I manage teams without a single call(orchidfiles.com) |
I manage teams without a single call(orchidfiles.com) |
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
This is an obviously poor policy.
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.
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.
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.
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.