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Comment by qq66 | Hacker News Reader

There is only a small subset of organizations with a small subset of members tackling a small subset of problems that can achieve their goals fully asynchronously. For everything else, synchronous meetings will continue to be essential (and even those projects like Linux which seem to be fully asynchronous usually have one contributor who dominates the project and thus the communication overhead/latency problem isn't as taxing)

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>There is only a small subset of organizations with a small subset of members tackling a small subset of problems that can achieve their goals fully asynchronously.

Both this assumption and the gp's assumption are just that: assumptions. It's fascinating how a few years of half-hearted attempts with status quo management all too eager to revert to at-location is used as a way to support this.

It's still way too early to make such a bold statement.

That's because people suck at communication - especially programmers. I lead remote teams and it is totally possible. The only essential "meetings" we have are retrospectives in which we discuss how to work/communicate with each other better. Good communication requires a lot of energy, bad communication requires meetings. We only have meetings unless absolutely necessary, not some laughable "pop ins"

>That's because people suck at communication - especially programmers

It's everyone. Not 'especially' programmers. Everyone. Flip the tables and expect the other side to adapt to the context instead, and we'd be calling management terrible at communication. Software development seems fairly unique in expecting developers to bridge the gap instead of management, when such expectations are not put on several other fields. Regardless of the mental strain put on those professions.

Heck, it's stunning we have so many customer-facing type jobs in software development only to expect developers to adapt. The heck you getting paid for if you're not actually a mediator between two different contexts like, you know, almost every other field?

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