Honestly I think it’s wild people are so upset about this. Typing back and forth a ton of DMs sucks. Phone calls just get things accomplished. That’s my experience as a software engineer at least.
What phone calls accomplish is: that moment of “hold on I didn’t catch/understand that/i have a query” is immediate. Sometimes that’s better, sometimes that’s worse.
For it’s not so much that it’s going to be an unnecessary call than that the person just doesn’t want to collect their thoughts or (worse) doesn’t want to say what they want in writing. It’s usually going to be some ask that’s completely apart from anything I’ve been thinking about in the past 5-10 days, might be sketchy, and they apparently seem to think it’s urgent and/or nuanced, yet they’re just going to completely hold out on providing context and time that would let me be prepared for whatever pile of shit they’re about to dump on me.
If you can’t communicate it to me in a slack message or two, there’s a very real possibility that either you don’t know what you want, or that I can’t help you with it on a cold call.
Most of the time people can read faster than you can talk, by the time someone finished spaking ~20 words i have already finished in half the time the (avarage) person has finished to speak.
Bonus points: some people can just communicate better by writing
On the flip side, it takes longer to type the text than it does to say it, plus verbal communication can be two ways even when the talking is mostly on one side because you can add acknowledgements when you understand without interrupting or you can interrupt when something is said that you don’t follow.
I do better with text myself, but communication is something where you need to meet in the middle, assuming you’re open to communication in the first place. If you just don’t want to communicate, then the easiest to blow off is the preferred method. Which actually is another reason I personally like text communication, because I can ignore it in the moment and get back to it later, but you can do this with calls by asking to schedule a call instead of taking it right then.
The thing is, people usually suck at explaining themselves… so instead of a <5 minute telephone interrogation, it’s suddenly a 15+ minute back-and-forth chat. But yes, I’d much rather answer a quick well-detailed text question.
9 times out of 10 it’s a stupid question that they could have typed into Confluence to get the answer though. I gatekeep all of these requests with "Sure, I'm fairly busy now, but lets schedule something for a little later today when I have some time. In the meantime, can you put your question in the chat here in case I need to look something up? Thanks"
Sure this won’t apply to everyone, but if the effort of searching it in confluence is harder than arranging a call your documentation is not structured properly.
Honestly I think it’s wild people are so upset about this. Typing back and forth a ton of DMs sucks. Phone calls just get things accomplished. That’s my experience as a software engineer at least.
What phone calls accomplish is: that moment of “hold on I didn’t catch/understand that/i have a query” is immediate. Sometimes that’s better, sometimes that’s worse.
For it’s not so much that it’s going to be an unnecessary call than that the person just doesn’t want to collect their thoughts or (worse) doesn’t want to say what they want in writing. It’s usually going to be some ask that’s completely apart from anything I’ve been thinking about in the past 5-10 days, might be sketchy, and they apparently seem to think it’s urgent and/or nuanced, yet they’re just going to completely hold out on providing context and time that would let me be prepared for whatever pile of shit they’re about to dump on me.
If you can’t communicate it to me in a slack message or two, there’s a very real possibility that either you don’t know what you want, or that I can’t help you with it on a cold call.
Most of the time people can read faster than you can talk, by the time someone finished spaking ~20 words i have already finished in half the time the (avarage) person has finished to speak.
Bonus points: some people can just communicate better by writing
On the flip side, it takes longer to type the text than it does to say it, plus verbal communication can be two ways even when the talking is mostly on one side because you can add acknowledgements when you understand without interrupting or you can interrupt when something is said that you don’t follow.
I do better with text myself, but communication is something where you need to meet in the middle, assuming you’re open to communication in the first place. If you just don’t want to communicate, then the easiest to blow off is the preferred method. Which actually is another reason I personally like text communication, because I can ignore it in the moment and get back to it later, but you can do this with calls by asking to schedule a call instead of taking it right then.
The thing is, people usually suck at explaining themselves… so instead of a <5 minute telephone interrogation, it’s suddenly a 15+ minute back-and-forth chat. But yes, I’d much rather answer a quick well-detailed text question.
Exactly
I’ll instantly forget everything we talked about the second I hang up.
This, it’s not necessarily about efficiency as much as it is having it in writing, for me.
Yeah, I’m definitely the same way.
When I tell people to submit a ticket, it’s not to make them do extra work, it’s so I’ll actually remember to do it.
9 times out of 10 it’s a stupid question that they could have typed into Confluence to get the answer though. I gatekeep all of these requests with
"Sure, I'm fairly busy now, but lets schedule something for a little later today when I have some time. In the meantime, can you put your question in the chat here in case I need to look something up? Thanks"Sure this won’t apply to everyone, but if the effort of searching it in confluence is harder than arranging a call your documentation is not structured properly.
Most of the time, they didn’t even try. I’ve copy/pasted their exact question before and the answer was in one of the top 5 articles.