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.
If you work remotely, a certain fraction of managers always carry a suspicion: he is probably slacking off right now, maybe napping; let me call and check.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
OTOH, there are people who just don't retain information from hearing it. In college, it was useless for me to attend lectures without taking notes, I would immediately forget most of them. Now taking detailed notes and reviewing them at the end of the day, that was my superpower.
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.
Should I start working on something that requires a lot of active context memory at 9? What if I'm deep in it and then the calendar goes ding for the meeting and I need to get in the call mid-thought?
Can you just stop working on stuff, have a meeting, and pick up exactly where you left off with nothing lost?
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
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.
- 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.
> Text is low bandwidth, audio/video is high bandwidth
That's the same fallacy as "A picture is worth a thousand words."
I don't know what kind of software everyone commenting here is writing but in my career my customers provided written specifications and technical standards for what the software should do.
Now quite often they were incomplete, or wrong, or even completely unnecessary but there is no way a phone call however long can substitute for sending back the spec. annotated to point out all the ambiguities, misconceptions, and alternatives. If there was enough certainty in the spec. I might write a small proof of concept mock up of what I thought the user needed (not necessarily what they asked for) so that we would have something concrete to hang our discussions on.
Now we have something to discuss but it's probably better done on a large physical whiteboard in person after which a revised specification will be written and we go round the loop again until we have it thrashed out in sufficient detail to do a real implementation. Drawing pictures on the whiteboard of the physical machinery that the software was designing all too frequently revealed that the customer had an incomplete understanding of not only the software but also the physics of the target design or occasionally even of basic geometry.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 57.9 ms ] threadBut 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.
If you work remotely, a certain fraction of managers always carry a suspicion: he is probably slacking off right now, maybe napping; let me call and check.
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
This is an obviously poor policy.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Should I start working on something that requires a lot of active context memory at 9? What if I'm deep in it and then the calendar goes ding for the meeting and I need to get in the call mid-thought?
Can you just stop working on stuff, have a meeting, and pick up exactly where you left off with nothing lost?
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
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.
That's the same fallacy as "A picture is worth a thousand words."
I don't know what kind of software everyone commenting here is writing but in my career my customers provided written specifications and technical standards for what the software should do.
Now quite often they were incomplete, or wrong, or even completely unnecessary but there is no way a phone call however long can substitute for sending back the spec. annotated to point out all the ambiguities, misconceptions, and alternatives. If there was enough certainty in the spec. I might write a small proof of concept mock up of what I thought the user needed (not necessarily what they asked for) so that we would have something concrete to hang our discussions on.
Now we have something to discuss but it's probably better done on a large physical whiteboard in person after which a revised specification will be written and we go round the loop again until we have it thrashed out in sufficient detail to do a real implementation. Drawing pictures on the whiteboard of the physical machinery that the software was designing all too frequently revealed that the customer had an incomplete understanding of not only the software but also the physics of the target design or occasionally even of basic geometry.
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.
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.
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.