[xbpx]

When the team doesn't talk synchronously. So many times I've seen folks post a question that needs swift response to some issue tracker and then act indignant when they are held accountable for the thing not getting done. The answer is almost always "well no one responded until 3 days later".

Yes well no one asked you to leave some text on a server somewhere and hope someone sees it. They asked if you could do X by Y time and you said YES.

[avmich]

To me it's often the variety of channels to communicate. When a question is asked that needs swift response and that question is not answered, naturally the person asking the question is stuck. It's quite awkward to try to get a response by some other means, one never knows - people don't want to answer? They don't know? They don't care, and anything goes? They just didn't receive the question? If there is just one channel, which in case of remote teams should be mandatory - and frequently monitored - at least some of those questions could be avoided. Like, a single channel in Slack, or email only. Otherwise, answer "well no one responded" becomes awfully justified.

Of course this usually isn't that much of a problem when the question is not too important, or the asking person knows possible options to proceed - it's usually a new or junior team member who suffers most from this. On interviews everybody is encouraged to ask questions, but in real life many become tired answering something which they know for too long - even though it's the specifics of the system, which they built unnecessarily complicated and just got used to. So unfortunately in subpar teams it becomes harder to obtain necessary information.