poker that someone is reminded that they need to consider the testing/docs aspect they start to factor that in without being prompted.
The daily standup is similar. "I'm going to frobnicate the foobar today" and someone will say "Ah, have you spoken to Alice in that other team as she did the same thing with Bob's team last week, she's got a load of scripts that should save you a load of time."
Retrospectives are about acknowledging people who did good work, what worked well within the team, and also raising the things that held people back. If you have a good team leader they should be wondering why on Earth this is the first time they're hearing about any of this stuff. (A bad team leader will continue to blunder on not learning anything and being blissfully unaware that they're missing the really big neon signs, or they'll find some other way to dismiss the concerns/findings.)
Eventually you may get to a point where there is very little face to face communication required because the team starts to use the async communication systems properly, they communicate freely between team members and also upwards. But this is often a precarious situation, it doesn't take much for the boat to be rocked, new people coming in, trusted people leaving, new projects, new directions, unrealistic deadlines, etc. Every so often it requires more communication than before to get things back on track.
Once you're over the "scrum/agile solves all" hill people tend to pick/choose what continues to add value, and they discard the rest. (For the teams I've worked on in the past it was the "don't interrupt or change course mid sprint" rule that worked best for us - so many times the urgency had disappeared once we had got to the end of the sprint and we'd been saved from ultimately unnecessary distractions.)
Back to the management style in the article, even though I could work somewhere with little or no regular verbal communication I know I would quickly find I absolutely despised it.
I've done long solo projects in the past with no real colleagues or technical leadership/reporting. I found it far less rewarding than being part of a team (although it was often more financially rewarding). I get that some people thrive on this kind of thing and I'm happy for them. Every so often I like to go deep on something but how long I can tolerate this for is becoming shorter and shorter as I get older. There's a big difference between going a full day or so in focus/flow mode to extending this for days/weeks/longer.
I used to seek out 1:1s with random people in the company. I'd join the "watercooler" video call a few times a week to just chat random stuff with random people. As for async comms, although we were all good at starting off with well thought out full initial message/question on Slack (not just a "hello" and then silence) many of these were better off resolved via a quick video call once it was clear that async wasn't the most efficient method. Pretending or hoping that everyone is so eloquent, clear and exact with their language that you can do everything async is just fantasy in my experience. If the question was raised in a channel (rather than a DM) then someone would go back and provide a brief summary so that anyone finding the initial conversation by search didn't just hit a "let's jump on a call" cliffhanger with no resolution. (Then the company grows big enough that Slack retention policies become a limiting factor.)
I've definitely worked with people who can work with little or no interaction but even in workplaces with a greater than average concentration of introverts and neuro-divergence such people (who can work like that) are in the great minority (again, IMHO). Most people work better with direct access to empathy, reassurance and even just someone to listen to them ranting. The trick is to find the right balance as too much communication can be stifling, but I'd rather be in that situation and working on dialing it back.