Lots of talk here about writing being far superior to talking. This is entirely true. The thing you guys have to realize is that most people, like truly 80% of the population and probably some large subset of sw eng, hate reading and writing.

People see reading as a chore. The last full book they read was in an elective in college and even then they skimmed the spark notes. They see writing as a stupid thing they have to do, a word count they have to hit, not a communication mechanism at all. Seriously there are so many people out there like this. If you give them something to read and force them to read it, they won’t get half of it because they’re just waiting till the chore is over when they get to the end.

This is why chatGPT was trained to produce bullet points and why people do PowerPoints. A paragraph of the written word is scary to a percentage of the population, certainly most “normal people,” and definitely a large subset of engineers.

That’s just the way it is. But these are your colleagues you have to figure out how to communicate with them.

Trying to be more charitable, I would say that it's not so much that people don't like reading and writing but that they are saturated with it.

Reading is a chore because, in a typical corporate job, you have to do so much of it and the material is generally pretty bland. There's the hundreds of emails per day, the meeting notes, the presentations, the endless stream of messages. Not to mention the code, the docs and all the role specific stuff you'll encounter along the way.

Perhaps we should be pushing people to be more succinct and thoughtful in their writing? Perhaps AI could do that ;)

> Lots of talk here about writing being far superior to talking. This is entirely true.

Writing and talking allows you to formulate and explore concepts in different ways. Writing forces you to be specific and put thoughts in a linear order. Talking allows you to explore less defined ideas in haphazard ways.

I recently had a meeting where understanding snapped in place right at the end of the meeting. Writing might have gotten us there too, but I'm not convinced that it would have been more efficient. The idea wasn't well defined to start with and we talked about lots of things randomly.

Now writing is needed to make sure that we capture what was discussed and agree on it.

Both has a place in collaboration with other people.

ps. not to make the argument for useless meetings where managers drag you along for body count, I've slept through my share of those. And would probably also sleep through the AI summary of it

FWIW, I see talking and listening as a chore, and I don't think many people are good at them. Each is better in different contexts and there is overlap, of course

If you give them something to read and force them to read it, they won’t get half of it because they’re just waiting till the chore is over when they get to the end.

This is not different from talking to someone who is too busy (or just doesn't want) to listen. Writing exists in a form that can always be referenced. There's no risk of playing telephone, no memory required, etc. It'll be waiting for when the person is ready to read it.