261–270 of 464 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Rubber ducking." As in speaking to your rubber duck with no expectation of a response? First time seeing this usage. Thanks.
Moreso than that, imagine a rubber duck floating in the water: silently looking at you, nodding in understanding.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Marriage has taught me to go even further than that. I now ask "are you telling me to get it off your chest, or you want help solving it?". If the former, I don't offer any solutions whatsoever, in any kind of format.
Thank you for bringing this up. This was a life lesson that unfortunately had to be spelled out for me in a very embarrassing way. My ultimate takeaway is to now default to listening without advice. The result are on average better as people who want to vent are more put-off by advice givers than advice seeks who receive a good listener. It's also made me quite a bit more appreciative of times when I need to vent and…
Let's say someone is telling you they are fearful for their job, they think they will get fired soon, even though they have nothing specific to point to. As a listener, are you agreeing with this or are you neutral nodding your head? Because my default would be to reply that they should do the best they can and if it comes to that they will surely find better pastures, but then I'm giving advice already.
I hear this advice but I have little clue how to put it into practice, moreover because of what I mentioned above, if I'm telling someone something, I definitely want them to think about it and try and help me with advice, otherwise I feel like they don't even care and would not share again with the same person.
I get a lot more mileage out of "have you tried..." than "why don't you just...". As a recent example, I wrote a system that auto-generates PDF packing slips from an order form, to send to a warehouse for picking and packing. Yesterday a client told me to "just make it landscape" while I was explaining why "just making it landscape" won't solve the problem of giving the warehouse whitespace to pencil stuff in, becaus…
I've had a few people accuse me of being difficult. Usually they were quite difficult themselves to work with; yet were totally unaware of how unreasonable they were.
(Queue the scene from Beauty and the Beast where the Beast accuses Belle of being difficult.)
I noticed later in the thread that you were considering walking away from the customer. If you do this, I think it's best to walk away completely. Don't find a replacement, don't try to keep the business. Just cut the cord as quickly and completely as legally possible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "have you tried..." Or: "what have you tried?"
"Everything, nothing works". Few people like being asked open-ended questions when they are irritated.
Anyway, the nice thing about in-person conversation (or even over video call) is the conversation can flow a lot more easily, so even if you said "Hey, just do X" and they angrily respond, you can adjust quickly and say "Oh, sorry, I figured we'd go for the most obvious thing first. Okay, let's figure this out." I think opening lines matter way less when it's in person, and tone matters way more. You could say "Oh, just try X" in a friendly manner or "Oh, just try X!" in a condescending manner. In text, it's up to the receiver of the message to interpret.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's not fair to ask people for help and then complain about their word usage when trying to help. This is a situation where solicited advice was asked for. This is not wrong but it's not always useful. Being more kind in your language when giving help will carry your point across more clearly. Consider a junior engineer stressed out by deadlines -- sure, they should listen to you calmly and fix the problem, but it…
> Communication is about being understood, not being fair. This is why in some cases it's better to say "Just" instead of trying to hide what you're trying to say in order to maybe be more sensitive without even knowing if that's necessary. For this situation, I tend to phrase it as "Can we just "? which might be received better than "Just ", but "just" is an important word here - I want the other person to understan…
If "Can we just " is coming from a trusted colleague who understands the problem space that is exciting because they may have found a shortcut or clever solution.
If "Can we just " is coming from a non-technical client or project manager then I feel nervous because in practice it often indicates that they have underestimated the scope of the problem or we have overestimated the scope of the problem. In some cases it is possible to have enough meetings to level-set expectations but in some cases the "just" seems to be a leading indicator of persistent project tension due to mismatched expectations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for bringing this up. This was a life lesson that unfortunately had to be spelled out for me in a very embarrassing way. My ultimate takeaway is to now default to listening without advice. The result are on average better as people who want to vent are more put-off by advice givers than advice seeks who receive a good listener. It's also made me quite a bit more appreciative of times when I need to vent and…
What do you do though? Just stand there quietly nodding? When I try to do this I end up basically saying "that sucks", "hmm hmm", "yeah", etc which is very frustrating to me as I'd hate someone doing that to me. Or worse, sometimes I get the feeling that those "that need a listener" actually want mindless agreement with whatever the situation was or I feel like I'll be reinforcing insecurities. Let's say someone is t…
"Oh no, that's terrible! Why are you fearful, are you all right?"
and you remain active by asking follow-up questions. For example to plug gaps in the story:
"Wow! Did your manager say that to your face? Or was it hearsay through that one co-worker?"
and so on. Expressing emotions is also perfectly fine:
"I feel bad. Wish I could do something for you."
I'd only interject long enough to get them talking again. If they need your help they'll have asked it by now :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, nobody's saying "you're a bad person for offering advice". In some contexts, though, offering advice can feel like you want to close the person down rather than listen to them, that you think their problems aren't serious enough because you'd solve them easily. I'm guessing you've had at least one occasion where you have a work issue, and your manager is casually dropping solutions that didn't work, and you wer…
To recenter the conversation - in a personal context idle complaints (ie. venting) are considered rude, and are often accompanied by an apology, for a reason. You're basically monopolizing a person's time, and expressing explicit disinterest in their perspective. Using complaint as a coping mechanism is a fundamentally selfish thing to do[1]. Therefore I don't think we should tolerate it idly. If you want to talk and…
Yep, and allowing other person to do all this to you is definitely spoiling. At the same time, a possibility and ability to spoil someone you love - is one of the biggest pleasures in life.
(I’ve shown the video to my wife. She said: “See, you could have done much worse”)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for bringing this up. This was a life lesson that unfortunately had to be spelled out for me in a very embarrassing way. My ultimate takeaway is to now default to listening without advice. The result are on average better as people who want to vent are more put-off by advice givers than advice seeks who receive a good listener. It's also made me quite a bit more appreciative of times when I need to vent and…
What do you do though? Just stand there quietly nodding? When I try to do this I end up basically saying "that sucks", "hmm hmm", "yeah", etc which is very frustrating to me as I'd hate someone doing that to me. Or worse, sometimes I get the feeling that those "that need a listener" actually want mindless agreement with whatever the situation was or I feel like I'll be reinforcing insecurities. Let's say someone is t…
So with your example, I would first accept their feelings - we've all been insecure about jobs from time to time - and then try to probe into them.
"Has your boss been talking about money being tight? Did one of your big customers just drop?"
"Has your boss been talking about your performance? Do you see others on your team being dismissive of your role?"
Questions like this let the counterparty know that a) they matter to you and b) you're hearing what they're saying. I think that's what you're saying you want to convey. I could be way off base here.
I'm all for cutting this out with medical advice and such (unsolicited advice, and importantly wrong advice), but this example annoys me: >You look at some graphs and error messages. It’s easy (once again, I speak from experience) to say something like “Could you just cache the hot partition keys?” or “So, just scan the logs for the high-latency signals and frequency-sort them.” >This. Will. Not. Help. It's not fair…
> It's not fair to ask people for help and then complain about their word usage when trying to help. This is a situation where solicited advice was asked for. This is not wrong but it's not always useful. Being more kind in your language when giving help will carry your point across more clearly. Consider a junior engineer stressed out by deadlines -- sure, they should listen to you calmly and fix the problem, but it…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Solid advice. I shouldn’t have pushed so hard to get heard. Should have just made it landscape (which took minutes) and let it fail. The trick is balancing that against wanting to be a consultant to them (i.e. somebody who knows what he’s doing and offers viable solutions that they themselves can’t think of) rather than a mindless pair of hands that gets directed by them to throw code at a wall.
You need clients that will allow you to be that for them. Sometimes they just want a really expensive code monkey. I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe paying hundreds of dollars an hour is a sort of status symbol?