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

#241

Post by lamasery » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 4:27 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…

I would assume the manager's a terrible reader and writer.

Most people are. Most managers are.

It's one of those upsetting things I've learned about the world as an adult, that's sharply contrary to what I believed as a child. I kept being surprised by all kinds of things until I began really to appreciate that, simply, most folks aren't especially literate. Even ones who attend and attain degrees from universities—surely at least nearly-all of those people can read and understand "college level" texts with some fluency? But no, that's, somehow, not even close to true.

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

#242

Post by xnx » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 4:27 PM UTC

digi59404 wrote: post #54

Even here in the comments you see people who have read this article and fall victim to the very things it’s pointing out. It’s ironic. Let me add a couple to this list. 1. No amount of knowledge or discussion will make a person accept something they don’t want to accept. 2. To truly listen means to place yourself mentally and physically in a vulnerable state. Because you will likely hear things that run contrary to y…

> and finding a way to solve the pain points. As opposed to trying to understand what feature the user wants to request.

Careful, this is also arrogance that you know what the user wants better than they do.

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

#243

Post by rayiner » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 4:29 PM UTC

mjburgess wrote: post #209

rayiner wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Speaking to people in a meeting allows them to emote, express difficulty of understanding, understand the sentiment and priority of what they're hearing -- and most of all, it allows them to listen rather than read. People speak at a much lower information density, and this is a less taxing form of communication. Is that why everything is a Youtube video these days instead of written articles? The real danger of Ti…

Yes, see my comment below. Memo -> meeting, book -> podcast / audiobook, newspaper article -> 10min youtube video, even, meme -> yt-short/tiktok People are naturally motivated to watch, listen, and interact with other people. There's less a need to explain why cognitive effort is required, lower risk to bounce-off the format because it's to difficult/boring/frustrating/etc. We're already primed to expend effort inter…

> Yes, see my comment below. Memo -> meeting, book -> podcast / audiobook, newspaper article -> 10min youtube video, even, meme -> yt-short/tiktok

Yeah, a dog can understand spoken words but can't read a memo. We should strive to use our human faculties and hold others to that standard, instead of lowering ourselves to communicating like animals.

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

#244

Post by npilk » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 4:30 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…

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1860/

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

#245

Post by basilikum » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 4:32 PM UTC

crispyambulance wrote: post #206

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…

> The documentation was complete, correct, and relatively terse. Less than a page. No, that's YOUR IMPRESSION of your own writing. There are many reasons why others might not find what you wrote sufficient to understand it. You boss ran it through AI for a reason and that reason was most likely because it the document was not understandable or perhaps confusing. Did the document have usage examples? Did it explain co…

You are making a bunch of claims about a situation you know nothing about.

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

#246

Post by cindyllm » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 4:33 PM UTC

lamasery wrote: post #236

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…

> The number of times I see my words interpreted as though my choice in words had been imprecise is a near constant source of pain, particularly in the workspace. I might be on the spectrum, I am undiagnosed. Could be some of this, but also the median person is barely literate. Reading historical correspondence of highly-literate people makes this clear. There's none of the shit you describe. It's not because they're…

[dead]

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

#247

Post by deathanatos » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 4:42 PM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #240

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…

> Within a day I start getting feedback that makes zero sense. Seemingly no one can get the RPC to work. I had tested this extensively, the complaints made zero sense. One of the complaints includes the actual request being made and the endpoint is entirely wrong. Not a single character typo, a complete fabrication. I ask where this came from and they point me to the documentation they were sent. Every single thing w…

> if you're going to "rewrite" something with AI, proofread it, especially technical documentation.

The entire idea of AI, AFAICT, is to avoid the work that is necessary to understand the thing, which would then permit you to proofread (for technical accuracy, not just grammatical well-formed-ness), let alone write it in the first place.

> How many hours were burned (and money) over some AI generated goof?

But you see, the person whose hours were burned was the parent, here, not the person using the AI. The person feeling the pain is not the person who needs to learn the lesson.

(Why you'd take the parent's docs and just run them through a slop-shredder is another question, but I can see the reasons along the lines of "sprucing them up" or "enriching them", etc.)

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

#248

Post by MichaelZuo » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 4:57 PM UTC

pwdisswordfishq wrote: post #160

mjburgess wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You're assuming malign motivations, I'm assuming misplaced ones. Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Bingo, it’s pointless trying to suss out beyond a certain threshold.

Just assume it’s a mix.

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

#249

Post by Henchman21 » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

mjburgess wrote: post #129

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…

Perhaps you should ask the manager why he passed it through AI. It might be that with precision, readability is lost. It's a tradeoff: the more compressed your language is, and hence the more precise, the more cognitive effort you require the reader to expend on each word. Reading is a translation from your mental model, as expressed in words, to the readers mental model. Words alone don't perform this translation, t…

You just did the fucking thing he was complaining about. Holy shit I have never seen a point so well made on HN, well done @donatj

I believe the correct word choice here is "obtuse".

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

#250

Post by hannahstrawbrry » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 5:05 PM UTC

If you are a student/young engineer, this piece of advice is some of the best you can get: "...thinking of people with the binary of "technical" and "non-technical", you definitely will be missing insights and most likely, you're not listening properly."

Especially for interns within large multifunctional companies- I have seen a hundred times over how some very bright engineers will start to sniff out who they have decided is or isn't technical and try to avoid the non-technical team members. You might get some kudos from other engineers but it won't compare to the praises analysts will sing when they finally get the technical attention they have needed for a year or more.