In my experience I'd have to agree. I'm shipping more and I'm onboarding onto domains faster but the same bottlenecks exist, the same complexities creep up and the same talents that help individuals push through are still relevant.
Prior to quarantine, I had never heard of the concept of async communication. It felt like a fancy way of just saying "document more". Now that my whole department is WFH we've tried using Notion as our central repository of information. I don't think it lands every single feature described in the write up (e.g. search could be better), but, it has enough features to create write-ups and RFCs that are visually appealing to help get the point across.
We still hop on a quick Zoom 1:1 if we can't find the words to discuss over text.
There's a great blog post that I found by Camille Fournier that touches on things that you've mentioned https://medium.com/@skamille/i-hate-manager-readmes-20a0dd9a..., but I think something of note is at the end on how it can be used as a self-exercise for the manager.
tl;dr, Manager README's are more for the manager than the direct report. It's a great exercise in introspection if kept private and not used as something codified for employees to follow.
> This was a surprisingly good read. However it's pretty long, so a table of contents would be useful for navigation and future reference.
Agreed. I read through the introduction before realizing that the fabric descriptions was when I began learning something.
I'll definitely try to remember the quick and easy spot check techniques the article mentioned, e.g. holding cotton fabric up to the light to see how tightly woven the yarn was.
I'd also add that facial recognition is also becoming more common as a way to authenticate into systems. This might be a naive analogy, but, this feels like thousands of people providing a company with their name and their phone's lock screen combination.