Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

ashley.rolfmore.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 305 posts

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

#261

Post by IAmBroom »

idiotsecant wrote: post #235
nicoburns wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems more likely to me the manager tried to read it and struggled, then generated something of equivalent size or larger. Either way, it's poor management to interpose oneself between employees. As a manager you should be connecting groups of people to talk to each other directly, not injecting oneself as a go between. If they have issues understanding the material they're much better off asking the OP directly…

The op is probably not the world's most reliable narrator. Based on his very, very specific preferences around writing I'm guessing he can be a bit prickly when it comes to feedback. The manager might have had a bad day and dreaded having the conversation and ended up with this. Still very stupid, but OP is not quite so clearly the martyred hero in this version.

Agreed. Anyone who believes they can write an English sentence that is clear, exact, and bulletproof is foolish at best.

This is the reason professional jargon exists: to narrowly define certain words. But even then, only a tiny fraction of words are so restricted.

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

#262

Post by johnnyanmac »

kraai wrote: post #114
6P58r3MXJSLi wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done tech support for years, since 1996. Your assumptions are also very wrong, my psyche could kill you, I simply know what I want on my side and you on your side, we have to meet somewhere in the middle, otherwise it's not listening, it's abuse. If you don't stand up for yourself, nobody will. Your view is US centric, I live in Europe, we have rights, we can't be fired for having opinions. We don't work 10 hour…

Yes this clearly illustrates the difference in labour laws and basic human rights between US and Europe. "to have a job where you can stand up and leave when your psyche can't handle it." This just sounds nuts to me, not being able to have the right for sick days/leave when your mentally unwell... It's also counter-productive, people that are unwell won't be very efficient. Happy and healthy people work better.

For a while now, the US has been on a position where they do not care about "better work", because better work is not making the line go up as fast anymore. That's pretty much the core factor that will lead to the next major financial crash when reality eventually catches up.

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

#263

Post by IAmBroom »

basilikum wrote: post #245
crispyambulance wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

GP made a claim about the precision of his language that is incompatible with natural language.

This is already known: GP is wildly overconfident in their communication skills.

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

#264

Post by johnnyanmac »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #140
b3lvedere wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a privilige it must be to be able to have a job where you can stand up and leave when your psyche can't handle it. Ever done tech support for ten hours a day? :)

Unless you are literally in manacles chained to an oar on a slave ship, you have the option to stand up for yourself. Everyone has to navigate the needs of life somehow. The simple universal requirement to find food somewhere somehow in no way translates to "what a privilege it must be". You have exactly that same luxury because it's not a luxury it's simply existing.

>in manacles chained to an oar on a slave ship

Yeah, we call that health insurance during a recession in the US

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

#265

Post by johnnyanmac »

yetihehe wrote: post #112
b3lvedere wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a privilige it must be to be able to have a job where you can stand up and leave when your psyche can't handle it. Ever done tech support for ten hours a day? :)

Either leave or make your psyche able to handle it. If your psyche won't be able to handle it, you will have a mental breakdown and leave anyway. Which outcome would you like more, leaving before or after mental breakdown?

Whichever pays for health insurance longer.

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

#266

Post by johnnyanmac »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #219
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…

> 1. No amount of knowledge or discussion will make a person accept something they don’t want to accept Discussion, probably not. Modifying incentive structures, absolutely.

Do most people in an organisation have that power?

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

#267

Post by sokka_h2otribe »

watwut wrote: post #238
godelski wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's poor management to interpose oneself between employees. I didn't interpret mjburgess as defending the manager or even condoning the action. In fact, I read their comments as recognizing that action as a failure. The difference is that mj was trying to give advice to donatj, and donatj can't control what their manager does. So the advice is crafted such that it gives actionable suggestions to donatj. Yet, that…

> So the things to do are either fix the problem or figure out how to work with the broken thing. So, I will say that if you did not seen or read a text in question, there is no way for you to accurately diagnose issues with the text and give out advice on how to make it better. Such advice from someone who simply assumes the way the text was wrong based on some manager rewriting it with ai is less then useless. It i…

It's not based on writing they didn't read...

The feedback is to the author of the post complaining (understandably) about their manager using AI and destroying the carefully written document.

That post alone is plenty to give feedback on absolutism and the nuances of existing in the world with mostly neurotypical people. [My interpretation of the feedback]

We dont care about the manager, they don't matter. This is not "defending" or "justifying" the manager, in case you see it that way.

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

#268

Post by [deleted] »

rrgok wrote: post #77

I have better a idea, since everybody need an engineer to build the damn thing, how about we teach non engineer people to talk to engineer people. Why is it always our burden to learn and improve. UX problem, blame the engineer. Comunication problem, blame the engineer. Documentation problem, blame the engineer. I'm so sick of it. Comunication is a tango. If you - who need the product and are ready to pay for it - do…

[deleted]

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

#269

Post by walterbell »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #130
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 recently had a similar experience. I wrote a 4-page specification. The person receiving it had an LLM summarize it in a few bullet points instead of reading through it. I got a proposal which doesn't match the need, and then he complained that my objections should have been mentioned in the spec in the first place (they were, but not in his LLM summary). It's just frustrating. I'm not one that obsesses over the mea…

> I got a proposal which doesn't match the need

We need message and content identifiers that enable threading across email, messaging and docs:

  In-Reply-To: [namespace][hash]
Then any summary can reference the original, and any conversation can cite a traceable chain of human and computed commentary.

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

#270

Post by Throaway8675456 »

JohnMakin wrote: post #256
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. I often deal with the same, I am usually quite literal in both what I say/mean and what I hear from people. The latter I've got a lot better with, but communication can practically be impossible sometimes - neur…

That Random twitter guy is obviously just agitated & ready to pounce on someone.

Honestly, half of these "neurotypicals are so confusing" posts just look like people who dont want to admit they have social anxiety and are hard to get along with as a result.

Post reply on HN