LogFAQs > #930389014

I definitely am a lot closer to agreeing with foolmo than it comes off. I do think that you can get better at communicating effectively in an asychronous remote friendly way and it doesn't even take a ton of effort, and ideally everyone would-- the skills help you in all forms of general communication even if you're not actually working remotely. Knowing how to phrase things for your audience is an incredibly valuable skill.

The reality of life is not everyone is effective at it though and both sides in any given exchange are limiting factors, not just you-- and it's not always something you immediately know either. Programming especially is a weird field where it won't always be obvious that something isn't clicking until it's gone on a while, and then at that point you've done some good damage in terms of lost productivity, either cause the dude isn't coding anything, or the dude is coding a bunch of filth someone is gonna need to clean up later to integrate well. There are just a lot of factors going in. This lost productivity risk is the case even in non-remote, but it's harder to detect remotely.

He just seems kinda ignorant of a lot of nuance on the subject and comes off as a pretty poor example of someone I'd expect to be an authority on technical communication to boot (like if you consistently for 10+ years discuss things in a way that suggests you're not absorbing the conversation there's a very good chance that you're just not a good communicator in general and you're damage controlling things by claiming it's intentional) which rubs me the wrong way and sends me into rants. I can't shake the image of a foolmo email to a bright eyed newbie co-worker laying the groundwork for a project consisting of him explaining things in an overly complex manner with extensive focus on a bunch of minor points and poorly laying out the big picture, and then saying "git gud it's all right there" when asked questions about it.
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No problem!
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