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I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me

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Re: I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me

#21

Post by d-us-vb »

While I agree with the sentiment for the effect its adherents want to have, but...

Why not just

"Communicate clearly"?

- Don't add fluff

- write as plainly as possible

- write as precisely as is reasonable

- Only make reasonable assumptions about the reader

- Do your best to anticipate ambiguity and proactively disambiguate. (Because your readers may assume that if they don't understand you, what you wrote isn't for them.)

- Don't be selfish or self-centered; pay attention to the other humans because a significant amount of communication happens in nuance no matter how hard we try to minimize it.

Re: I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me

#22

Post by andrewflnr »

IanCal wrote: post #9

Some of those examples are genuinely different as they convey different intent and certainty. Also some of the basic small talk level things are also there to gauge someone’s responsiveness right now. To ask directly can mean “I believe my issue is important enough to immediately change what you’re thinking about to my problem without checking first”. You might complain about breaking your flow, which is fine, but an…

Yeah, skip the fluff about my having a good weekend if you need me to fix something, but a lot of those uncertainty markers aren't fluff, they're essential to honest, accurate communication.

Similarly, many times when you say a variation on "I know you're the expert on the codebase" or whatever, that's because it's true and important. Something I think is a problem, which this article wants me to phrase as a short, plain declaration, might actually just be a misunderstanding on my part. If I get one of those messages, I'm not going to see my time being respected. I'm going to see an arrogant jerk too lazy to learn what they're talking about before shooting off their mouth.

Re: I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me

#23

Post by kixiQu »

> If the payment service went down because a config value was wrong, the incident report should say: the payment service went down because config value X was set to Y when it needed to be set to Z.

The number of junior engineers I have had to coach out of this way of thinking to get the smallest fragment of value out of a postmortem process... dear Lord. I wonder if this person is similarly new to professional collaboration.

The larger personal site is very aesthetically cool, though – make sure you click around if you haven't!

Re: I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me

#25

Post by titanomachy »

oncallthrow wrote: post #2

This is pretty autistic. I kind of agree, being somewhat on the spectrum myself. But I think the world would be a considerably worse place if everyone abided by such rules.

Some people have an attitude to work resembling “I spend most of my day here, so having enjoyable professional relationships with my coworkers is a major determinant of my quality of life.” And there are other people who have an attitude closer to “it’s my goal to deliver value efficiently and get paid. I’m not here to make friends. Any meaningful human interactions happen outside of work.”

I don’t know enough about autism to know if that’s the right label for the second category. (I’ve had coworkers who identified as autistic who seemed to deeply care about whether I enjoyed working with them.) I think these two types of people can work together productively, but I don’t think they’ll ever totally understand each other.

Re: I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me

#26

Post by andrewflnr »

hluska wrote: post #7
camel_gopher wrote: post #4

You can communicate like this and have it be effective if you have an established good relationship with the recipient. That’s why team cohesiveness is important. Context of whom you are communicating with is also important. That’s the trade off of approaches like these rules. In some situations they are fine. In others not so much.

I don’t agree - the type of communication between certain members makes a team harder for everyone to join. You end up with tribal knowledge to the extreme if you communicate like this. It’s why it is unbelievably bad advice - it claims it respects a listener’s time yet creates an environment where the majority won’t listen.

> You end up with tribal knowledge to the extreme if you communicate like this.

Wait, what? How does a team habit of bluntly stating facts result in "tribal knowledge"? If anything it should be the opposite. The approach in the article has problems but I don't believe that's one of them.

Re: I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me

#28

Post by wnoise »

d-us-vb wrote: post #21

While I agree with the sentiment for the effect its adherents want to have, but... Why not just "Communicate clearly"? - Don't add fluff - write as plainly as possible - write as precisely as is reasonable - Only make reasonable assumptions about the reader - Do your best to anticipate ambiguity and proactively disambiguate. (Because your readers may assume that if they don't understand you, what you wrote isn't for…

Because those are far more general than what he is asking for, and what he is asking for will usually not be seen as covered by your generalization.

Re: I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me

#29

Post by andrewflnr »

camel_gopher wrote: post #4

You can communicate like this and have it be effective if you have an established good relationship with the recipient. That’s why team cohesiveness is important. Context of whom you are communicating with is also important. That’s the trade off of approaches like these rules. In some situations they are fine. In others not so much.

Yes, in particular emotional trust is key. Maybe a few people can just declare their own emotional reactions away and have that stick, but you can't ask that of other people. We're still just apes. So if you want brief, clear communication, you need people to actually believe in their guts that when you tell them something they did is broken, it's not a personal attack.

Re: I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me

#30

Post by analognoise »

dolebirchwood wrote: post #16
analognoise wrote: post #13

“My quirky autism excuses me being an asshole” is how most of this reads. “Maximally direct” people need to learn how to mask better, and if it costs them too much then they’re not suited for professional work anyway.

The irony of your comment's tone is overwhelming.

Thought I’d try maximally direct communication.
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