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Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

ashley.rolfmore.com

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Re: Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

#31

Post by chaboud »

heyalexhsu wrote: post #5

Or maybe we're spending too much time on communicating. If too much time is allocated then its hard to stay focused and there's always the next time that can be used to clarify. Cut all the unnecessary meetings and only allocate the minimum viable time to communicate. Then everyone will be listening.

I think this is, more often, that we are spending too much time pretending to communicate. Far too often I've found myself in a meeting that doesn't have a quorum, but people try to have the meeting anyway. Even more often than that, I've found myself in a meeting that doesn't have the sufficient pre-requisites to be useful. It will just be some AI slop document dropped in front of folks, with little to no regard for coherent thought or responsibility. It's 30 minutes of gaslighting the readers, trying to make them feel stupid for "not getting it", followed by 10 minutes of "this meeting was a waste of time" course-correction (we read our docs in the beginning of meetings).

And the problem is that the communication (or alignment) is the thing that the meeting is supposed to be about, sharing well-considered thoughts and cohesive direction, soliciting meaningful feedback against clearly-articulated assertions. Instead, we're all-to-often addressing someone's attempt to turn their job into a group project, the stone soup of the modern business world. You can lay this bare by asking "what is the aim of this meeting?" early on, to level-set that the meeting owner isn't just setting up a study group.

Birds-eye-view-only managers only see work get done in meetings, so they assume that the meeting is where the work gets done. They don't understand all of the work that went into what came before the meeting to make it a successful one. If you rush the "communication" before you've found the clarity of thought, your meeting is just noise.

There's a simple but powerful response to this sort of persistent malaise, one that strikes fear in the hearts of the secretly inept: "I don't know, but let's figure it out right now."

When it's time to slow down and walk through the problem, I hold folks to an ordering of dependency: Why, What, How, Who, When... If you don't know all of the things before (e.g., Why, What, How - if you're trying to figure out Who), you cannot proceed. I don't care if you're an intern or a VP. No short-cuts to bullshit hand-wavy answers.

Decompose the problem, do the thinking, reason through it right there, and, if the team doesn't change its behavior, find another team. In the right environment, some folks are willing and able to step up to the plate and act like grown-ups working together to craft something better. Sadly, quite a few can't (or won't) answer the call to be responsible adults.

So they call another agenda-less meeting.

Re: Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

#32

Post by nomel »

onion2k wrote: post #17

You assume what they say is the same as what they are thinking The converse is also true. People saying something assume that people listening are understanding and thinking about the same thing. This is why it's important to write things down in details and as-unambiguous-as-you-can forms. If you're in a meeting and someone puts up a slide deck with a 6 word bullet point that 'explains' what they want, that is a sig…

You also need to force them to justify their requirements, since asking for something way beyond what you actually need is an easy way to hide the fact that they don't understand what they actually need.

In my experience, people like that asking for 10x the actual requirement is fairly usual. But, every once in a while you hear someone say "we should buy the best, so we don't have to worry about it in the future" (when I heard it, that was a 500x cost difference).

Re: Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

#33

Post by mixermachine »

heyalexhsu wrote: post #5

Or maybe we're spending too much time on communicating. If too much time is allocated then its hard to stay focused and there's always the next time that can be used to clarify. Cut all the unnecessary meetings and only allocate the minimum viable time to communicate. Then everyone will be listening.

In my experience in software architecture, drawing a diagram often saves you >60 minutes of discussion and potentially multiple meetings. This works even with a badly drawn but truthful one.

Use an Ai agent + Mermaid.js for a quick scribble if you are in a remote meeting. Use white boards or pen + paper in a local meeting.

Diagrams are so much clearer then words, especially if the concept or logic in question is not trivial.

Re: Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

#34

Post by AdieuToLogic »

colechristensen wrote: post #21
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Too much time is spent attempting to communicate and as such, communication isn't actually happening. This is where I think we have a different definition of communication. > (i.e. we all spend way too much time in useless meetings where nothing happens and few people are any more informed than they were before) Hence my clarification of: Most meetings are not about communication. They are usually prescriptive in f…

Standard philosophical problem, you're disagreeing about the definition of a word instead of the content of the message. Step back and think if a dispute over the usage of the word is necessary or helpful in this context. Amusingly this is where a lot of communication goes to die, loss of the big picture and discussion of how to use particular words. Clearly you agree with OP about how time is wasted but you're insis…

> Standard philosophical problem, you're disagreeing about the definition of a word instead of the content of the message.

Perhaps I should have said we have a different understanding or expectation of communication, instead of "definition." For this confusion I introduced, I apologize.

> Clearly you agree with OP about how time is wasted but you're insisting on using different language to express the same idea.

I do not.

Again, as I previously self-quoted:

  Most meetings are not about communication. They are usually 
  prescriptive in form and dictatorial in nature.
OP postulated:

  Or maybe we're spending too much time on communicating.
To which I disagreed. OP then opined:

  If too much time is allocated then its hard to stay focused 
  and there's always the next time that can be used to 
  clarify.
Which is an indirect reference to meetings, not communication.

Finally, OP concluded with:

  Cut all the unnecessary meetings and only allocate the 
  minimum viable time to communicate. Then everyone will be 
  listening.
Which erroneously correlates meetings with listening. Your original response included:

  ... we all spend way too much time in useless meetings where 
  nothing happens ...
Thus reinforcing said erroneous correlation. I blame myself for insufficiently expressing my thoughts on the difference between listening, which is implicit in communication and the topic of the article, and meetings, which are an assembly of people requiring only physical presence.

Re: Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

#35

Post by ethan_smith »

faangguyindia wrote: post #18

Most of the problem is that talking to non technical people is frustrating, they often start like 1. Can u add X 2. Can u change Y Without understanding cost of doing all this. Yes, i can do all and everything you ask for, but each action has a cost, which you fail to understand. We cannot do everything if we need to launch a reliable product.

This is kind of the exact thing the article is about though. They're not "failing to understand" costs - they just have different context. Your job is to help them make informed tradeoffs, not to expect them to already know what things cost before asking.

Re: Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

#38

Post by anilakar »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #6
heyalexhsu wrote: post #5

Or maybe we're spending too much time on communicating. If too much time is allocated then its hard to stay focused and there's always the next time that can be used to clarify. Cut all the unnecessary meetings and only allocate the minimum viable time to communicate. Then everyone will be listening.

> Or maybe we're spending too much time on communicating. This is a phenomena I have yet to experience in the wild. > Cut all the unnecessary meetings and only allocate the minimum viable time to communicate. Most meetings are not about communication. They are usually prescriptive in form and dictatorial in nature. > Then everyone will be listening. Listening is a skill, one which is can be perfected if practiced. Ne…

You can spend too much time communicating and not communicate enough at the same time. Effectiveness is the key here.

Re: Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

#39

Post by huswepcc »

apsurd wrote: post #11

Agree with the problem but this list reads like a vent. Communicating effectively is the central problem of all humanity! This vent criticizes developers for not knowing how to listen. that's why it comes off condescending. The root problem is that people don't know what they don't know. The best communicators are translators. People listen because the message becomes self evident in their understanding. It's hardly…

Passing on what an ancient greybread told me. He said look at it as a Noisy system (signal is always lower than noise no matter what you do) with bounded chimps inside it.

Bounded meaning there are upper limits to what anyone can do. And there are upper limits to how frequently model updates of the chimp brain can happen per unit time. And the limits of a group are much lower. At the extreme end Large institutions once they settle on a model of reality can take decades to radically update it. Even if all signs say reality has totally changed.

So with those constraints in mind decide what you want to spend your energy and time on.

Re: Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

#40

Post by anilakar »

onion2k wrote: post #17

You assume what they say is the same as what they are thinking The converse is also true. People saying something assume that people listening are understanding and thinking about the same thing. This is why it's important to write things down in details and as-unambiguous-as-you-can forms. If you're in a meeting and someone puts up a slide deck with a 6 word bullet point that 'explains' what they want, that is a sig…

What I say: This is not ready for production.

What management hears: We can sell this to the customer for acceptance testing.

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