> But I've had deep and meaningful relationships with people, fully remotely and text-based, since I used IRC as a teenager.
Me too, but I think perhaps that you and I are several standard deviations above the median in terms of reading comprehension and ability to write clearly.
Not everyone is capable of this, as I learned when I tried to run a whole-ass engineering org like I previously ran more informal teams on irc.
Most people are bad at reading comprehension. It's why they tell people to repeat and rephrase their points when communicating, to give their readers a second chance at getting it.
Perhaps, but how is this different from any other soft-skill? A manager with poor reading comprehension who can't do their job unless they require every single person they manage to be physically available seems to be just as ill-suited for their job as an engineer who is incapable of working on a team, or data scientist unable to present their results in a comprehensible way to stake-holders.
Seems to me that remote-work has been a bit of a reckoning for managers, in the sense that our societal work environments have been tailored in a way that unnecessarily hampers employee well-being and productivity, all to cover up the fact that many managers are lacking in some soft-skills that are critical to actual management.
Couldn't have said it better myself. The shore went out during the pandemic and we saw how many managers and leaders have been swimming without swimsuits. And unsurprisingly, you see a lot of them making excuses rather than finding ways to evolve and grow the way individual contributors have had to do this whole time: adapting to cubicle life, adapting to desks instead of cubicles, adapting to shared workspace, adapting to flexible workspace where you don't even have your own assigned workstation. Meanwhile Mr. Manager in his corner office loses it if he has to make a zoom call
There is also the aspect of being on the record in corporate chat. There is way more on the line when everything is recorded than informal in person talking. People also 'have to be there' with their jobs, doing something they necessarily do not enjoy. On IRC in the 90s when everyone was anonymous and nothing was on the line, you had the social freedom to be more open, and the people who wanted to be there didn't have to be paid to be there.
Yet another good reason why corporate chat message TTLs should be no more than 7-14 days.
(Another is that the default of "forever" in things like Slack and Mattermost means that a compromise of a single user account gets to see every DM (including sensitive stuff DMed like passwords or PII) ever sent or received by that user. It's insane. It's also able to be subpoenaed. Expire your messages!)
People get really annoyed that they cannot find answers to previous questions, and if you have q&a website to get around that, your just moving the chat goalposts around. Not to mention its a higher friction process, so people go ask questions anyway on the company slack.
Also screenshots are a thing and easy to do in secret impulsively, recording stuff when your talking in person has a much higher threshold, and far less people are typically listening.
Also once you get to a certain size, there are legislative retention requirements and legal holds.
I would humbly agree, and you make good points. I never thought about why repeating points is so important. I have often wished to some extent that the bar for communication were higher, but I guess that's something most workplaces would rather just plow through than try to really improve.
Hiring is hard enough without chopping off 50 or 80% of otherwise-qualified applicants because they have gone their whole life without reading things very carefully.
Me too, but I think perhaps that you and I are several standard deviations above the median in terms of reading comprehension and ability to write clearly.
Not everyone is capable of this, as I learned when I tried to run a whole-ass engineering org like I previously ran more informal teams on irc.
Most people are bad at reading comprehension. It's why they tell people to repeat and rephrase their points when communicating, to give their readers a second chance at getting it.