I'm 10y remote now and 99% of all interactions with my heavy remote / async teams are NOT done with calls / video.

It almost all in writing.

Everyone right now trying to optimize for voice / video communication is optimizing into the wrong thing.

Human voice communication, especially for software development has the following flaws:

* Cannot be directly searched without transcribing, which ads more overhead.
* Cannot express code examples
* Does not scale efficiently with the number of people communicating

The latter is mostly because human voice communication is not multiplexable. Communication efficiency using human voice as medium goes down far faster than writing.

As usual its all about the RPC pattern. Think of anything you say in a voice call as an RPC command and the limits human voices bring.

A full multiplex broadcast, reflectable RPC pattern (email, chat channels) is superior to voice in the average dev case.

I do not say calls are not important. I just say they are being given far to much weight in the recent discussion of "new remote workers".

This thread blew up a bit: Nice & thx for the RTs.