> To me, this implies a further disadvantage: extremely high latency when compared with in-person collaboration.
First, it's high latency, not extremely high latency.
Second, it has huge advantages:
1.) While latency (in terms of how quickly you finish task) will increase, your bandwidth will increase too. Everyone get more done.
2.) With asynchronous communication, you are not interrupted by communication, you can do it in bulk.
In case there is something urgent, you always can do a call, or synchronous chat.
> 1.) While latency (in terms of how quickly you finish task) will increase, your bandwidth will increase too
It has to increase to make up for the round trips you can't afford: you try to communicate more information in one batch. Whether this is good or bad really depends. On one hand, I think it just forces communication to be better, on the other hand you might waste time communicating things that you'd immediately find to be unnecessary if you were interacting live with the other party.
It sounds like you're focused on maximizing output. I'm more interested in maximizing outcome.
As to high vs extremely high, I'm not sure arguing over relative terms is useful. But just so it's clear what I mean:
If I'm working in a team room with colleagues, my average latency between request and response is, say 15 seconds. But in globally distributed remote work situations, a much longer lag is not uncommon. E.g., when I was working with European colleagues, it was typical to get a response the next working day. That's about 5000 times longer, which seems pretty extreme to me.
First, it's high latency, not extremely high latency. Second, it has huge advantages: 1.) While latency (in terms of how quickly you finish task) will increase, your bandwidth will increase too. Everyone get more done. 2.) With asynchronous communication, you are not interrupted by communication, you can do it in bulk.
In case there is something urgent, you always can do a call, or synchronous chat.