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Comment by nitrogen | Hacker News Reader

Voice is just faster.

As someone who grew up more immersed in the digital world than the average, I want to point out that this isn't a universal truth. With practice, concise and clear text can convey more accurate and more useful information than a low-SNR vocal conversation.

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It's not about transferred information fidelity, it's about short feedback loops, the ability to interrupt, and the knowledge (on both sides) of attention.

Since concise and clear statements can be made in both media, the difference is entirely in the limitations of the transport medium, and written text lacks all of the characteristics I earlier mentioned.

The ability to interrupt is what I most dislike about voice. IRC/IM/Slacj/HipChat/whatever can provide just as short of a feedback cycle, and people can be inattentive in voice calls as well, which is a greater waste of time due to their synchronous nature.

You don't phone someone for a simple message, you do it because you know a back-and-forth conversation is needed. Which is always significantly faster than text.

If there is back and forth required then voice just isn't the way to go. It's too fast for that. This is why email always wins out over voice.

This is just not true. If you've ever worked remote and need to work through a problem there is nothing faster then getting on the phone and doing a screen share just as if you were face to face.

I respectfully disagree. Nothing feels like a greater waste of time when working remotely than when someone can't be bothered to think about their problem enough to ask via text and demands a phone call. Maybe it's just the teams I've worked with, but voice calls almost invariably end up as 99% noise, taking forever for people to figure out what they actually want to ask and never getting to the point.

Synchronous voice communication is much higher bandwidth than text. Probably by an order of magnitude. And it allows nuance (tone, inflection, emotion) that is not possible with pure text (kind of like how emoji adds a dimension to text that isn't really possible in its absence). Surely you can imagine topics that could benefit from this increased bandwidth, no?

I can imagine such topics, but nearly none of them occur in a software development workplace. As I said before, it has been my experience that the extra bandwidth of a voice channel is nearly always wasted. IMO the best case for voice calls as a developer is brief daily status/standup meetings, and you've probably seen how many people around here dislike those.

I think what's really going on is that people who grew up analog don't see textual decisionmaking as "real", and need a familiar voice call to make things feel "official".

I have to disagree. I will have been working remotely for 5 years in November. Yes, there is a time and place for getting on the phone, like for last resort trouble shooting; but that is really a small part of communication in my experience. When initial trouble shooting, architecting, planning, or negotiating you need that time to investigate and consider your response.

For me, my team is mostly +15 or +8 hours from me. So relying on voice is just impractical.

You've added an extraneous variable. Nobody's saying that you can't be more unclear on a telephone than through an email or text. The difference between "concise and clear" and "low-SNR" is definitional, no matter what the media is.

Which is too much to ask from the average person.

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