How to communicate effectively as a developer • Hacker News Board

Re: How to communicate effectively as a developer

#171

Post by robbyking » Fri, Oct 28, 2022, 11:19 PM UTC

frodetb wrote: post #120

BurningFrog wrote: post #51

Here is my competing take: The biggest problem I see in developer communication is what I call the "assumed context" problem. As in, you talk/write to people as if they know all about your code, except the detail being discussed. In reality, they usually have much less detailed understanding, and you're making no sense to them. I'm pretty sure this is related to people "on the spectrum" often having low "theory of mi…

I think this is a big one as well, and would go one step further and say that anyone no matter their place on the spectrum may fail at communication in this way. I bet most junior developers know what I mean, if they've sat in meetings with senior guys talking about something esoteric. One simple trick, I think, is to avoid extensive use of pronouns. A sentence like "Because of that, it doesn't find it there" might b…

> One simple trick, I think, is to avoid extensive use of pronouns.

I was taught this is a project management for engineers course I took when I was younger: never use language that is open to interpretation. In addition to your examples, I also see this happening in meetings when engineers say a non-sprint task will be "quick." How quick? A few minutes? A few weeks? A few quarters? As soon as we started clarifying these ambiguities we eliminated a lot of misunderstandings.

Re: How to communicate effectively as a developer

#172

Post by jonahx » Fri, Oct 28, 2022, 11:26 PM UTC

_greim_ wrote: post #158

jonahx wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bottom right should be "points lost" imo. For me, the most points lost, as there is nothing more annoying than someone assuming context I don't have. It seems that this chart assumes: 1. Everyone is a baby that gets their feelings hurt when you imply they might not know something they do in fact know (top right). 2. Everyone loves being alpha nerd and making people feel dumb for not knowing things they know (bottom r…

Yes, I'm for sure describing a perverse incentive structure, but one that's easy to fall into, almost a default state. If you get enough well-intentioned people together they can break the cycle, and then you have a healthy team. > Bottom right should be "points lost" imo. There's a certain breed of hot-shot dev who truly believes they're gaining status by making cryptic, in-the-know references, and there's another b…

> There's a certain breed of hot-shot dev who truly believes they're gaining status by making cryptic, in-the-know references, and there's another breed who falls for it. When it comes to social status games, if enough people believe it, it becomes true.

Yes, this is what I described in point 2. Again, I'm not saying it isn't a real thing. At the same time, I wouldn't call it the norm either.

Re: How to communicate effectively as a developer

#173

Post by kaashif » Fri, Oct 28, 2022, 11:56 PM UTC

aeze wrote: post #109

bitwize wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a tendency to info-dump to establish shared context, and people find that insulting as well. So it can turn into a dilemma of: Info-dump: "I know that already! What do you think I am, an idiot?" Assume context: "In English, please! I didn't get my MBA to be made to look like an idiot." Excuse me for failing to read your mind and know exactly what you know and what you don't before I begin. Those of us on the s…

I think there are ways to learn how much context the other party needs - like asking them in the beginning of the conversation.

If you ask people if they know something and they already do, they can sometimes be insulted. I'm never insulted when people do that, I think it's considerate, but I have seen people get all "of course I know that, what do you think I am, an idiot" on me.

I still ask if I'm not sure of someone's level of expertise - I think any reasonable person would react positively.

Re: How to communicate effectively as a developer

#174

Post by zwkrt » Fri, Oct 28, 2022, 11:58 PM UTC

tristor wrote: post #140

As someone who went from engineering to product management, partly due to having developed a skill of communicating effectively in writing and in speech, I would suggest perhaps the most important part of communicating effectively is storytelling. If what you are sharing does not have a clear and obvious narrative arc, people are going to disengage quickly. This is not necessary for short bursts of information in a h…

Completely agree, although I don't think that people need to be better creative writers to be better at creating narrative arcs. For work, your narrative arc is normally solved if you are understanding (1) the relationship between you and your audience, (2) what you want, and (3) why your audience should care. If you communicate those things, the narrative should be crystal clear. That depends heavily on the context.

    "Hi, I'm from a team from far away in company land (1). I've been having an issue with your service for the last few weeks because it seemingly drops connections sometimes. I looked at your metrics and I see that this is happening to other clients as well. This issue is stopping us from deploying a change to the UI that we promised customers would go out next week (2). Can you help me debug from your side? (3)"

    "Hey boss (1). I think that I need more support on this project (2a). We originally thought it would be easy to refactor a widget into a widgetFactory, but after I investigated it widgetFactories will require a schema migration (3). I think Sarah is really good with those, can I ask her to work on this with me (2b)?

    "Apache upgrade production outage thread (123)"

Re: How to communicate effectively as a developer

#175

Post by aussieshibe » Sat, Oct 29, 2022, 12:08 AM UTC

mjw1007 wrote: post #89

BurningFrog wrote: post #51

Here is my competing take: The biggest problem I see in developer communication is what I call the "assumed context" problem. As in, you talk/write to people as if they know all about your code, except the detail being discussed. In reality, they usually have much less detailed understanding, and you're making no sense to them. I'm pretty sure this is related to people "on the spectrum" often having low "theory of mi…

The idea that programmers have a poor theory of mind doesn't stand up at all in my experience. I remember once seeing the inbox of someone working as a sales-ledger clerk. It was full of messages with the subject "accounts query", or a small variation of that. The ones with subjects like "query for account ACME-37" were from technical staff. Similarly if I ask "when do you need those figures?" and I get the answer "n…

It's above-and-beyond of you to follow up at all in that situation, IMHO.

Taking "I need X next Wednesday" at face value to mean "as long as I have X by 5pm Wednesday I'm happy" is completely reasonable.

Re: How to communicate effectively as a developer

#176

Post by b3morales » Sat, Oct 29, 2022, 12:30 AM UTC

Consultant32452 wrote: post #125

taude wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're "assumed context" problem actually has another term called "Curse of Knowledge" [1] (which I believe it's much more known as). There's a ton of strategies that have been written about it. Just adding this term here for people who want to search for strategies on how to work around this. It comes into play in all forms of communication, written, verbal, Slack, etc... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cu…

I can speak to what it's like with autism brain. In conversations people often say things that I have unusual associations about. My mind will start spiraling about the unusual association and I will begin an internal narrative about the new, unrelated topic without verbalizing any of it. I will continue with the original conversation with the convo partner. Then, out of the blue, I will verbalize something about the…

Is this specifically an autistic trait and not something allistic minds do? Asking, uh, for a friend.

Re: How to communicate effectively as a developer

#177

Post by BurningFrog » Sat, Oct 29, 2022, 12:40 AM UTC

kitanata wrote: post #157

BurningFrog wrote: post #51

Here is my competing take: The biggest problem I see in developer communication is what I call the "assumed context" problem. As in, you talk/write to people as if they know all about your code, except the detail being discussed. In reality, they usually have much less detailed understanding, and you're making no sense to them. I'm pretty sure this is related to people "on the spectrum" often having low "theory of mi…

I am a Staff Engineer leading a large engineering organization. I am also “on the spectrum” and openly autistic. My co-workers know that I am autistic. I have found that communicating to business folks and leaders is a skill like anything else and can be taught. Your assumption that being autistic somehow completely disqualifies one to speak competently to others is ableist and harmful. While it is true that people w…

> Your assumption that being autistic somehow completely disqualifies one to speak competently to others...

As anyone can see, I did not write that.

Re: How to communicate effectively as a developer

#178

Post by karmelapple » Sat, Oct 29, 2022, 12:40 AM UTC

xbfjvusb6 wrote: post #163

karmelapple wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fascinated: does your company/manager truly track SLOC and promote based on that? Or is SLOC here more of a proxy for "features shipped"? Because if this is what's happening, I'd encourage two changes: 1. Communicate differently to HR, lead, and skip - either use different approaches of documentation, or point out different aspects of your contributions 2. If trying various different approaches don't work... leav…

It's a black box but the CEO has communicated dev performance is dependent on amount of code shipped. I suspect they're using sloc or pr counts behind the scenes. I've done everything you're recommending. CEO doesn't care about any of that. Only metric they care about is money made and code shipped. They do say they care about communication and apparently track it but I havnt seen it reflected in comp reviews so my c…

Yowza. In that case… time to look elsewhere. I can tell you many companies do not do this sort of thing.

Re: How to communicate effectively as a developer

#179

Post by b3morales » Sat, Oct 29, 2022, 12:43 AM UTC

kaashif wrote: post #173

aeze wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are ways to learn how much context the other party needs - like asking them in the beginning of the conversation.

If you ask people if they know something and they already do, they can sometimes be insulted. I'm never insulted when people do that, I think it's considerate, but I have seen people get all "of course I know that, what do you think I am, an idiot" on me. I still ask if I'm not sure of someone's level of expertise - I think any reasonable person would react positively.

Yup, absolutely; this is yet another angle on empathetic communication. When in the listener's seat, it's important to be mindful of the fact that the presenter is trying their best at the difficult task of conveying this information to you.

Re: How to communicate effectively as a developer

#180

Post by svat » Sat, Oct 29, 2022, 12:47 AM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #51

Here is my competing take: The biggest problem I see in developer communication is what I call the "assumed context" problem. As in, you talk/write to people as if they know all about your code, except the detail being discussed. In reality, they usually have much less detailed understanding, and you're making no sense to them. I'm pretty sure this is related to people "on the spectrum" often having low "theory of mi…

All good, but what makes you call this a competing take? What view of the article does this compete with? It seems to agree with it, more or less.