Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nimitz14 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com