231–240 of 335 posts
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Yes, but it's also both. Everyone should manage their own feelings and exchange information both efficiently and respectfully.
That's your worldview. Crocker's rules is that you don't have to take receiver feelings into account you just communicate efficently.
I think the author's sentiments can be neatly summarized as follows: "I wish I didn't live in a society".
There are better and worse societies in this matter. I'm glad I live in a society where it is acceptable for a bartender to just bluntly ask "what do you want?" without all the pointless chitchat. Or for me to go to my boss and tell him "there is a problem with X, we should do Y, even if you earlier said Y is bad.".
Our emotions are ultimately our own problem, but you are sorely mistaken if you think the emotions of others can't cause you major problems. There is some merit to keeping social chatter to a minimum in important communication channels, and not being personal. But if you're just gonna try to steam roll everyone else with your opinion, and insult them and their work directly under the pretense of being "objective" then you are going to have a hard time. It usually doesn't even work if you are in a management position, because subordinates will tend to undermine such a manager (if they even stay).
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The point of communication in general is to alter the recipient’s mental state in certain ways. Maybe you want to alter their mental state such that they understand a technical problem. Maybe you want it to be a state that causes them to explain something. Maybe you want to alter their mental state such that they pick you up from the airport. The key thing is that there is a particular goal, and if you want to achiev…
Unless you are as open to having your mental state altered by the other person as you expect the other person to be to having theirs altered by you, I don't think you're really communicating.
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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…
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How do you figure that the author is “developmentally challenged”? It sounds to me like they are able to handle their insecurities in a more mature and emotionally balanced way than most others.
They wrote an entire article about how they hate when someone says they hope they had a nice weekend...
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”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).”
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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 is…
If you are shortening your communication you are doing it by reducing the information content. In some cultures it's acceptable to spend longer buying bread than in others, so you might take the time to exchange more information with the baker. But that is a (to them, if not to you) valuable interaction that they have chosen to have, filled with information whose exchange is (to them) just as important as the price of bread.
However, my worst professional relationships are with people who will rebuke your feedback whether you Crocker it or not. If you're direct, they'll say you should have been more diplomatic about it, but if you're diplomatic, they'll say you're being dishonest and should have been direct. There is no right way to approach it, these people will always find a way to criticize the delivery, and to delegitimize the feedback because of it.
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 ex…
Asking people not to include minor pleasantries in their written communication isn't a "reasonable" request for anything larger than a small group of people.