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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

#181

Post by dcrazy »

MarkusQ wrote: post #169
mapontosevenths wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, are you a reader? When was the last time you read a full length chapter book for fun? Does it feel like work to you? Is it a slow process? I ask not to insult, but to understand. I can't help but wonder if a lot of this demand for terse language comes from a simple inability to read well? Reading is really not supposed to feel like work to the educated, and it does not to me. For me its just a state…

Not the GP, but I'm an avid reader. One of the books I read (Strunk & White's Elements of Style) had this to say to aspiring writers: "Omit needles words."

One will note that the book, while short, contained more than that one sentence.

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

#183

Post by jpdb »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #150
jpdb wrote: post #146

Asking (begging?) people to communicate with you in a certain way because you think it is depriving you of your attention(time?) is _much_ more selfish because you are depriving people of the opportunity to control how they are perceived. How and what people think of me is extremely important to me. I want to be perceived as someone who is effective _and_ pleasant to work with. Changing my voice to suit your inabilit…

"I want to be perceived as someone who is effective _and_ pleasant to work with." That seems like a good reason to adapt your communication to your audience. If x finds preamble unpleasant, but you use unnecessary preamble when communicating with x, that won't help you be perceived as pleasant to work with.

> If x finds preamble unpleasant, but you use unnecessary preamble when communicating with x, that won't help you be perceived as pleasant to work with.

Absolutely! But OP isn't suggesting preamble is unpleasant, they are saying there is little or even no value and to remove it altogether.

Even if OP did in fact mean to suggest this when speaking to them directly, it is unbelievably selfish to ask (let alone _beg_) someone to eschew their voice just so you don't have to read a few more words and "waste calories" to gather the information they believe is important.

The pleasantries and preambles and hollow words _are_ important. People might be adding them without having deep thoughts on them to the point where they explicitly include them, but they want to signal to you that they consider your humanity. That signal isn't noise, it's a very minute sign of camaraderie. If OP doesn't value that signal, that's fine, but pretending it's noise is antisocial.

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

#184

Post by zer00eyz »

charlie0 wrote: post #143
jmward01 wrote: post #142

The writer asks for it, so I will be blunt. They are demanding people have perfectly formed thoughts crafted in a way to give them just the information they wanted with no consideration for the process of thinking or consideration for the person speaking. It is selfish and impossible. Articles like this, I think, expose how bad we have gotten at both speaking and listening. "I personally value directness, so when som…

At lot of this isn't true in practice because we live in an async word. Perfect example is giving bad news. So much dancing verbal dancing around it when people really know the answer. The best team I've ever worked on had little social cushioning. This doesn't mean people were being mean to each. The directness of everyone on that team was great because we could work towards resolving issues quickly and without any…

> The best team I've ever worked on had little social cushioning.

It is HARD to build this sort of thing in the modern workplace. We dragged politics into the workplace, in a way thats more about social signaling. We moved to work from home, removing the social interactions around the coffee pot and lunches that let you ask about peoples lives outside of work. Furthermore corporations took over the social channels: Slack/chat, email, zoom etc leaving people less inclined to be personal there. Where is the outlet to go bitch about your boss, your PM, your scrum master with your co-workers.

The blunt, no nonsense request to a colleague, who you just asked about their kids in a separate interaction, reads a lot different, without these interactions.

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

#185

Post by benregenspan »

MarkusQ wrote: post #169
mapontosevenths wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, are you a reader? When was the last time you read a full length chapter book for fun? Does it feel like work to you? Is it a slow process? I ask not to insult, but to understand. I can't help but wonder if a lot of this demand for terse language comes from a simple inability to read well? Reading is really not supposed to feel like work to the educated, and it does not to me. For me its just a state…

Not the GP, but I'm an avid reader. One of the books I read (Strunk & White's Elements of Style) had this to say to aspiring writers: "Omit needles words."

I think the point is that some of the extra words OP is complaining about aren't needless. It's on the writer to know their audience, but it's also asking a lot to tune a message in a PR review to the one particular person who demands bluntness, especially if they don't know that person well. If the majority of people in the organization respond positively to a certain style (which may involve some amount of phatic speech), then the person who is "over-writing" here is probably making a good decision.

Once I build rapport with someone, I tend to be more blunt, but still balance that with the fact that other people may be reading the interaction, and I don't want to model a rude communication style.

An organization can choose to promote a very direct approach to feedback (Bridgewater is famous for this), but it requires top-down work to get everyone on the same page, not just expecting one developer to mind-read another.

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

#186

Post by ectospheno »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #177

The idea that how your audience receives the communication is their problem and not yours is entirely why some engineers are shit communicators and seem lost when facing the realities of human culture and politics. You might wish the world would all just think exactly like you but the moods, interest, and preferences of the people around you are YOUR PROBLEM and you need to engage with them if you want to accomplish…

While “perception is reality” is indeed a thing in life so is respecting diversity. If this person prefers to be spoken to in a certain way then it is polite to respect their wishes. You can have your own preference and they should likewise respect yours.

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

#187

Post by mayhemducks »

jpdb wrote: post #146

Asking (begging?) people to communicate with you in a certain way because you think it is depriving you of your attention(time?) is _much_ more selfish because you are depriving people of the opportunity to control how they are perceived. How and what people think of me is extremely important to me. I want to be perceived as someone who is effective _and_ pleasant to work with. Changing my voice to suit your inabilit…

Oooh this is good! So - I agree with part of this.

When a conversational partner chooses to communicate a certain way because of how they want to be perceived, they are living out their values. And I admire that, and I think it is an important component of a healthy organization.

But, if you would, allow me to describe the distress I feel when I have to take in "extra words". Because I personally do not feel it as extremely minor.

My mind operates almost exclusively on language, mostly in text form. I do not absorb input in paragraphs with overarching or underlying emotional content. I don't even absorb it in sentences. I process language word by word - and when reading code it's character by character. Each chunk I take as input explodes into hundreds of possibilities of meaning that each must be thought about in turn, and then dismissed as probably not what the person meant. Some of these are quite funny, and if you are one of the dozen or so people close to me, I might even share them out loud hoping for a laugh. In a real-time conversation, this has to happen in milliseconds. It never turns off - the language parser/analyzer occupies a large chunk of my brain's processing continuously, even when I wish it didn't. If I am under some stress - even normal everyday work stress, and I feel like I need to force myself to process even more words, when they are not hyper-relevant to the stressful situation at-hand, I often find that I have not enough capacity left for managing my emotional state. Fear, uncertainty, risk evaluation all get heightened. Fight-or-flight can kick in too. What if the time I just spent socializing with this person and managing their emotional needs too puts the project over-budget? What if I loose my place on this team because of that? Depending on lots of things, this can either spiral into questioning my very existence and place in the universe, or it can fizzle out and you'd never even notice it.

So just be careful when you evaluate how distressing something is to another person. Unless you know them quite well, you might not have the clearest picture.

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

#188

Post by wat10000 »

lr0 wrote: post #153
mcherm wrote: post #134

Many people are taking what I believe to be the wrong message here. I believe the author's intent was (or should have been) to describe how THEY wanted to receive communication, not how EVERYONE should. A skilled communicator will craft their message for the audience. Some want "just the facts" with no social lubricant. Others want the banter to build person-to-person relationships. Some want a quick statement of con…

> I believe the author's intent was (or should have been) to describe how THEY wanted to receive communication, not how EVERYONE should I thought that would be too obvious to state.

Most of your post discusses communication in general terms. When you say that it’s unprofessional and rude to begin a Slack message with a greeting before getting to the meat of the issue, there’s no indication at all that you only meant this to apply to Slack messages sent to you personally.

At one point you say, “Nobody reads ‘hope you had a great weekend’ and thinks better of the person who wrote it.” Who is going to read that and think that “nobody” only applies to you?

If you really meant this to describe how you want to receive communication, not how everyone should, well, this is an example of catastrophically bad communication. Maybe you’d benefit from some of the mindset that leads people to write and appreciate useless greetings.

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

#189

Post by 5o1ecist »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #177

The idea that how your audience receives the communication is their problem and not yours is entirely why some engineers are shit communicators and seem lost when facing the realities of human culture and politics. You might wish the world would all just think exactly like you but the moods, interest, and preferences of the people around you are YOUR PROBLEM and you need to engage with them if you want to accomplish…

[dead]

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

#190

Post by tonnydourado »

I hate hello-how-are-you-then-wait-before-asking messages as much as the next autistic programmer, but both examples in the "more examples" section still kinda read like an asshole, because they present as fact things that often either aren't, or you couldn't be absolutely sure of it.

For instance:

> "The caching layer is causing a 400ms overhead on cold requests. Here's the trace."

Cool, but how do you know that? Are you sure you're interpreting the trace correctly? How many measurements have you done? Sure that there isn't a historic reason why the caching layer behaves in this way, or a conflicting requirement that lead to choosing this latency over some other, worse consequence?

In the same way:

> "The current error handling swallows exceptions silently, which is making debugging hell. We should propagate errors to the caller"

Agree in principle, but did you check git blame to see if there was a rationale? Or asked someone else? How much change would this require? Could it break consumers of our code?

Granted, the "polite" messages didn't care any of this information either, but at least they didn't almost preemptively shut down the conversation by laying down what is at best an well informed guess and at worse purely personal opinion as if it's irrefutable truth.

Perhaps instead of debating whether to be (too?) polite or direct, it's better to focus on providing as much information as you can, anticipate follow up questions, and close with clear actionable next steps, something which is also missing from both versions of the messages.

"Well, those are hypothetical examples" cool, another evidence that we're all talking out of our asses about the sex of the angels, here. Maybe if the author didn't try so much to characterize themselves as perfectly infallible information delivery machine, then I wouldn't have nit-picked so much their half-assed hypotheticals.

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