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Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

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Re: Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

#351

Post by dennis_jeeves1 »

NAHWheatCracker wrote: post #164
f1shy wrote: post #14

YES. Absolutely! Many people seem to totally lack the capability of understanding simple questions. I often have to ask yes/no questions, and even then I have to say "please answer yes or no". Then I have to go beating 1 bit information at the time... really frustrating, specially with people with master or even PhD degrees! Ok, where I'm now it seems a PhD can be bought around the corner for 2 cents. In my experienc…

I recently had an experience where a project manager was basically demanding a yes/no answer in what felt to me like a power move. PM: Are we good to go live on Wednesday? (it's Monday) Me: Feature X isn't fully ready yet. Data science needs to address a bug that I found 2 weeks ago. If they fix the bug, I'll prepare a release for Wednesday. Alternatively, we can go live without feature X. PM: Feature X is required.…

PM: Are we good to go live on Wednesday? (it's Monday)

Me: maybe, I'm not sure. ( your answer is incorrect, let the manager probe you further)

Re: Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

#354

Post by afarrell »

khazhoux wrote: post #311
thom wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the examples you've given are of team members struggling in a wider ecosystem. Yes, you can stamp your foot and hold them to their responsibilities on a single task. But you might deliver more value if you listened to the things holding them back, because there will always be future tasks.

Again... in many contexts, yes I appreciate the detail. I'm not saying engineer-to-manager or engineer-to-engineer communication should also be terse. But some people struggle to collect their thoughts clearly, and struggle to articulate simple answers to even the simplest of questions. I have seen this, and seen how detrimental it is to their effectiveness as engineers and teammates. My approach is to actively coach…

Sometimes it is a fear response to the anticipated consequences of giving a clear answer.

In your example, I imagine that the engineer is trying to be seen as still worthy of employment despite not shipping a feature. That motivates them to show themselves as:

- Able to overcome some challenges.

- Able to learn from mistakes.

This is a self-reenforcing cycle. An engineer who struggles to make decisions will struggle to deliver at pace. An engineer who struggles to delver at pace will have more experiences of getting fired. An engineer with more experiences of getting fired will be more fearful and thus struggle more to gather their thoughts and communicate clearly.

The only solution I know of is more secure professional relationships such as with a coach such as you’ve been acting as.

Re: Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

#355

Post by yoz-y »

unconed wrote: post #336
nolok wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Us frenchmen, on a world scale, tend to be direct, realist and pessimist. So american optimism is really jarring at first until you get used to it.

Your say "direct", but in my experience French business communication is ridiculously convoluted, bordering on the baroque. "Dear Sir, I hope this message finds you well and in good spirits. Would it be possible to arrange a meeting by telephone in the near future, perhaps even the next week, if that fits with your calendar? I would shame myself if I neglected to mention that I will prepare the requested documents at…

Ah yes. Any sort of official French written communication is drowned in this sort of drivel.

Re: Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

#356

Post by janj »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #346
janj wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't read this as expecting simple answers to questions, but as the question being simple and instead of the person being asked giving a direct answer to that question, instead they give an answer to a tangential question. I've worked with people who do this consistently. Know this I would try to formulate as simple and direct a question as I could, but always the answer would be to a tangential, often more basic…

Would be interesting to see an example. I’ve been on the receiving end of people who want their question asked exactly as worded, cross-examination style, and it is not fun. I wonder if it is that? If the other person doesn’t answer how you expected, then expect that, persist, be kind and be calm. Assume the best intents. They might actually be saying dumb things to help themselves make sense. Here might be an exampl…

It's never a cross examination or contentious from my end.

One recent edited example:

My question: "I'm trying to investigate why a request is failing, I found it in aws, the logs for [service] contain a stack trace up to where the [microservice] request is made, logs are very sparse. Is there a way to get [microservice] stack trace?" [I included links to logs and relevant info]

His response is "Do you want a stack trace on every log? I assume dumping a stack trace is somewhat expensive (though I don't actually know if this is the case) so I would be hesitant to attach one to every log entry"

Did I ask to attach a stack trace to every log? I guided him through the original ask and did receive some help. If this happened one time it wouldn't register, but his initial response here was very typical, something I got used to.

Re: Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

#357

Post by kazinator »

People sometimes communicate unclearly on purpose:

* to avoid committing to some specific work.

* to avoid revealing that they haven't done some expected background investigation or groundwork.

* to try to cover up simply not knowing stuff.

* engineers may overthink a question and the answers for fear of saying something incorrect, because almost everything is riddled with conditions and limitations. And sometimes incomplete counts as incorrect. It's hard to know which may be relevant to the situation being asked about, leaving the busy-brained techie flustered. "Oh, in C, you use the + operator to add numbers. Oh but wait, if there are overflows, it is undefined; don't interpret my answer as meaning that you have a nicely behaved, safe addition. Oh, except for unsigned types ... I should also warn you that the operands possibly undergo promotion to different types, and one operand is converted to the type of the other according to some hairy rules that have portability implications; just try to avoid mixing signed/unsigned or integer and floating."

Politicians are evasive. Canada's Justin Trudeau has become internationally noted for using questions as prompts to dump carefully scripted messages.

Re: Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

#358

Post by janj »

janj wrote: post #356
quickthrower2 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be interesting to see an example. I’ve been on the receiving end of people who want their question asked exactly as worded, cross-examination style, and it is not fun. I wonder if it is that? If the other person doesn’t answer how you expected, then expect that, persist, be kind and be calm. Assume the best intents. They might actually be saying dumb things to help themselves make sense. Here might be an exampl…

It's never a cross examination or contentious from my end. One recent edited example: My question: "I'm trying to investigate why a request is failing, I found it in aws, the logs for [service] contain a stack trace up to where the [microservice] request is made, logs are very sparse. Is there a way to get [microservice] stack trace?" [I included links to logs and relevant info] His response is "Do you want a stack t…

Wanted to add for context, this question wasn't directed to him specifically, was posted in a general channel. I don't want to sound paranoid but based on his pattern of responses it seemed like this type of immediate response in a public channel was intended to influence other's perspectives. I'm not into the office politics games but I am aware that people play them.

Re: Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

#359

Post by travoltaj »

janj wrote: post #356
quickthrower2 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be interesting to see an example. I’ve been on the receiving end of people who want their question asked exactly as worded, cross-examination style, and it is not fun. I wonder if it is that? If the other person doesn’t answer how you expected, then expect that, persist, be kind and be calm. Assume the best intents. They might actually be saying dumb things to help themselves make sense. Here might be an exampl…

It's never a cross examination or contentious from my end. One recent edited example: My question: "I'm trying to investigate why a request is failing, I found it in aws, the logs for [service] contain a stack trace up to where the [microservice] request is made, logs are very sparse. Is there a way to get [microservice] stack trace?" [I included links to logs and relevant info] His response is "Do you want a stack t…

Their answer sounds fine to me.

Stack trace usually means a full stack trace. I've rarely seen one in production - it's usually for unhandled errors. Usually it'll be a one line log which will point you to the point in code where it's erroring out.

Sounds like you just want the logs for the [microservice] for a particular failing request, and not the stack trace?

It'd be bad communication on both sides, here.

Re: Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

#360

Post by travoltaj »

janj wrote: post #358
janj wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never a cross examination or contentious from my end. One recent edited example: My question: "I'm trying to investigate why a request is failing, I found it in aws, the logs for [service] contain a stack trace up to where the [microservice] request is made, logs are very sparse. Is there a way to get [microservice] stack trace?" [I included links to logs and relevant info] His response is "Do you want a stack t…

Wanted to add for context, this question wasn't directed to him specifically, was posted in a general channel. I don't want to sound paranoid but based on his pattern of responses it seemed like this type of immediate response in a public channel was intended to influence other's perspectives. I'm not into the office politics games but I am aware that people play them.

Is this pattern of responses from him, the same to everyone, or just to you?

If it's the former, it's probably just them and not office politics.

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