> To be clear, I am encouraging more communication, not less communication. For internally aligned teams, you get more, and better, communication through a system that replaces daily standups with asynchronous collaboration.
Coming from a perspective of managing distributed teams: Asynchronous communication is a decent way to replace synchronous standups if (and only if) everyone involved can respond in a timely manner and is willing to schedule a synchronous discussion when necessary.
The pitfall of asynchronous communication is when team members start trying to force everything to be asynchronous. In many cases, getting on a call with someone or even just taking 10-20 minutes to have a synchronous chat is all it takes, but the team needs to be willing and ready to go synchronous when necessary.
Purely asynchronous environments sound great when you just want to go heads-down and work on something, but the downsides become obvious when people start getting blocked on responses from other people for sometimes days at a time while async emails ping-pong back and forth instead of a 10 minute conversation that could clear everything up.
Of course, the other extreme is also bad: If everything is forced into synchronous conversations over chat or calls then you’ve given license to the team for everyone to disrupt each other all day. There needs to be some guidance about what’s appropriate for communications and interruptions as well as some authority for individuals to push back and delay meetings that interfere too much with their work.
> In many cases, getting on a call with someone or even just taking 10-20 minutes to have a synchronous chat is all it takes
I have only found that to be beneficial if you work with horrible communicators who struggle to get their thoughts out without repeating themselves in a multitude of ways.
In the age of testing candidates to death, ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater if they cannot calculate how many golf balls fit on a bus in O(n) time using a reversed linked list, why are you hiring horrible communicators in the first place?
Having had the luxury of once working with a team of effective communicators, the idea of needing a 10-20 minute call would have been laughable.
> I have only found that to be beneficial if you work with horrible communicators who struggle to get their thoughts out without repeating themselves in a multitude of ways.
That's true, that's just around 99% of the people, while it's useless for the 1% that can't communicate even with synchronous audiovisual aid.
True, although it is a learned skill so the only reason that is the case is because they haven't taken the time to learn. Which is fine. But, given the tech industry's obsession with hiring only those who have learned rare skills, it is an odd exclusion given that this quality it is arguably the most important facet of effective team software development.
> Asynchronous communication is a decent way to replace synchronous standups if (and only if) everyone involved can respond in a timely manner and is willing to schedule a synchronous discussion when necessary.
This is the true measure of what makes someone a good team member.
> the team needs to be willing and ready to go synchronous when necessary.
Who gets to decide what counts as "necessary"? This philosophy sets the value of my time and concentration to 0 relative to the person calling a team meeting.
Coming from a perspective of managing distributed teams: Asynchronous communication is a decent way to replace synchronous standups if (and only if) everyone involved can respond in a timely manner and is willing to schedule a synchronous discussion when necessary.
The pitfall of asynchronous communication is when team members start trying to force everything to be asynchronous. In many cases, getting on a call with someone or even just taking 10-20 minutes to have a synchronous chat is all it takes, but the team needs to be willing and ready to go synchronous when necessary.
Purely asynchronous environments sound great when you just want to go heads-down and work on something, but the downsides become obvious when people start getting blocked on responses from other people for sometimes days at a time while async emails ping-pong back and forth instead of a 10 minute conversation that could clear everything up.
Of course, the other extreme is also bad: If everything is forced into synchronous conversations over chat or calls then you’ve given license to the team for everyone to disrupt each other all day. There needs to be some guidance about what’s appropriate for communications and interruptions as well as some authority for individuals to push back and delay meetings that interfere too much with their work.