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Comment by ebiester | Hacker News Reader

Recently, with my husband's work, I saw three one-hour meetings turn into over 200 emails because someone doing the work refused to get on the phone and misunderstood the written word.

I am skeptical that email is that much more productive for many people.

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Although I've been using networked email as a primary communications channel for my entire computing life (since ~1978), I did work for a couple of large companies before it was widely adopted and you simply cannot imagine the amount of infrastructure required to produce and move physical paper documents around, not to mention disseminating mass communications. Moving that all online was a massive improvement, even with its drawbacks.

Now it's been ubiquitous for a while, people now try to deal with the drawbacks.

The cliche of 'started in the mailroom' is expired by now but it was there for a reason. Businesses had a whole division whose job was to collect, shuffle, and deliver manila envelopes. Someone would come around with a push cart and drop them in the inbox.

Working in the mailroom was an entry-level, menial job, but one which rewarded intelligence and afforded a unique view into the function of the company.

I've observed similar issues: https://seliger.com/2015/08/02/how-computers-have-made-grant...

Lowering the friction of process often results in more process, but not more result.

Depends on the context. Just yesterday, I called the city parking, because I had made a payment the previous day, but I never received confirmation. After the separate ten minute queues just to be hung up on really frustrated me. I sent a short email to an email address I could find, and they fixed my issue within two hours of sending it.

Email has its place for lower priority communication where fast response and interaction is not important.

Text chat is good for interaction but it can bog down with a lot of back and forth and sometimes the meaning is hard to get across. The latency while better than email is still slow and people will often not ask questions that they should.

When those channels are not enough I'll initiate a quick voice/video call with one or a few people to go over a specific topic. Generally we can clarify the situation through some quick questions and answers. The latency is low and answers often invoke other questions. You can usually reach an agreement very quickly that way.

For sure! I’m definitely hoping to see more workers and employees used to short conference calls while growing up on Skype and Discord. So perhaps as the new generations come into the workforce we’ll see it much more. Definitely seems like I’m much more efficient with my peers while discussing stuff over voice than text.

> refused to get on the phone

So your solution to this attitude is to insist more on meetings and phone calls ?

Did anyone ask that person why they came to hate getting on the phone that much ?

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