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# System prepended metadata

title: My notes on "Asynchronous Communication is the Great Leveler in Engineering" by James Stanier
tags: [learning, remote]

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###### tags: remote

# My notes on "Asynchronous Communication is the Great Leveler in Engineering" by James Stanier

https://shopify.engineering/asynchronous-communication-shopify-engineering

Nice article... James Stanier is indeed a person with great experience on these topics, and Shopify is really one of the best org for the culture they built.

My highlights:

- **there's no one right way to communicate in a remote-first company**: you and your team has to continually choose the right way, choosing between different levels of synchronousness, from a pair programming session to collaborating via written documents.
- **remote-first does not mean to just go full-async**: pair programming and sync collaboration sessions together are still key tools to keep in the team's toolbox to work effectively
- **"sync vs async" is not the only relevant axis of decision**: there's also the need for human connection (*when shifting to asynchronous work we also need to ensure that we maintain that connection*) ...and indeed *"at least twice a year, we encourage teams to come together"*.
- the more you move towards async forms of communication, the more you and your team have to make sure to **document and share your decisions** in a way that is useful for others (”*permanence of communication”*)
- Shopify employees span through many **different timezones**, and this is a strong driving need for them: teams are geographically distributed and they may have windows of overlap and times of the day where just a part of the team in online...
- each team is encouraged to **establish norms and policies** on how they want their communication to be, and that is a good insight for us too
- an important part of those norms, especially when choosing an async way of communicate, is a **clear and quick way to reach consensus** and don’t wait for others (waiting is waste)
- Shopify has **a single source of truth,** a single knowledge base, a single place for the people to look for relevant information, so that people can find quickly and easily what they look for instead of looking here and there...