Comment by mmarq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmarq | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, many people prefer meetings over asynchronous communication because they can't write. I'm not referring to grammar or to spelling, but to being able to communicate effectively without a continuous feedback from the recipient of the message. When these people are asked to write documentation, the result is usually very sparse text with too many bullet points, table and images. Good asynchronous communication requires a high degree of introspection, clarity of mind and empathy, that not everybody has. A meeting allows you to pass your message through successive approximations, as in adjusting what you are saying based on the reactions of the listeners and being pushed in the right direction by their questions. Unfortunately it is also much more time consuming, because everybody has to stop whatever they are doing and listen for 1-2 hours, while reading 2 pages of text would taken them 30 minutes and they could have scheduled it at their convenience.

I don't see much of a difference between older vs younger generations nor between native and non-native English speakers.

I'm open to accept that it's just my own experience and that it doesn't generalize.

I don't fully agree. I'm an ok writer, and don't mind writing documentation. But it takes time for me to write a good email. Like you say, you need clarity in your head. So basically you have to clear things out on your own before you can finish the document.

Compare this to a meeting: you just say what you are thinking at the moment. Others might join in and raise points you haven't thought of. So you start from there and readon further. Basically a meeting is clearing things out in a group, which sometimes is more efficient.

I prefer documentation with sparse text and lots of diagrams and images. It provides the high level context and I can fill in any gaps with a short follow up conversation.

For most people, the high level information is all they really need. The few who need to dig in more can hash out the details in a smaller more effective meeting without wasting everyone else's time.

Do you find it easier to learn something new from pictures and bullet points or from a long-form document?

That kind of documentation is not necessarily bad, but it depends heavily on context, which is not always shared across readers. So when the author and those they talked to are not available anymore, it quickly becomes useless.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think people should write War and Peace. Usually a good 2-3 paragraph introduction improves the quality of a document/email significantly. There you can provide the context that is necessary to fully understand the pictures and lists and diagrams you add after.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com