Let me tell you about something that happened to me recently.
Minor background: Where I work we use Tuple for pairing. It’s wonderful and I’ll sing its praises any day—I think it’s really changed how I look at remote collaboration—but those details are not particularly important for this story. Anyway, so here’s what happened:
My colleague called me, on Tuple, unprompted.
My first reaction was “Oh god, what the hell did I break in prod?” Nobody calls me out of the blue like this, as a not-exceptionally-senior IC in 2025. I don’t have a work phone. I work full-time remote except when I occasionally decide to go into the office and then, often, have to take Google Meet calls on a couch instead of in my condo (my team is fairly distributed). I do attend meetings and do a lot of pairing, but outside of that, I can be pretty async.
So I answered the call. My colleague said something like, hey, I was reviewing your PR and thought it would be easier to just talk about it. Then we talked about it for quite some time, decided on some things, and hung up.
I mean, revolutionary. A phone call for the digital age! Millennials! Just stick with me here.
Another thing that happened recently was this Charity Majors thread about remote vs IRL work, where many prominent names in tech fought a bit about which thing was Best and More Effective For Collaboration and stuff. And the more I thought about these comments, the more I thought about that phone call and others like it, and realized that a detail I’d never thought to separate out from “in-person vs remote” is “synchronous vs asynchronous”.
I don’t think this is a revolutionary idea or anything, but it had never really occurred to me before that a lot of what I miss about IRL work is synchronous work, and specifically (again with the phone call here) spontaneous synchronous work. When the team I’ve been working with calls me on Tuple without a “Hey, got a second?” on Slack first, it just feels like they rolled their chair over from three desks away. These are people I’ve been working directly with on product features for weeks; it’s not unreasonable to assume that whatever I’m doing is also whatever they’re doing at any given moment. In a situation like that, they aren’t intruding; we’re just working.
I really do like remote work (although I’ve lately been forced to reckon with the whole “wow, it’s actually very nice to see people in real life? mods???” thing), and not having to commute and carry my stuff around all the time is great—I love having both more time and more control over that time. But I had always taken for granted that “remote” implied “generally asynchronous” and “in-person” in turn implied “generally synchronous,” even though I have experienced async IRL work on the regular (code reviews, Slack/chat interfaces, etc were familiar long before the Great Remotening).
But something that is a little difficult to pin down is the strange feeling of isolation I get when everything is too async, just the little delays waiting for my Slack message to get picked up from the void or my review comments to get noticed, or maybe just too long sitting there marinating in my own worries. It’s the spontaneity, the water-cooler chats, the hallway encounters! cry RTO defenders. Might they be correct, but might those things not always require physical presence either?
Or, like, do I just miss phone calls?
Postscript: I owe some thanks to Jenny for her blog posts which made my brain wonder if I could, too, write some blogs again. One is this one on originality, and how it is not actually necessary to have a perfectly original idea to contribute to dialogue, and the other is this one on the importance of knowing you are being heard. I don’t think this blog post is Fundamentally Altering The Discourse, but maybe a couple of people are going to think a little differently about collaborating, and that seems neat to me.