Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by antisthenes » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 2:45 PM UTC

harvey9 wrote: post #156

estimator7292 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Someone replaced well thought out documentation with AI fabrications and let GP take the fall for it. That is malicious and inexcusable. It's not on GP, the fault lies with the idiot that ran gold documentation through the bullshit machine. Don't blame someone who was wronged, that makes you a malicious asshole.

I can still see a path where the manager was stupid but not malicious. The manager sent on a document which he was too lazy to check at least had the right endpoints but left the GP's contact details on. I could also imagine intentional harm to GP's reputation was the goal, with really clumsy execution.

Either way, that person should not be managing anything.

And if it was an honest mistake, they need to come out and apologize both to the IC and to the team that is using the documentation.

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

#192

Post by apsurd » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 2:46 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #159

apsurd wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is! If I contort a little, the Tower of Babel is the communication problem in reverse. But original sin means we're born sinners so towards effective communication is toward God. But that's not the point of life, the point is serving God as a sinner for salvation (bible stuff, not my point).

> If I contort a little, the Tower of Babel is the communication problem in reverse. That is what I was referring to. I don't see that you need to contort anything. The story plainly states that without communication problems, man is powerful enough to frighten God, and that the solution God reaches is to introduce communication problems, leaving us stuck in the situation we actually have. The importance of communica…

I did read your comment as that reference, and I liked it. but I see you got downvoted so I didn't trust myself anymore. thanks for taking the time to confirm.

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

#193

Post by mjburgess » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 2:48 PM UTC

yyy3 wrote: post #175

mjburgess wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On your last sentence: The very first sentences should clear warnings not to modify the document, and read it entirely. That the contents of the document are short ( And if that still doesnt work, arrange a 15min meeting with relevant stakeholders and go through the document quickly before releasing it. It is my view that we have always been an oral species, and the great tyranny of the written words always a great b…

>Writing has always been a great burden. It should not be elevated to, nor equivocated with, some great utility or intellectual practice. That was for an era where sound was harder to record and transmit than words; and where meetings required moving around the world. Okay Socrates[1]. Obviously writing has not been a "great burden" because it's 5000 years later and we're still all doing it. It hasn't been enough of…

So you prefer writing. Either way, writing is dying. It's dying because speaking and meeting can now be transmitted as easily. This itself should, empirically, demonstrate the point. The podcast killed the book, the meeting killed the memo. All around us writing is dying, and writing no one wants to read even more quickly.

Soon, in my view, writing will be seen as an instrumental intermediate artefact for technical or creative workers which is rarely shared and rarely read by anyone else. In other words, all writing will become checklists and scripts. Just as books became podcast scripts, and memos became meeting agenda.

I believe this is because writing and reading was, and is, a great burden to many. If you have some other explanation, so be it. It won't change the direction of the culture.

Prepare, I guess, to read more transcripts.

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

#194

Post by two_cents » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 3:01 PM UTC

rimliu wrote: post #121

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…

There is a very weird and a very awesome soviet-era movie Kin-dza-dza. At one point one of the characters tells this about the other: "he says things what he does not think, and he thinks things what he does not think."

One of my favorite movies. There is a context to it though: dystopian post apocalyptical society where all planet natives are telepathic and can read each other's thoughts.

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

#195

Post by nh23423fefe » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 3:04 PM UTC

mjburgess wrote: post #147

cthor wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an insane response to someone having their carefully written work casually bastardized by an LLM that rewrote the entire design spec without even being informed. The amount of institutional noise generated by such carelessness far exceeds whatever improvement in readability you could possibly imagine. Any criticism you could aim at the original text that you don't even have on hand (i.e. are completely specul…

You're assuming malign motivations, I'm assuming misplaced ones. It seems more likely to me the manager tried to read it and struggled, then generated something of equivalent size or larger. I'm taking it the generated document passed around was actually at least as large as the one-pager, and hence entirely pointless to rephrase even with the malign motivations you're assuming. Since the poster here wears his person…

> Because people don't like to read writing which has taken such effort to produce, because it then requires a great effort to read.

I disagree, but stipulate that. Why would this be reasonable behavior when doing knowledge work?

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

#196

Post by throwaway27448 » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

donatj wrote: post #127

I tend to be very exacting in my word choice. If I used a specific word, I meant it. Many people I find speak in what I would describe as tone poems. They circle around an idea using whatever word is within reach, and expect you to understand the meaning based on shared connotations. These people are tiring to interpret. When I write something, each and every word was chosen specifically and with intention. The numbe…

> When I write something, each and every word was chosen specifically and with intention.

Of course, another person can only guess at this intention. Such is informal language. There is simply no way to avoid misunderstanding, although simply expecting to deal with communication issues will get you most of the way to mutually confident communication. Repeating the same concept in multiple different ways will also greatly reduce confusion.

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

#197

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 3:08 PM UTC

nlitened wrote: post #63

anilakar wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I say: This is not ready for production. What management hears: We can sell this to the customer for acceptance testing.

What you say: I don’t want to take responsibility. What management hears: I want someone else to take responsibility for me.

[deleted]

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

#198

Post by rayiner » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 3:09 PM UTC

donatj wrote: post #127

I tend to be very exacting in my word choice. If I used a specific word, I meant it. Many people I find speak in what I would describe as tone poems. They circle around an idea using whatever word is within reach, and expect you to understand the meaning based on shared connotations. These people are tiring to interpret. When I write something, each and every word was chosen specifically and with intention. The numbe…

> I tend to be very exacting in my word choice. If I used a specific word, I meant it. Many people I find speak in what I would describe as tone poems.

That's an amazing description thank you.

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

#199

Post by 121789 » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 3:12 PM UTC

apsurd wrote: post #56

atoav wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a developer, I also have worked enough other jobs to know how important communication is and how bad developers can be at it. A typical pattern I recognized is that many developers communicate like bad medical doctors: they do "Mhh, Ahh" and then after a way to short period they fire out a diagnosis of what you need, sometimes without you even having said everything relevant yet. It is nothing new that people in…

Yes, all said, developers likely are the worst communicators because they over index on their self-ascribed strengths: logic (and logic bullying). Not so much because they aren't smart or capable. But singling out specific archetypes is an obvious contradiction of the article, which is weird. Author is in the UX design space so likely has particular lived experience with specifically eng orgs.

it's any technical specialist in any field in my experience. my partner is a doctor (not a kind that needs great people skills) and I see the same problems. luckily I have worked with many many developers so it's quite easy to deal with

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

#200

Post by brnt » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 3:15 PM UTC

randusername wrote: post #164

donatj wrote: post #127

I tend to be very exacting in my word choice. If I used a specific word, I meant it. Many people I find speak in what I would describe as tone poems. They circle around an idea using whatever word is within reach, and expect you to understand the meaning based on shared connotations. These people are tiring to interpret. When I write something, each and every word was chosen specifically and with intention. The numbe…

> I tend to be very exacting in my word choice. If I used a specific word, I meant it. You aren't alone. My professional written communication is meticulous. I think carefully about my audience and optimize word choice for very low probability of accidental collision or misinterpretation. I don't think everyone should communicate this way all the time, but I do think everyone should recognize that loose communication…

> think carefully about my audience

Consider that you may not be doing this very well. Or that it is even possible to even know what your audience is (going to be). I have found the less I assume about my audience, and thus the more verbose and elaborate I am, the better the reception of my communication tends to be, on the whole. I'll save the terse and meticulous for people who I know and level with in terms of that preference.

Communication is all about adaptation. It is a dance, in that what you think is precise and clear is never going to be shared among every person you are trying to communicate with. Clearly if your manager passes your doc through an LLM, you made an error in judgement. If this upsets you (and I don't have unlimited energy for this either), you should find more likeminded, or at least sufficient numbers of likeminded people so that it doesn't take all of your time and energy away. There is after all a reason why you get along better with some than others, and communicative preference is one reasons why I think.

Sometimes I thoroughly enjoy having to stretch my mind though. I'd hate to work with only people like me (I have!).