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How to communicate effectively as a developer

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Re: How to communicate effectively as a developer

#211

Post by BurningFrog »

runald wrote: post #193
BurningFrog wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your assumption that being autistic somehow completely disqualifies one to speak competently to others... As anyone can see, I did not write that.

The word completely does over-assert that quote, but it's disingenuous to pretend that the quote does not follow from your overall point. People with good "theory of mind" would supposedly read between the lines, but I guess it was never that simple. Spoiler alert: there's no such thing as one true generalized theory of mind.

Reading between the lines is a whole different thing.

"Theory of mind" means, among other things, having a good mental model of what other people know and don't know.

Obviously, without understanding what piece of information the other person is missing, it's very hard to explain it to them.

Re: How to communicate effectively as a developer

#212

Post by BurningFrog »

mjw1007 wrote: post #143
slillibri wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose, but as someone in infrastructure I have had developers ask very, very specific questions without ever actually providing the context or what they were actually trying to solve. Seems to me to be a variation on the same problem. Just because a question is specific doesn't mean it's the right question.

My view is that, whatever is causing developers to often be bad at filling in context, it isn't a deficiency in their theory of mind. (Similarly, someone elsethread is talking about how their non-developer colleagues neglected to tell them about an upcoming release. One possible explanation is that their colleagues were bad at "theory of mind", and believed that as they knew about the release, so did everybody else.…

> My view is that, whatever is causing developers to often be bad at filling in context, it isn't a deficiency in their theory of mind.

The "theory of mind" explanation is that those developers don't understand what context other people are probably missing.

I agree that there are of course other possible reasons.

Re: How to communicate effectively as a developer

#213

Post by antod »

slillibri wrote: post #139
mjw1007 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that programmers have a poor theory of mind doesn't stand up at all in my experience. I remember once seeing the inbox of someone working as a sales-ledger clerk. It was full of messages with the subject "accounts query", or a small variation of that. The ones with subjects like "query for account ACME-37" were from technical staff. Similarly if I ask "when do you need those figures?" and I get the answer "n…

I suppose, but as someone in infrastructure I have had developers ask very, very specific questions without ever actually providing the context or what they were actually trying to solve. Seems to me to be a variation on the same problem. Just because a question is specific doesn't mean it's the right question.

I've had the same experience. It was kinda jarring as I expected devs to not fall into the same trap they complain about with questions/requests from their users.

Re: How to communicate effectively as a developer

#214

Post by Consultant32452 »

b3morales wrote: post #176
Consultant32452 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can speak to what it's like with autism brain. In conversations people often say things that I have unusual associations about. My mind will start spiraling about the unusual association and I will begin an internal narrative about the new, unrelated topic without verbalizing any of it. I will continue with the original conversation with the convo partner. Then, out of the blue, I will verbalize something about the…

Is this specifically an autistic trait and not something allistic minds do? Asking, uh, for a friend.

FWIW I think everyone does this on occasion.

Re: How to communicate effectively as a developer

#215

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

mason55 wrote: post #181
BurningFrog wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your assumption that being autistic somehow completely disqualifies one to speak competently to others... As anyone can see, I did not write that.

It was such a perfect illustrative response because your post said nothing of the sort and in fact explained how anyone can pick up the skill

I'm not sure about that. Communication is hard when words associated with specific emotional valence get involved. For the responder, I'd suspect that on the spectrum is one of those phrases.

I think what makes this stuff difficult is that the same word can trigger wildly different responses.

As an example, I've been working from Ireland for US multinationals for a while now. In Ireland, the word stupid means bad or crap but doesn't have a massive emotional valence.

In the US based tech side however, it was literally the worst thing one could say, I suspect because people were identifying with their ideas.

Same word, multiple different meanings lead to communication problems.

Re: How to communicate effectively as a developer

#216

Post by smileysteve »

samwestdev wrote: post #10
smileysteve wrote: post #5

The post begins with a preface about promotions for leadership from the Csuite. But I argue most Csuite and leaders are horrible at this too; I can't tell you how many all hands or emails I've been at where leaders use the abbreviations ELT, LT, ET, Csuite to refer to themselves -- and then use abbreviations for their move-the-needle projects and expect everyone in the room to know what they mean. Clear communication…

> Frankly, Ruby on Rails - and Rspec provide an example that developers should be very verbose -- in their method names, their file names, the description, background, context, and specific examples.. Very interesting. Any practical example from said codebases?

https://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_basics.html...

https://www.rubydoc.info/gems/rubocop-rspec/1.25.1/RuboCop/C...

Re: How to communicate effectively as a developer

#217

Post by aymar_99 »

One thing i can share from my experience is, some people communicate poorly because of laziness.

In this case, Even if the vague communication is understandable to you since you are aware of the dev's current WIP, pretend you don't understand and nudge the developmer to add more details for the context as necessary.

For example let's say your team has 5 services. The developer pings you : when starting the service i am facing this exception, tried different ways couldn't figure out, can you please help? .

Questions : Which service is he trying to start? Which machine is he trying to start?(local/virtual).

He probably doesn't mention these details because he thinks you must be aware of what he is working on. Even if you know the same, you can ask these questions and ask to mention such infos going forward to improve their communication.

The idea is to communicate clearly as with any developer and not to take things for granted due to laziness in typing the relevant details.

Re: How to communicate effectively as a developer

#218

Post by devonkim »

frenchman99 wrote: post #154
devonkim wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issues I have are that developers tend to be bad at communicating even with each other. Communication as a discipline is a lot about meeting people where they are and this is difficult for basically everyone. The antagonistic attitude that developers seem to develop happen across almost every technical discipline whether it’s engineering or even trades. It may be even worse in trades given so much contact with th…

> If developers had to do customer support for their products as a rule you bet they’d get grumpy. Do you have data to support this? I would love to do customer support from time to time to better understand the users of the product I work on as a developer. But that request has been denied to me many times, in multiple jobs. To get people to communicate better, inspire them to do so and have faith in them.

The data I’m seeing is from studies showing that developers doing peripheral duties and getting interrupted is one of the biggest barriers to productivity and quality among developers rather than training, education, or even raw IQ.

Specialization of roles along with the political realities of corporations means that fiefdoms and exclusions will happen to though.

Re: How to communicate effectively as a developer

#219

Post by frenchman99 »

devonkim wrote: post #218
frenchman99 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If developers had to do customer support for their products as a rule you bet they’d get grumpy. Do you have data to support this? I would love to do customer support from time to time to better understand the users of the product I work on as a developer. But that request has been denied to me many times, in multiple jobs. To get people to communicate better, inspire them to do so and have faith in them.

The data I’m seeing is from studies showing that developers doing peripheral duties and getting interrupted is one of the biggest barriers to productivity and quality among developers rather than training, education, or even raw IQ. Specialization of roles along with the political realities of corporations means that fiefdoms and exclusions will happen to though.

It is perfectly possible to do customer support on a specific schedule so that it doesn't become an interruption though.

Re: How to communicate effectively as a developer

#220

Post by myko »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #125
taude wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're "assumed context" problem actually has another term called "Curse of Knowledge" [1] (which I believe it's much more known as). There's a ton of strategies that have been written about it. Just adding this term here for people who want to search for strategies on how to work around this. It comes into play in all forms of communication, written, verbal, Slack, etc... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cu…

I can speak to what it's like with autism brain. In conversations people often say things that I have unusual associations about. My mind will start spiraling about the unusual association and I will begin an internal narrative about the new, unrelated topic without verbalizing any of it. I will continue with the original conversation with the convo partner. Then, out of the blue, I will verbalize something about the…

Dang, this describes many interactions I've had over my life.
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