Occasionally I get this feeling for a large customer meeting or a public talk, because there are consequences and serious prep. But this is just trying to normalize extreme social anxiety and call it a management style.
One reason you get together to talk is so you can hash out details on potentially ambiguous topics, so you don't head in the wrong direction causing net negative contribution.
Another is that people are not automata. Humans require inspiration and motivation and you need to reinforce the vision of what you are building and why. Its also even sometimes a reasonable idea to ask about how their life is going and check up on their family and pets and career aspirations.
In general, some people should not be managers, and there is plenty of room in the world for super ICs.
And you need meetings to do all of this? There are so many other ways to communicate which you make more use of when you are less dependent on meetings. It's not a binary choice between meetings and extreme social anxiety.
Yes, "this meeting could have been an email", async communication and all that jazz. Nonetheless stating that a 10 minutes quick chat is going to be the center of that day for you definitely signals social anxiety.
It's important to show a client that you care by being there in person, it's important to see your coworkers once in a while and ask them how they're doing.
A call with your manager where they say "yes, I agree with everything you said - go ahead and do it, I trust you" can mean much more than the same thing said in a text message.
Like all team building I feel like the fundamental question is, “what works for this group of people?”
Rather than “teams with/without calls is superior,” and slamming every team you work with into it.
Richard Dawkins, coined the concept of extended phenotype which proposes that genes do not just build physical bodies, but actively shape the outside world to ensure their propagation.
That's because management is an interruption-driven position. You just can't guarantee you can get 2-4 hours of productive, uninterrupted time.
Which means you shouldn't take on engineering responsibilities which, if delayed, will hurt your team.
So I'd still build stuff but it would be internal tools, or exploratory prototypes, or stuff that was absolutely not linked to any deadlines.
As far as I can tell coding agents have changed this quite a bit: I know a lot of engineering managers who are getting back into code now because they can carve out 30 minutes, and 30 minutes is now enough time to get something useful done.
I still think most managers should stay off the critical path to production though, at most organizations.
I'd much rather talk for 30~60 mins and get everything hashed out. It also allows you to build rapport, so next time it will be much easier to do something together again.
If one wants to be a good manager then you do not have the luxury of being in good or bad mood, you are required to context switch between more than one person with entirely different motivation and problems.
But some teams, and some people, and some work is more effective with regular scheduled human interaction. People who need direction, guidance, or just to feel more physically connected with their work and team.
I'm so glad you are able to remove all "live human interaction" from your management style. I'd miss having a boss that felt like I was worth face-time. This feels like going too far for async work, I don't know how you wouldn't feel disconnected.
My biggest issue with this concept is time. You write your wall of text, I see that you've failed to account for some factor, so I write my wall of text. You don't completely understand my wall of text and ask for clarification. Back and forth, asynchronously. In a call this can be resolved in minutes. Over text this could take days
I really couldn't disagree more strongly. I think it's much easier to correct misunderstandings over text. In a spoken discussion, there is a high degree of temporal entropy - the longer it's been since you made a point, the worse my recollection of your exact point may be. Detail and nuance is lost. But if you write your point down, I can refer to it at any point without any real loss of information.
In my experience, it's relatively common for two people to leave a spoken discussion thinking they have a strong, shared understanding, and only much later do they realize that's not the case.
does anyone else have their entire day sidelined by a 10-minute call? is that common?
to me, it hints at something else, but i am not sure if i am the odd one out or not.
It's extremely common for me.
It really comes down to the point made in the article. If you have five or six calls already, the marginal cost of one more call is very low. If you have no calls, the marginal cost of one more call is very high.
It's possible the other party is dealing with some complex or ambiguous and a call is often helpful to talk through and get them focused quickly. If you still hate calls though, as them to send a write up summary of the call and continue any further conversations that way.
There are so many ways to handle these interactions with just a little give and take.
I switched my team to text based "stand up" style updates.
Everyone would submit them anytime before 10am. A nice perk is it allows devs to do it at the end of the day to help plan the following day. Especially useful for Mondays where people spend time remembering what they were doing on Friday.
Everyone could see what was happening, blockers were really obvious if the updates weren't specific enough; magic phrases such as "still working on", "investigating" without specifics.
Management, allergic to looking at the board in Jira, were happy that they were getting their precious status updates and we could stay in the zone.
But how do you find others developers like yourself ? Most people need calls. They might say they don't like it, but they're more productive once they have them. They need to feel there is a human on the other side that cares about the results, that is waiting for them and pushing them. Most people need deadlines, even if they're fake. They need to tell people around them they have to do X before Y, they wouldn't be able to justify what they're doing to themselves and their surrounding without that fake deadline. They wouldn't think about telling coworker about a similar piece of code or feature they're working on without that daily standup.
All those boring useless things, all those methods, those rules, those office politics, they're here for a reason
But as I age, I see that there are people out there that NEED to talk and to speak to other people. And of course, you have those doing micromanagement.
This is an obviously poor policy.
Are we avoiding leaving RF spectrum traces? Are we worried about compromised digital channels? What is the reasoning?
In 2026 I'd rather be fighting for the army that evaluates all options to come up with the most effective way to accomplish an objective rather than one that dogmatically clings to ineffective methods.
In other words: if the winning side uses letters and the losing side uses phones, I'd rather be on the letter writer's side.
There's a very strong "focus culture" which relies on the idea that work is not done in meetings. This is wrong. Progress comes in many forms.
I've seen many grotesque misunderstandings go through 30 iterations of confusion across teams because nobody is good at communicating clearly. Then one 20 minute in person meeting clears it up.
> I can’t even imagine a task or question that can’t be discussed over text.
Can't is a strong word. I can easily imagine, and the author earlier in the article did imagine, cases where someone does not want to discuss an issue over text. Issues like:
* I have broad concerns about the direction of the company and I'm not quite sure how to frame them.
* Coworker X keeps not doing the things that he's promised to do, to the point that I'm beginning to consider him untrustworthy.
* I need you to pay me more money, and I'm not explicitly threatening to quit yet, but I'd like to create some informal common knowledge that I could have a higher paying job next month if I wanted.
If you have a stable team where everyone's well-aligned on the roadmap, no personnel issues ever arise, and nobody's slacking? Sure, no calls can work. But without the calls you may not notice when those stop being true.