251–260 of 372 posts
Lots of people are afraid to say "I don't know" in my experience. Although, sometimes people ask me a question where I have to work out in my head what the answer is and it feels weird to sit there in silence for 15 seconds as I do so.
The words “yes” and “no” are way undervalued as appropriate responses to a question. Me (manager): “Hey Bob, did you and the other team figure out a solution for the problem you mentioned last week?” Bob: “Well, we had a couple of long meetings and went through a lot of issues.” Me: “Great. Did you come to a conclusion?” Bob: “Well, there was a lot of disagreement at first, that’s why we spent longer than we intended…
As a manager, this is actually a good response. It gives me insight into what's causing problems for my reports.
“Bob, did you deploy your API to stage yet so we can start experimenting with it?”
“Well, this version isn’t final yet… there’s a few things I might want to do differently. It won’t be deployed to production for at least another 2 weeks. The whole thing is actually a lot trickier than it seems…”
“Bob, is this on stage or not?”
“Oh, yes”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was a pretty clear rant. Missing a word is not exclusive of clear communication.
They could have settled down, collected their thoughts. This “rant” literally provides evidence the poster is a crappy communicator. Are we sure they’re not blaming everyone else out of frustration with their own shortcomings? I suggest they read some Camus and consider in a relative world not everyone is composed of the same statefulness they are.
I dunno what’s up with these Ask HNs which are utterly transparent humblebrags but in this case, chances are what you think is clear communication lacks a lot of context and nuance, and despite obviously feeling superior to them, you’re missing or ignoring important information that people want you to possess.
And yet some people just can’t communicate well with any of their co-workers, and that’s what we’re discussing here.
A crucial point not mentioned yet: cross cultural issues. In an American culture, it is "self-evident" that clear communication is about being direct and to the point. But this is far from universal. More generally, western cultures tend to conflate earnest and truth. "Telling it like it is" is valued. We don't realize our own "phoniness". I have witnessed countless times people hitting a wall in meetings and other s…
Hm. I am an American, but maybe that American optimism stuff explains some friction I have had at work. I find that being optimistic when important things aren't working is stupid and increases risk.
But imprecise communication is something you'll have to get used to if you want to do important work. The most precise communication you will find are in higher level math textbooks, where the proofs rely on predetermined axioms and careful logic (and when proved these statements are called "trivial"). Issues in the real world are built on top of imperfect information.
Reminds me of a Feynman quote on what makes a topic that we can have a discussion on:
"We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance–gold transfers we can't talk about, because those are understood–so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!”
I dunno what’s up with these Ask HNs which are utterly transparent humblebrags but in this case, chances are what you think is clear communication lacks a lot of context and nuance, and despite obviously feeling superior to them, you’re missing or ignoring important information that people want you to possess.
It happens often when question goes through 'occupation boundaries'. Eg you are manager (judging by 'my experience is with SWEs') and you ask 'simple' direct question from swe "can you implement this feature". And instead you get wall of text. Which might be frustrating, but is it SWE to blame?
A crucial point not mentioned yet: cross cultural issues. In an American culture, it is "self-evident" that clear communication is about being direct and to the point. But this is far from universal. More generally, western cultures tend to conflate earnest and truth. "Telling it like it is" is valued. We don't realize our own "phoniness". I have witnessed countless times people hitting a wall in meetings and other s…
Hm. I am an American, but maybe that American optimism stuff explains some friction I have had at work. I find that being optimistic when important things aren't working is stupid and increases risk.
It is a combination of personality and the persons understanding of the topic.
It boils down to you yourself not communicating your intention in the conversation a lot of times. You can say "java is a poor choice because of gc", do you want to talk about langauges in general, are you looking for them to relate to you on your experience with java, are you trying to get better context about why the person wants to use java? Are you mentioning that because you want to get to know the person better and that was your ice breaker?
Understand that other people live in a completely different world in their minds than your own. Being clear and direct is not enough, being specific might also be required which means saying obvious intentions and meanings out loud.
Lots of people are afraid to say "I don't know" in my experience. Although, sometimes people ask me a question where I have to work out in my head what the answer is and it feels weird to sit there in silence for 15 seconds as I do so.
> Although, sometimes people ask me a question where I have to work out in my head what the answer is and it feels weird to sit there in silence for 15 seconds as I do so. I've had to train myself to actually respond in this situations "let me think about that for a second". Because although the silence is awkward it is way better than rambling off and getting something wrong or having someone interrupt your train of…
A human loading indicator.