
For non-trivial coordination, meetings might be better than email - lordnacho
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/was-e-mail-a-mistake
======
kijin
As a freelancer, I maintain an "email-only" policy for new clients. It says so
very clearly on the contact form: I don't do phone consultations for new
clients.

Even so, every once in a while I get people who use the contact form and
demand that I call them back. I politely respond, obviously by email, that I
don't do phone consultations for new clients. I rarely hear back from them.
Good riddance; I've learned from experience that people who demand synchronous
communication from the start tend to be the worst clients. They always want
other people to cater to their needs _right now_ , like an obnoxious boss.
People who are comfortable with email, on the other hand, are at least a
little accustomed to waiting a few minutes for a reply.

~~~
achow
Interesting 'business-hack'.

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dwighttk
Email is one of the few communication technologies we use these days that
wasn’t a mistake.

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boomlinde
The article mentions Scrum, and its synchronous daily meetings. It fails to
mention that Scrum is also largely supported by asynchronous communication,
like code commits, review requests, reviews and documentation.

The effect in my experience is that the purpose of the Scrum meeting is to
offer a birds eye view of the asynchronous systems that make up the bulk of
the development process, to enable participation and further comment. "The
idea that a quarter of an hour of structured synchrony is enough time to
enable a full day of work might sound preposterous" because it is. It's just
there to kickstart the day and to give everyone a general idea of what's going
on.

For anyone doubting this, I suggest skipping a scrum meeting to see how much
it actually impedes your work. Then, if you dare, try to avoid using the
asynchronous communication that supports the development process for a day.
Compare the results.

Overall I just think that people should consider more carefully whether a
topic is more suited for email, phone call or a meeting.

------
kijin
Unlike machines that can always respond to a request for synchronous
communication, people are often having meetings, doing other work that cannot
be interrupted, or in different time zones. All of which necessitates
asynchronous communication -- even if the delay is only a few minutes at a
time. You can't just take research about distributed computer systems and
apply the conclusion to humans.

------
brzezmac
I'd say e-mail was not. The features that gave it a bad rap are CC and Reply
To All. My 0.02$ on the subject: [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cc-reply-all-
perfect-match-ma...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cc-reply-all-perfect-
match-made-hell-maciej-brzezi%C5%84ski/)

~~~
garmaine
If every email (including each CC) cost the sender 0.02$, I think that would
solve most of the problems with it :)

------
afarrell
With in-person communication, you can tell if someone has allocated attention
to focus on understanding you.

With async communication, you can't. This is a source of impatience on the
sender side and overwhelm on the receiver end. There isn't a way to respond to
an email with "429 - too many requests" or "503 - service unavailable".

~~~
lotsofpulp
If the sender has a pressing matter, then they shouldn't be using async
communication.

~~~
krylon
But they do. I have gotten calls from users complaining their mail had not
arrived after _30 seconds_. Many people seem to treat email as a kind of
elaborate IM.

(EDIT: Note that I do agree with your sentiment!)

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pmontra
I was looking at a Kanbanize board right before reading this post. I asked to
my customer on Slack if I should complete a subtask of a card or start a small
new one, because I think I won't be able to complete both of them before the
end of the day. This is asynchronous and I didn't get an answer yet. I can
make it synchronous by calling him but I won't travel the 3-4 km to their
office every day I'm working for them only to be able to meet face to face. We
did it during the design phases and it's OK. Probably the best way to build a
grand design of the system. But email, IM and boards like Kanbanize, Trello,
etc are OK for everything else. And Slack or Meet for calls and screen
sharing.

I got the answer now, back to work.

------
orwin
Interesting to read, but maybe to simplistic? I mean, asynchronous
communication and synchronous communication each have advantages depending on
the work. If I have to code something completely new, i want to be able to
work alone with no distraction (and email is still king of asynchronous
communication). If i'm debuging or if i'm doing ops stuff, having other devops
around me help, whether its by my side or with a shared screen + audio. Human
are not robot, and i think/feel that foc creative/innovative tasks, async is
the way to go.

~~~
pergamonreverse
Agreed, I think both are useful for different forms of communication.

Pleased that they are two separate apps so you can turn one off when when you
just need the other.

------
Merrill
It depends on the situation. Email should be accompanied by a messaging system
that a) lets you know if the other person is available to chat, and b)
provides real-time interaction.

The combination is more efficient than phone or video conferences, and much
more efficient than in-person conferences, especially those requiring a plane
trip. These more often involve social banter and often include participants
who are only marginal contributors or time wasters.

~~~
einpoklum
No it shouldn't. You shouldn't know when I read your email; and if I want to
be available for a chat, then I'll have a chat client of some kind (including
Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp) to begin with.

------
cyborgx7
Let me save you the read. No. The federated standardized asynchronous
instantaneous digital communication protocol was not a mistake.

~~~
fredley
Trivial Betteridge's Law application.

------
cpr
Certainly email lists as a discussion medium were always doomed. ;-)

I remember taking part in the first mailing list (1973?) on the ARPAnet, which
was, appropriately enough, about mailing lists, hosted by BBN. Flame wars
sprung up day and night, even with only a few dozen people.

Email is just a reflection of the humans that use it, so, sure it's a
disaster, but still quite useful.

------
raverbashing
Email was a good killer app for what was an incipient technology at a time
(especially with most of the participants being non-adversarial)

It is certainly not for everything and today it is only usable with a thick
layer of verifications and anti-maliciousness on top, but it still has its
purpose.

------
cmrx64
Does anyone know what algorithm theory is?

------
kieckerjan
Such a clickbaity title. E-mail was meant as a replacement for the paper
letter, and in this it succeeded tremendously well. It is quick, distributed,
open, cheap and efficient (almost to a fault). It has been with us for decades
and will still be with us after the current behemoths of the internet have
sunk into their tarpits.

Trouble arises when you start using e-mail for different purposes. E-mail is
not chat. E-mail is not a todo-list. E-mail is not a tool for massive
collaboration. Running a business using just e-mail is as absurd a proposition
as running a business using only paper correspondence.

~~~
dsr_
Yet, in the same way that a spreadsheet is not a database, is not a data-
acquisition tool, is not an application programming language: people have used
email for all these purposes and not been completely unsuccessful.

That's why general tools are awesome: you can do things with them that the
originators didn't dream would be possible -- or desirable.

------
pure-awesome
This SMBC Comic comes to mind:

[https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-11-26](https://www.smbc-
comics.com/comic/2010-11-26)

~~~
majewsky
How do you guys find these comics when you want to reference them? Is there a
better way than putting some keywords in a search engine together with
site:smbc-comics.com?

~~~
lioeters
The brain is a remarkable search engine!

------
einpoklum
> Was email a mistaken?

No.

> E-mail was supposed to make our work lives easier and more efficient

Email was supposed to allow us to send textual messages, e.g. letters, notices
etc., through computer networks and in a computer-viewable, computer-editable
format. And it has done that.

> but the mathematics of distributed systems suggests that meetings might be
> better.

Huh? that makes absolutely no sense. Very little of my email is even
theoretically replaceable with a "meeting" (not the least of which - automatic
notifications.) As for the rest of my email - if I had to hold 10-20 meetings
a day I'd go nuts.

> They became convinced that synchrony was superior and that spreading
> communication out over time hindered work rather than enabling it.

No they didn't. Author is probably ridiculously over-generalizing some finding
on a certain specific setting and a certain irrelevant metric.

> A major implication of research into distributed systems is that, without
> synchrony, such systems are just too hard for the average programmer to
> tame.

Yup, just like I thought. Totally irrelevant. How is reading email a
programmatic taming of a system? It isn't. and so on, and so fort.

What a trollish article.

------
lqet
> But coördinating telephone conversations

As a non-native speaker, I wonder: is this a typo or intentional?

~~~
_petronius
Unusual in modern orthography, and I have only seen it in the New Yorker house
style (the diaeresis indicates that the second vowel should be pronounced
separately, which is quite different to how that mark is used in a number of
other languages that use the Latin alphabet, like German and Turkish). This is
subjective, but it reads as a little pretentious to me as a native speaker,
compared with other ways of marking it.

More usual is 'co-ordinating' or just 'coordinating' without marking the
syllable break between the prefix and the root.

~~~
atomwaffel
> which is quite different to how that mark is used in a number of other
> languages that use the Latin alphabet, like German and Turkish

True, although there are other languages use the diaeresis to separate vowels
that would otherwise be a diphthong, for example French in _Noël_ or Spanish
in _vergüenza_.

~~~
_petronius
Ah, cool. It wouldn't surprise me if English borrowed that from French,
actually.

------
trilila
Yet another useless essay.

------
pergamonreverse
Emails in the workplace are only sent for two reasons.

1\. To show your boss that it is someone else's fault - delays etc

2\. To show that it is not your fault there is going to be a delay as a
deadline approaches.

