Basically every piece of useful information that can be encoded using your voice can also be encoded using an email - and in a much more efficient way, since you don't have to keep deciphering emotional cues. Of course, expressing emotions, for example, can be harder, but I don't think engineers should be relying too much on expressing their emotion as a way to do a good job.
This is nonsense. Body language, tone, empathy: all are crucial to successful communication between people, even engineers, even technical communications, believe it or not.
Completely agree. Often times the emotion is even worse over email or IM - I've seen people (engineers) be a lot harsher and a lot less receptive to alternative ideas over a text medium than they ever would face-to-face.
If true, this is fine, as long as you are an engineer and talk only to other engineers. People from different backgrounds don't use email this way, though.
> How long to write a long email? How long to speak to someone?
A better question is how long to say something that is well thought out and matters vs. how long to write something that is well thought out and matters. I have found that talking leads to lots of talking with little real substance unless it is meant to be a brainstorm session. And even then, writing ideas down before hand help to quickly get to the sticking points rather than bike shedding over something trivial and wasting everyones time.
Writing out a page long email forces the writer to think through and address their idea more seriously up front. This is why Bezos famously requires a written memo for a new idea before the meeting [0].
How long do the sound waves from speech persist in a gaseous medium, or the often equally gaseous white matter between your ears? How long does an email, backed up and archived by sender, recipient, archiving software, compliance department, etc, etc persist.
People tend to actually think before they write something down that will last forever. Much less so when they're flapping their gums in real-time. High quality, premeditated communication trumps low-quality, off-the-cuff communication, for me, anyway.
