> But for me, it becomes the event my whole day starts to revolve around. I have to break out of my flow, put my tasks on hold, take the call, and then get back into context. In the end, a 10-minute call can cost me several hours of focus.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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 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.
Yeah, I'm totally in favor of minimizing calls. It's easier to reference text, and I have more time to formulate my thoughts. But calls have value, too.
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.
Yes, the "10-minute call becomes the event my whole day starts to revolve around" is very ADHD and/or autism coded (I'm non-neurotyopical and also mountain this molehill), and there's a lot of rationalization about this in the article. Being a manager means accommodating neurotypical people, too. I agree that the author should think hard about whether management is the best place for them.
When I've been an engineering manager my policy has always been that I can work on code but only if that code is not on the critical path to shipping something my team is responsible for.
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.
This ignores the human side of things - people want relationships, empathy and sometimes just to be listened to.
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.
I work with stakeholders that come from different backgrounds (different countries, non-engineers). No way that we can get aligned using just text. Or if we try, it will take a tremendous amount of back and forth, annoying everyone in the process.
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.
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.
Usually if you’re a manager, your job IS the meetings - or a large portion of it. You’re responsible for a remit and the performance of people inside the group and what is delivered. I think it’s unlikely that can be done of high quality without meetings, but ymmv
The best thing I ever did was switch my team to text based stand up updates.
Everyone would submit them anytime before 10am. A nice perk is it also allows devs to do it at the end of the day if they want and set up their upcoming day rather then trying to remember where they left off the day before.
Everyone could see what was happening, blockers were really obious if the updates weren't specific enough (still working on, continuing to work on).
Management who seemed to be allergic to looking at the board in Jira were happy that they were getting their precious status updates.
You can work without calls for sure and choose to avoid them if that works for you, please don't be in the position of managing team for the teams sake. This is a blatant misunderstanding of how the teams are built and run. Being in a role and doing a good job in your role are completely two different things.
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.
While I agree Scrum and agile are overkill and somewhat performative for the managers. I also like how OP gets that being an effective manager means understanding what the engineers are doing, as in, you rose through engineering into management, which is also a good thing!
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.
English is vague, even when accounting for that fact. It's much more difficult to detect or correct misunderstandings over text.
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 have the opposite experience. Phone calls almost always leave me feeling that something important has been left out. But there is no record so I can't re-read it to find out if I forgot or if it was just not mentioned. Luckily I rarely had to deal with such things because most of my work required written specifications and technical standards anyway, plus our teams were scattered in widely different time zones so the windows for live contacts were small.
>It's much more difficult to detect or correct misunderstandings over text.
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.
Yes. I worked in an agile shop some years ago. We did daily stand-ups at 10:00. So, you arrive in the morning, and can't really get deeply into anything because stand-up is coming up. Then stand-up ends and you maybe have a sidebar conversation at the coffee machine, you get back to your desk and now lunch is coming up, so you look for some stuff you can do quickly, maybe read your email, check HN, whatever. After lunch you might get a few unbroken hours to really make progress on something, but half the time it's interrupted by code reviews, planning poker, or some other agile ceremony and the same sort of effect occurs.
> does anyone else have their entire day sidelined by a 10-minute call? is that common?
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.
I used to be like that early in my career around 25. By now I am nearly 40 and that doesn’t remotely cross my mind. I’ve had to do so many social events that I am numb to it. It used to cause tons of anxiety/rumination though. When in doubt vape hella weed and you will forget about your worries. That seems to be the solution to all of my life’s problems.
If you don't like calls, then ask the person requesting it to email/message you want you want to discuss and any decisions that you're hoping to make it from it before accepting it. It's not much, but at least you now have a focus for the call. If you disagree that a call is needed, tell them and request to handle it over async comm lines.
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.
+1 - So many times you can avoid the meeting by simply asking the person to specify the topic. Then often it turns out you can clarify their big topic either directly over chat or its not a topic for you at all..
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
The top one reason I want to retire so bad is because of useless meetings and calls. I had a boss for 6 months that would call me randomly during the day "just to check how things are going", I mean wtf.
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.
Using your analogy, imagine it's the year 2026. Two armies are fighting. One uses letter to communicate. One uses phones. Which army do you want to fight in?
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.
- Some people cannot communicate via written text. At all.
- Other people always prefer voice over text. Why should our preferences trump theirs?
- Text is low bandwidth, audio/video is high bandwidth (in that it can convey emotions & tonality much more easily)
- People are much more open with issues they're encountering when face-to-face. Text is too impersonal for that.
Is this feeling about a call being such a potential meteor strike on your day normal and acceptable? I’ve always been of the mind it’s a skill I need to improve, but this reads like it’s an acceptable but insurmountable personality quirk to work around, am I too much of a perfectionist and stressing myself out? Feels like a soft skill but maybe I’m just burning myself out trying to get good at everything.
There is a clear difference drawn here between a team manager and a team leader, the latter being able to actually handle persons tone, manner of speaking, their emotions, without fear of ruining their whole own day.
Some kind of work can live in this "put it in a well structured & considered ticket" mode, some cannot. If this is your style and you've found a place where it works, fantastic, but I don't believe this to be generalizable.
The problem is literacy. Even if you can read and write, that does not mean you can reduce a complicated idea into text. It also doesn't mean you can decode ambiguously worded and poorly structured writing. A meeting is often needed; not because the relevant people can't be bothered to write their thoughts down, but because they literally are not capable of doing it.
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 don't begrudge anyone management practices that work for them, but this doesn't seem like a complete analysis.
> 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.
> But for me, it becomes the event my whole day starts to revolve around. I have to break out of my flow, put my tasks on hold, take the call, and then get back into context. In the end, a 10-minute call can cost me several hours of focus.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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 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.
Yeah, I'm totally in favor of minimizing calls. It's easier to reference text, and I have more time to formulate my thoughts. But calls have value, too.
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.
Yes, the "10-minute call becomes the event my whole day starts to revolve around" is very ADHD and/or autism coded (I'm non-neurotyopical and also mountain this molehill), and there's a lot of rationalization about this in the article. Being a manager means accommodating neurotypical people, too. I agree that the author should think hard about whether management is the best place for them.
When I've been an engineering manager my policy has always been that I can work on code but only if that code is not on the critical path to shipping something my team is responsible for.
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.
This ignores the human side of things - people want relationships, empathy and sometimes just to be listened to.
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.
I work with stakeholders that come from different backgrounds (different countries, non-engineers). No way that we can get aligned using just text. Or if we try, it will take a tremendous amount of back and forth, annoying everyone in the process.
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.
Seems like a local maximum or organizing around an individual’s quirks.
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.
There are many survival strategies in nature.
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.
Usually if you’re a manager, your job IS the meetings - or a large portion of it. You’re responsible for a remit and the performance of people inside the group and what is delivered. I think it’s unlikely that can be done of high quality without meetings, but ymmv
The best thing I ever did was switch my team to text based stand up updates.
Everyone would submit them anytime before 10am. A nice perk is it also allows devs to do it at the end of the day if they want and set up their upcoming day rather then trying to remember where they left off the day before.
Everyone could see what was happening, blockers were really obious if the updates weren't specific enough (still working on, continuing to work on).
Management who seemed to be allergic to looking at the board in Jira were happy that they were getting their precious status updates.
You can work without calls for sure and choose to avoid them if that works for you, please don't be in the position of managing team for the teams sake. This is a blatant misunderstanding of how the teams are built and run. Being in a role and doing a good job in your role are completely two different things.
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.
While I agree Scrum and agile are overkill and somewhat performative for the managers. I also like how OP gets that being an effective manager means understanding what the engineers are doing, as in, you rose through engineering into management, which is also a good thing!
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.
English is vague, even when accounting for that fact. It's much more difficult to detect or correct misunderstandings over text.
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 have the opposite experience. Phone calls almost always leave me feeling that something important has been left out. But there is no record so I can't re-read it to find out if I forgot or if it was just not mentioned. Luckily I rarely had to deal with such things because most of my work required written specifications and technical standards anyway, plus our teams were scattered in widely different time zones so the windows for live contacts were small.
It's very easy today to transcribe and summarize every call that you have.
>It's much more difficult to detect or correct misunderstandings over text.
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.
>In the end, a 10-minute call can cost me several hours of focus. And I might spend the entire day thinking about it.
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.
Yes. I worked in an agile shop some years ago. We did daily stand-ups at 10:00. So, you arrive in the morning, and can't really get deeply into anything because stand-up is coming up. Then stand-up ends and you maybe have a sidebar conversation at the coffee machine, you get back to your desk and now lunch is coming up, so you look for some stuff you can do quickly, maybe read your email, check HN, whatever. After lunch you might get a few unbroken hours to really make progress on something, but half the time it's interrupted by code reviews, planning poker, or some other agile ceremony and the same sort of effect occurs.
> does anyone else have their entire day sidelined by a 10-minute call? is that common?
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.
I used to be like that early in my career around 25. By now I am nearly 40 and that doesn’t remotely cross my mind. I’ve had to do so many social events that I am numb to it. It used to cause tons of anxiety/rumination though. When in doubt vape hella weed and you will forget about your worries. That seems to be the solution to all of my life’s problems.
If you don't like calls, then ask the person requesting it to email/message you want you want to discuss and any decisions that you're hoping to make it from it before accepting it. It's not much, but at least you now have a focus for the call. If you disagree that a call is needed, tell them and request to handle it over async comm lines.
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.
+1 - So many times you can avoid the meeting by simply asking the person to specify the topic. Then often it turns out you can clarify their big topic either directly over chat or its not a topic for you at all..
I also work without calls, deadlines, schedules, scrums https://orchidfiles.com/building-without-booking-time/
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
The top one reason I want to retire so bad is because of useless meetings and calls. I had a boss for 6 months that would call me randomly during the day "just to check how things are going", I mean wtf.
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.
Using your analogy, imagine it's the year 2026. Two armies are fighting. One uses letter to communicate. One uses phones. Which army do you want to fight in?
This is an obviously poor policy.
This is why I dislike most wartime analogies. Most day jobs just aren't that urgent or important.
Why are we using letters?
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.
I am an introvert myself - but sometimes it’s good to get out of your comfort zone.
- Some people cannot communicate via written text. At all. - Other people always prefer voice over text. Why should our preferences trump theirs? - Text is low bandwidth, audio/video is high bandwidth (in that it can convey emotions & tonality much more easily) - People are much more open with issues they're encountering when face-to-face. Text is too impersonal for that.
Is this feeling about a call being such a potential meteor strike on your day normal and acceptable? I’ve always been of the mind it’s a skill I need to improve, but this reads like it’s an acceptable but insurmountable personality quirk to work around, am I too much of a perfectionist and stressing myself out? Feels like a soft skill but maybe I’m just burning myself out trying to get good at everything.
Building a team to operate based on your own personal preferences is selfish leadership... or even dictatorship.
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.
Is it even possible to build a team and _not_ operate based on own personal preferences?
It is so comforting to deal with known unknowns particularly when the unknown unknowns are the ones that get you.
There is a clear difference drawn here between a team manager and a team leader, the latter being able to actually handle persons tone, manner of speaking, their emotions, without fear of ruining their whole own day.
Some kind of work can live in this "put it in a well structured & considered ticket" mode, some cannot. If this is your style and you've found a place where it works, fantastic, but I don't believe this to be generalizable.
Me too. And I love it
The problem is literacy. Even if you can read and write, that does not mean you can reduce a complicated idea into text. It also doesn't mean you can decode ambiguously worded and poorly structured writing. A meeting is often needed; not because the relevant people can't be bothered to write their thoughts down, but because they literally are not capable of doing it.
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 don't begrudge anyone management practices that work for them, but this doesn't seem like a complete analysis.
> 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.
Seems like the author has anxiety issues. Not much else of substance in the post.
So much time more to play Doom…