Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to communicate when trust is low without digging yourself into a deeper hole

charity.wtf

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 304 posts

Re: How to communicate when trust is low without digging yourself into a deeper hole

#221

Post by Aachen »

stefandesu wrote: post #177

> Ever meet someone you didn’t like online, and realize they’re terrific in person? Online communication loses sooooo much in transit. This is so true. I have a good friend who is, in my opinion, really bad at this. It seems like he has a talent to make even little requests sound aggressive when using written communication. If I didn't know him so well, I would certainly interpret that as very rude, even though in RL…

> > Online communication loses sooooo much in transit.

> This is so true. I have a good friend who is, in my opinion, really bad at this.

I don't think it's true at all. Most people, I can perfectly well talk to online and can occasionally have an easier time talking to than in person. The person I'd classify as my best friend, for example, I literally speak to 1-2 times a year, the rest is text conversations (at least once a week we have a longer chat I'd estimate).

But I also know some people that are or were close to me who are terrible at texting. I can't seem to help them improve, either. If I'd believe that not everything can be learned to some extent, I'd say this is apparently something innate. They don't come across rude at all, in my case, but just no conversation flow whatsoever. It's a bit comparable to doing one of those interviews where you have to coax every word out of the interviewee.

(There is also the category of people that only ever text on a phone (slow) or just can't type at a conversational speed in the first place (50wpm/250cpm maybe? Just a guess), or have dyslexia and find reading more than half a phone screen's worth of text a significant hurdle. That's different and not what I mean about being bad at texting.)

Maybe you and the author are not people who are good at texting, and that's why you feel it is 'so true' that a lot is lost in text messages? Or maybe most of my friends and I are the outliers, that honestly wouldn't surprise me either, but either way, this thing portrayed as universal truth is far from it

Re: How to communicate when trust is low without digging yourself into a deeper hole

#222

Post by IggleSniggle »

winternewt wrote: post #176
lastangryman wrote: post #174

> Say “please” and “thank you” a lot. I remember a previous role the team leaders all went on a management training course. Everyone came back and started adding "please" to every request. I found it really patronising and felt like I was being spoken to like a 5 year old. > "Can you run the SQL update in prod?" Vs > "Can you run the SQL update in prod please?" The "please" sounds like an exasperated parent that is f…

When people use a lot of emojis, the story in my head is that they care more about keeping appearances up than about honesty and transparency. It's fake positivity.

I like to use emojis when they allow me to get denser content, especially if it's to be printed to a TTY. As long as there's a key somewhere, reducing var names to a single character allows you to pack in a lot more information, while simultaneously being far more expressive than eg "i", "j", "k". It gives you the benefits of columnar data without requiring scrolling back to see headers or even requiring that the columns be perfectly evenly spaced.

Re: How to communicate when trust is low without digging yourself into a deeper hole

#223

Post by klibertp »

jstarfish wrote: post #181
lastangryman wrote: post #174

> Say “please” and “thank you” a lot. I remember a previous role the team leaders all went on a management training course. Everyone came back and started adding "please" to every request. I found it really patronising and felt like I was being spoken to like a 5 year old. > "Can you run the SQL update in prod?" Vs > "Can you run the SQL update in prod please?" The "please" sounds like an exasperated parent that is f…

Bioshock gave me the idea, but I find "would you kindly..." goes over a lot better.

...aren't you afraid someone will take a golf club and hit you with it?

Honestly, the fear of saying this phrase to someone who just happened to play Bioshock and saw Ryan's monologue is enough for me to never-ever use it. I don't know how I'd react if I heard it directed at me, but I'm 99% sure I'd - at the very, very least - say "No, I would not" and go away. There's a fine line between "formative" and "traumatic" and I'm really not sure on which side that playthrough falls, even 15 years later.

Re: How to communicate when trust is low without digging yourself into a deeper hole

#224

Post by balfirevic »

glonq wrote: post #2

How timely. My boss just crucified a co-worker today in our meeting and I think something like this could help mend things. Yes, my boss never heard of " praise in public criticize in private ". Welcome to working with a hot-blooded eastern european

> Welcome to working with a hot-blooded eastern european

It's funny, one other commenter pointed out how you won't get far in Eastern Europe without saying "please" and "thank you" a lot. I'm from there and it's true - we have both rude and polite people!

Re: How to communicate when trust is low without digging yourself into a deeper hole

#225

Post by IggleSniggle »

Aachen wrote: post #221
stefandesu wrote: post #177

> Ever meet someone you didn’t like online, and realize they’re terrific in person? Online communication loses sooooo much in transit. This is so true. I have a good friend who is, in my opinion, really bad at this. It seems like he has a talent to make even little requests sound aggressive when using written communication. If I didn't know him so well, I would certainly interpret that as very rude, even though in RL…

> > Online communication loses sooooo much in transit. > This is so true. I have a good friend who is, in my opinion, really bad at this. I don't think it's true at all. Most people, I can perfectly well talk to online and can occasionally have an easier time talking to than in person. The person I'd classify as my best friend, for example, I literally speak to 1-2 times a year, the rest is text conversations (at lea…

I agree. My spouse accuses me of only being able to communicate properly via text, and i think it's true. I am very uncomfortable in face to face interaction and struggle to find words, but the written word uses a different part of my brain and is easy to communicate with. It drives them nuts because they struggle to express themselves appropriately in writing. So we have important conversations that are very asynchronous/slow as a result. It seems to be working, though, as we recently celebrated our 20th anniversary.

Re: How to communicate when trust is low without digging yourself into a deeper hole

#226

Post by nickjj »

pxc wrote: post #146
nickjj wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right about the "unexpected" part. I think it really depends on the context and the person. Both factors play a big role here. Imagine being in a spot to review a new hire's PR and you've barely interacted with them before this encounter. A reply of "Your method technically works but next time try xyz instead. It's more efficient. ;)" is extremely hostile in my mind. That phrasing is already over the top horre…

> Hey, I ran your solution and it's working nicely. Thanks a lot! By the way, recently I've been working on profiling our code so performance is on the top of my mind. I ran the profiler against this PR and noticed a dip in performance in one of the functions. Do you want to hop on a call sometime to explore a few ways we can refactor xyz function? Really curious to hear what you think and after thinking about this f…

> But that's making a PR comment into a meeting, which is something I'd kinda dread and want to avoid.

Even if it's a new hire that you may not have met yet beyond a hello in Slack?

Re: How to communicate when trust is low without digging yourself into a deeper hole

#227

Post by IggleSniggle »

aizatto wrote: post #104

I use "communication snippets" or "fillers" for example > Person A: “Hey, do you have any idea why this number is low? It’s a mystery … nobody I’ve talked to yet seems to know.” is really long I just say > curious; why is that number low? other prefixes I use are: 1. adding to the discussion 2. for discussion 3. low pri, no need to respond 4. neutral 5. nonactionable 6. sharing opinion https://www.notion.so/aizatto/c…

Is there a way to get to this without signing up for yet another service?

Re: How to communicate when trust is low without digging yourself into a deeper hole

#228

Post by IggleSniggle »

vasco wrote: post #182
glonq wrote: post #2

How timely. My boss just crucified a co-worker today in our meeting and I think something like this could help mend things. Yes, my boss never heard of " praise in public criticize in private ". Welcome to working with a hot-blooded eastern european

Nobody should be crucified either in public or in private. But correcting mistakes and making it explicit to the whole team what the problem was and how we'll minimize the chances of reocurring is best done in front of the team. Everyone learns together, and most importantly, they see how you react to mistakes. They won't be afraid to talk about their mistakes if they see your normal reaction. It'll also feel less ba…

Huh. In my schooling experience, all grades were quite private unless someone shared!

Re: How to communicate when trust is low without digging yourself into a deeper hole

#230

Post by RugnirViking »

winternewt wrote: post #176
lastangryman wrote: post #174

> Say “please” and “thank you” a lot. I remember a previous role the team leaders all went on a management training course. Everyone came back and started adding "please" to every request. I found it really patronising and felt like I was being spoken to like a 5 year old. > "Can you run the SQL update in prod?" Vs > "Can you run the SQL update in prod please?" The "please" sounds like an exasperated parent that is f…

When people use a lot of emojis, the story in my head is that they care more about keeping appearances up than about honesty and transparency. It's fake positivity.

I disagree. I feel there are certain "styles" of emoji use. I don't know if I can explain it well. for example ive worked with people who are really good communicators who use things like sunglasses emoji or muscle emoji to make you actually feel good and keep concise clear communication. But people who make some big long official announcement then pepper it with random emojis to make it more "fun" can be extremely offputting. There are appropriate times to put them but you gotta anticipate how your audience is likely to feel and use them to show you're communicating in good faith, and if you're communicating in bad faith, just don't use them at all, we can all tell.

Also the choice and timing of emojis can be good or bad. Honestly I think it literally comes down to a culture difference between hr types and engineers

Post reply on HN