I work remote and in my context a quick call is always a video call, which tbh feels low key nice to interact with coworkers.
Usually they are having an issue and need to share the screen, or are showing me a document they prepared and are explaining their reasoning for feedback, or I had an idea for their issue and I wanted to explain them with some pseudocode… I much prefer quick “calls” where I can show my screen than text, presenting ideas and hearing feedback is sooo much better (not only faster but better) if you can see the face of the person you are working with.
Texting feels like a sad proposition knowing a significant portion of the US population can’t read beyond the 6th grade level.
I’m often in a situation where it’s harder to type and I need immediate answers. Some people just sit on messages so phone call it is.
I don’t send the “free to talk?” messages though
I work in municipal development. When I want to call you instead of emailing you, it’s because what I’m going to say is something pretty frank that you’d rather not have a written record of. You, Mr Civil Engineer, don’t want your client to do an Open Records request on me and find the email where I had to explain to you, in detail, that water flows downhill and that your drainage plan shouldn’t show water moving parallel to contour lines.
Me too, thanks.
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.
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.
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 writingThe 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.
I guess I’m weird for preferring a 2-5 minute call over what would be 15-20 minutes of back-and-forth over text. 🤷♂️
For me the times are usually the other way around. I have coworkers who’d need two sentences for the actual question but wrap it in 15 minutes of useless small talk when they are on the phone.
Avoiding my calls because verbal conversations make you anxious? Fair enough, I will spend an embarrassingly long time to write, re-read, delete, re-write, re-read several times, re-delete, re-write a third time by blending versions one and two, re-read and realize I didn’t explain something, re-write and realize that something else is irrelevant, re-read and realize it wasn’t irrelevant because two paragraphs later etc. until I have a message that can’t possibly be misread, send it, and then agonize about writing something that was misread until I hear back from you while pathologically refreshing my inbox.
Saying you can’t talk now but scheduling a time for me later? Totally fair, you have a whole ass job outside of my stupid problems, if they can wait I will wait and if they can’t I’ll go back to paragraph 1.
Avoiding my calls because you think I’m dumb but won’t just tell me how I’m being dumb so I can try to make improvements? Congrats, my new work project is making your work life a living hell until you either quit or schedule a call with me where we can discuss preferred communication styles and how to demonstrate mutual respect.
Sure, we can have that call right now. After the call, I’ll ask you to summarize the follow-up steps in an email
This is giving “can’t place your own order at the drive-thru vibes.”
I can literally feel myself deflating when I get these, like it’s a huge involuntary sigh accompanied by the classic heart-sinking…
…followed by a deep breath and a “Sure! 👍”
I have forced several people to text me.
“Yeah, so I’ve got an issue with my computer, and I am getting an error message”
“What does the error message say?”
“Dont really know, lots of gibberish”
“Would you mind reading that gibberish to me”
“I’ll send you a screenshot”
“Allright, I’ll look at it once I got it, and come back to you”
At which point I will hang up, wait 10 minutes for their email, look if its something urgent and if it isn’t, wait about an hour or two before emailing them back my answer.
I hate random calls but I’m also usually very time efficient with answering things, so despite my own usual aversion to calls I find work is the only place I’ll ask if I can quick demo/show something to get input. Lasts a total of 3 minutes, keeps me on-topic to my work, and takes less time than waiting for their slow typing back while I’ll be distracted in typical ADHD fashion and start trying to discover if my laptop dock can make my hand cream melt.
Guess I’m just a chatty Cathy. I like the phone (as long as I somewhat like the person on the line).
Too many people of my generation worked the phone mines and I think the trauma has not healed
Either send me an email and you’ll get an answer when you get an answer, or come see me in person. Phone calls and text messages are annoying as shit.
How is a phone call any different from speaking in person?
You’re talking to each other, only the phone call is more convenient as it can be placed from anywhere :-D
the phone call is more convenient as it can be placed from anywhere
And that’s half the problem. My job deals with things that physically exist, and if you can’t be bothered to get your ass in here to actually look at it, I can’t be bothered to deal with whatever your problem of the day is (yes I’m getting bitter about engineers sitting at home telling me “BuT iT wOrKs iN CAD”).
Also, in person conversations are far more effective than phone conversations. Human communication is far more than just purely verbal.
Human communication is far more than just purely verbal.
Both my wife and I are fluent in (unfortunately different) sign languages. Fortunately the basics are the same because we end up mostly communicating in classifiers when we sign. But like, the words are maybe a third of what goes into in person communicative.
I’ve upvoted you but it’s different for me. I hate ad hoc calls but have no issue if someone comes over to my desk. Terrible is I’m basically remote full time…
How is an email that different from a text? aside from desktop acess I guess.
Email tends to have less expectation for immediate response and doesn’t have unavoidable “message read” notifications. Most importantly, in my experience at least, people tend to put more details into an email. Texts, teams messages, etc seem to cause people to try and speak in single sentences, and then I have to play 21 questions to drag the info out of them.
Texts, teams messages, etc seem to cause people to try and speak in single sentences
Oh my god this. I’ve gotten some well natured teasing from co-workers about taking a while to type multiple sentence teams messages (they’ll see the typing icon in the full team group chat), but when the alternative is a back and forth that doesn’t need to happen, or them having to wait a few minutes from first message until the idea is complete, I think it’s the best approach.
You also probably have better search and organization features with email. I don’t work in office settings so i really don’t email much.
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