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Comment by AHOHA | Hacker News Reader

I just never understood how come “tech” companies never used the same concept used within their products, async communications!! Sync communication is a blocking one, you need to block all involved parties to discuss X that most of the times is useless, just use async ones, I email/text/or even video record when I have the time, and you respond when you do, not really that hard!

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Because a lot of work needs sync and is inefficient to do in an async manner. Even for software engineers, let alone other people centric roles. Most obvious example would be designing nuances of a complex system. That discussion is needed at least once every 4-6 weeks and I wish we are around a whiteboard at that time.

Async work is more difficult, but not more inefficient. It is the difference between putting a lot of work into an email that perfectly explains something, vs shooting a quick email and offload the effort to the recipient.

In this case communication ability is crucial, since it requires written documents. Many people (managers and developers) lack the discipline, patience, and incentives to adopt this style of work.

> Many people (managers and developers) lack the discipline, patience, and incentives to adopt this style of work.

Correct. So what do we do then? Changing people is hard. And communication styles are ingrained after a certain age.

Also, even the best communicators are finding it hard to do some tasks async, like designing a complex system.

> like designing a complex system

If kernel devs can do it so can 90% of companies, if there is a will.

This seems to me like a culture matter that needs to come from the top, though.

Too many details to communicate and it’s poorly structured (if at all). If you miss something important you’re paying the roundtrip which takes hours/days, if you try to communicate everything it’s too much overhead

The kind of communication we’re talking about is heavily two-way and dependent on the previous signal. Each individual signal is low in content, so the biggest determinant of throughout is latency.

Async is great for a lot of communication and very efficient but sometimes you just need to tie someone down and get on the same page in a way that takes ages over async.

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