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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

#221
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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?

I argued why I believe this does not a good way of communication in business or professional-focused environment, because as explained, habitual padding tends to train readers to skim, because they learn that the lines often contain little of substance. For people who value directness (which, in my experience, includes many in serious professional settings) this kind of attitude is not appreciated. That said, it is simply my own rationale for preferring a more direct style of communication.

>Maybe you’d benefit from some of the mindset that leads people to write and appreciate useless greetings.

I come from a culture where elaborate politeness and social niceties are not only common but often expected, and I do practice them in the appropriate contexts. However, when the goal is to build something, solve a problem, or exchange ideas efficiently, I prefer a norm I explained, that is, directness and the substance of the message to take over.

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

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do think he was entitled to a little embarrassment This is exactly the kind of signal that would make me not want to hire someone. Tit-for-tat? Spite? No thanks.

“Tit for tat” and “spite” feel like they are very strong words for what amounted to a justified smartass comment. If I had shown up fifteen minutes late for the interview I wouldn’t have gotten an offer and the interviewer might have made a comment about it during the interview and people generally wouldn’t call them an asshole for it.

Yes, the fact that you don't see a problem with saying "he deserved it" as justification is the signal not to hire.

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

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying something like "Actually, I felt it was unprofessional and disrespectful to not have the interview start at the agreed-upon time" would also be direct, no? The way it's written sounds way more inflammatory.

I am afraid I don’t see how that is significantly different than what I said.

[deleted]

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

#224

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…

The author is saying something different here - that in this mode, the speaker’s feelings about how the recipient will receive a blunt message are the speaker’s problem.

In this case the recipient has already reassured the speaker they can handle their own feelings, but still meets resistance from speakers who are guilty or worried about how they will come across if they are too direct.

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

#225
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying other people's emotional immaturity is exclusively my problem to solve? Also when you state an absolute like the word of God, how do you expect it to be received? The article seems to imply to me: form relationships where direct truth is welcomed while acknowledging that people do have emotions. Facts can be true and the feelings can be strong at the sam time. Attaching emotions to facts intentionall…

> Are you implying other people's emotional immaturity is exclusively my problem to solve? Ignoring others emotions is not a sign of emotional maturity. The inability to empathize with others and make meaningful predictions about how their emotions will affect communications is specifically a lack of emotional maturity. This kind of sentiment comes up every time this topic is raised. This idea that we should be able…

> Ignoring others emotions is not a sign of emotional maturity.

I completely agree.

> The inability to empathize with others and make meaningful predictions about how their emotions will affect communications is specifically a lack of emotional maturity.

I completely agree.

> Case in point. You had an emotional reaction to the parent comment, and you responded with an attempt to shame the communication style rather than address the factual content of the communication.

Yes I did. I am still curious how OP expects that to be received.

> Your emotions dictated your response here, not the facts, and your response was emotional in content as much as factual. Hyperbole is specifically an appeal to emotion.

I think I agree here too. What do you mean?

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

#226
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The better a person is at communication the more they will fit their message to the audience to get the action intended. If 'direct' really works then over time it will be used but the fact that direct isn't used often implies strongly that it doesn't work for most people or it has secondary effects that are too negative. Demanding the exception is a pretty big ask especially if your aren't willing to meet half way…

The Gladwellian direct/indirect dichotomy (or continuum) is a misapprehension of how language works. All communication is indirect in some sense because we don't have mind control powers over our fellow humans. Even saying ‘I want to buy this bread’ is indirect in a sense: you're not causing the baker to sell you the bread, nor even explicitly instructing them to, but just stating your personal internal desires. It i…

> The Gladwellian direct/indirect dichotomy (or continuum) is a misapprehension of how language works. All communication is indirect in some sense because we don't have mind control powers over our fellow humans. Even saying ‘I want to buy this bread’ is indirect in a sense

If you take 'direct' vs. 'indirect' literally, you are right. Everything is somehow indirect, because language tries to represent reality, but isn't identical to reality.

But you are missing the point. The real issue is information density. Indirect communication generally has lower information density: You give examples of various possible interpretations of one phrase, and the more possible interpretations there are, the lower the information density is. The longer the phrase is, the lower the information density. One can come up with a few counter-examples, where for example a very long and very indirect phrase might just have one very unique and direct interpretation, but those are rare. In general, direct communication conveys more information with less words.

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

#227

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…

”What it means in practice is that your colleague can write "this approach is wrong, here's why" instead of "hey, hope you're doing well, I had some time to look at your PR and I just wanted to shared a few small thoughts, please take these as just one perspective, and of course you know the codebase better than I do, but I was wondering if maybe we could potentially consider [useful thing here]" and then bury the ac…

> It is better to be effective

This is the key to this whole topic. It doesn’t matter what should be. It matters what is. Humans are emotional in nature and ignoring that is not effective.

Also the undertone of this topic is always “I want you to be blunt to the point of rudeness (so I can be too).”

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

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Tit for tat” and “spite” feel like they are very strong words for what amounted to a justified smartass comment. If I had shown up fifteen minutes late for the interview I wouldn’t have gotten an offer and the interviewer might have made a comment about it during the interview and people generally wouldn’t call them an asshole for it.

Yes, the fact that you don't see a problem with saying "he deserved it" as justification is the signal not to hire.

The fact that you only want to hire workers who won’t call you out when they feel like they have been disrespected is a great way to breed a team of people who resent you.

Regardless, you kind of proved what I was trying to say. Most people don’t actually want directness. The fact that when I was direct with someone you’re treating it like some mafioso retribution is telling.

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

#230
post #224

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…

The author is saying something different here - that in this mode, the speaker’s feelings about how the recipient will receive a blunt message are the speaker’s problem. In this case the recipient has already reassured the speaker they can handle their own feelings, but still meets resistance from speakers who are guilty or worried about how they will come across if they are too direct.

Eh, I think the author is also exaggerating the problem significantly.

“I hope this is okay to bring up and sorry for the long message, I just wanted to flag that I've been looking at the latency numbers and I'm not totally sure but it seems like there might be an issue with the caching layer?”

This isn’t a problem of overpoliteness. It’s a problem of almost nonsensical rambling. I’ve never worked with anyone who actually communicated like this and if they did, they would get pretty direct feedback that they need to stop this. This isn’t polite, it’s dithering. Professor Quirrell level lack of confidence.

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