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I believe that you have different preferences. And I'm happy to take your word that you don't have social anxiety. However, loving socializing doesn't prove it. I loved it and also often got anxious. Now I love it as much but am not as anxious, which has made the social parts of collaborative work easier for me.

As to the second bit, I'm sorry to be contradictory, but having a specific, in-person time where asking for help is normal and expected lowers the barriers for literally everybody, because the particular barriers being lowered include costs like "figuring out how to contact the person", "being concerned about catching them at the right time", "contacting the person", and "delay in receiving a reply".

If you have a different approach you like better, that's great! The way a team works should match the needs of the people on the team, and of the team culture. There are plenty of teams out there, and good work gets done lots of different ways. I hope everybody ends up on one that works for them.

That said, "personality" is not an immutable set of characteristics, and not all of the way people express their personalities are equally good for collaborative work. As an introvert who also wants to get things done at the scale only a team can provide, I'm just always going to have to stretch myself.

I may also decide that I can only stretch myself so far, and so my limits may mean that there are kinds of work I'm just not well suited for. E.g., large companies demand too much of what I think of as "political" behaviors for me to find the work sustainable. So although I think we should generally try to honor each other's preferences, we must also be honest about the fact that not all preferences are equally suitable for every kind of work.




I disagree with your (in my view) far too prescriptive certainty that a lot of synchronous communication is universally best for collaboration. It is a common view (especially among managers) that I believe is simply wrong, and based on vibes rather than empiricism.

It's not universally wrong though. All I'm saying is that it isn't universally right. It just isn't universally anything. A good manager or lead should be able to look around on some teams and realize, hmmm, we aren't getting much value out of all these synchronous touch points, and on other teams they should realize, hmmm, we could use some more frequent synchronization here. But a manager or lead coming in with their own prescriptive preference for daily synchronous meetings, and failing to notice if they aren't valuable, is not doing their best work, IMO.

I have been on both kinds of teams. Indeed, right now I'm on a team for which I think daily morning meetings are working really great, regardless of my own personal preferences. But I've also been on teams where they are working terribly and only the manager is happy with the situation, and that's bad.


For me it's based on a pretty simple feedback-loops model. The length of the feedback loops limits all sorts of important things, especially external responsiveness, adaptation, learning, and error correction. Collaboration requires co-laboring.

There are circumstances where collaboration isn't particularly necessary, of course, so maybe that's what you're looking for.

I agree of course that there are plenty of ways to have bad collaboration even with short feedback loops, as in your last example. It's not a panacea. Nothing is.




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