I work with stakeholders that come from different backgrounds (different countries, non-engineers). No way that we can get aligned using just text. Or if we try, it will take a tremendous amount of back and forth, annoying everyone in the process.

I'd much rather talk for 30~60 mins and get everything hashed out. It also allows you to build rapport, so next time it will be much easier to do something together again.

When I've been an engineering manager my policy has always been that I can work on code but only if that code is not on the critical path to shipping something my team is responsible for.

That's because management is an interruption-driven position. You just can't guarantee you can get 2-4 hours of productive, uninterrupted time.

Which means you shouldn't take on engineering responsibilities which, if delayed, will hurt your team.

So I'd still build stuff but it would be internal tools, or exploratory prototypes, or stuff that was absolutely not linked to any deadlines.

As far as I can tell coding agents have changed this quite a bit: I know a lot of engineering managers who are getting back into code now because they can carve out 30 minutes, and 30 minutes is now enough time to get something useful done.

I still think most managers should stay off the critical path to production though, at most organizations.

You can work without calls for sure and choose to avoid them if that works for you, please don't be in the position of managing team for the teams sake. This is a blatant misunderstanding of how the teams are built and run. Being in a role and doing a good job in your role are completely two different things.

If one wants to be a good manager then you do not have the luxury of being in good or bad mood, you are required to context switch between more than one person with entirely different motivation and problems.

If you don't like calls, then ask the person requesting it to email/message you want you want to discuss and any decisions that you're hoping to make it from it before accepting it. It's not much, but at least you now have a focus for the call. If you disagree that a call is needed, tell them and request to handle it over async comm lines.

It's possible the other party is dealing with some complex or ambiguous and a call is often helpful to talk through and get them focused quickly. If you still hate calls though, as them to send a write up summary of the call and continue any further conversations that way.

There are so many ways to handle these interactions with just a little give and take.

I also work without calls, deadlines, schedules, scrums https://orchidfiles.com/building-without-booking-time/

But how do you find others developers like yourself ? Most people need calls. They might say they don't like it, but they're more productive once they have them. They need to feel there is a human on the other side that cares about the results, that is waiting for them and pushing them. Most people need deadlines, even if they're fake. They need to tell people around them they have to do X before Y, they wouldn't be able to justify what they're doing to themselves and their surrounding without that fake deadline. They wouldn't think about telling coworker about a similar piece of code or feature they're working on without that daily standup.

All those boring useless things, all those methods, those rules, those office politics, they're here for a reason

The top one reason I want to retire so bad is because of useless meetings and calls. I had a boss for 6 months that would call me randomly during the day "just to check how things are going", I mean wtf.

But as I age, I see that there are people out there that NEED to talk and to speak to other people. And of course, you have those doing micromanagement.

Using your analogy, imagine it's the year 2026. Two armies are fighting. One uses letter to communicate. One uses phones. Which army do you want to fight in?

This is an obviously poor policy.

> I even remember the days when dailies were actually held standing up in the office.

I switched my team to text based daily updates submitted anytime before ~10am.

A nice perk was it gave people the option to do it at the end of the day to help plan their following day so they hit the ground running in the morning. It was especially useful for Mondays where people spent time filling dead air on calls trying to remember what they were doing on Friday.

Everyone could see what was happening, stalled work and people going off track were really obvious if the updates weren't specific enough. "still working on" and "I couldn't solve it so I'm going try and run git bisect over 10 years of commits to see where it breaks"

Management were happy that they were getting their status updates and we could all stay in the zone for the whole morning.

- Some people cannot communicate via written text. At all. - Other people always prefer voice over text. Why should our preferences trump theirs? - Text is low bandwidth, audio/video is high bandwidth (in that it can convey emotions & tonality much more easily) - People are much more open with issues they're encountering when face-to-face. Text is too impersonal for that.