For one, calls don’t result in a searchable log. If I remember I talked to someone about Foo, I can search for that in my Slack history.
If someone else asks me the same question about Foo, I can just send them a screenshot from our earlier conversation and we’re done. I can also talk to 4 different people about four different issues at the same time in chat, but I can only be in a single call at a time.
I'm surprised more people aren't talking about this, I find it to be far and away the biggest reason for me to avoid calls. so many problems don't just happen once, and I find that the people who prefer to jump on calls are also the people who prefer not to write or share any documentation about what they know. I take notes often, but it's always easier to just have the logs available.
God, there's nothing worse than going back to find something I remember talking about in Slack and seeing the damn "call ended at..." thing right where I'm pretty sure it should be. Now let me go see if I took notes in some other program. OK even if I did I missed some stuff that would have been there if we'd just used the goddamn chat instead of having a call. Ugh.
Yeah but search in Slack and MS Teams both suck IME. The idea of what you're talking about makes sense and I'm sure it works out for somebody sometime or other. But I haven't found having that history particularly useful.
Disclaimer: I work at Slack. Yeah, search could be better sometimes. But for this particular problem, I personally find search useful in two contexts:
* Even if I can't remember the exact phrasing I used for something, I often remember the person I discussed it with and just check my DMs or threads with them.
* Half of my responses to "help me" questions include links to repos in files. So I search for the last time I typed out three paragraphs talking about a a given link and that works pretty well.
The other situation "type it out" is useful is when I think a particular problem is likely to be encountered by multiple people and essentially force someone to ask the question in a public channel so I can answer it there and everyone can see it (we have channels like and #new-eng-questions for this). Even if people don't find it via search, there are enough people checking the recent history of these channels that it's a useful exercise.
The other situation "type it out" is useful is when I think a particular problem is likely to be encountered by multiple people and essentially force someone to ask the question in a public channel so I can answer it there and everyone can see it
Agreed. Assuming it's the kind of question that's amenable to being answered in text-exchange format in the first place. I've gotten plenty of Teams / Slack messages where my response was "Can you ask this in the public team chat, so everybody can see it?" for that exact reason. That and it also opens up the pool of people who can potentially answer the question to more than just me, which is also a Good Thing.
But there are still plenty of questions where it quickly becomes apparent that having a call with screen-sharing and everything is going to be a much more efficient way of solving the problem at hand.
For one, calls don’t result in a searchable log. If I remember I talked to someone about Foo, I can search for that in my Slack history. If someone else asks me the same question about Foo, I can just send them a screenshot from our earlier conversation and we’re done. I can also talk to 4 different people about four different issues at the same time in chat, but I can only be in a single call at a time.