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Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

ashley.rolfmore.com

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

#291

Post by krageon »

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…

It's kind of hilarious that saying "maybe he wasn't capable of reading comprehension" is supposed to be some sort of reasonable basis to have taken another unforgivable action on.

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

#292

Post by dqv »

gbjw wrote: post #237
Isamu wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found that people who speak indirectly don’t agree that they are indirect, have no idea why you think they are not direct. It’s so ingrained it can’t be seen. I have extreme examples from friends, where somehow they “hear” the opposite of what I say because they are always looking for the indirect meaning, not what you are saying. Fun example from a friend: his family were extremely direct but his girlfriend’s…

> Fun example from a friend: his family were extremely direct but his girlfriend’s family was very indirect. As a young naive guy he was having dinner with his girlfriend’s family and her father asked: “is there any salt” and my friend looked up at the glass salt shaker and said “yes” and continued with his meal. Are we supposed to side with your friend here? The fact that he couldn't infer that the father might want…

IDK, I just do the normal-person thing of asking my question a different way when I don't get the result I was expecting instead of fuming about being misinterpreted.

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

#293

Post by 542354234235 »

brnt wrote: post #200
randusername wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I tend to be very exacting in my word choice. If I used a specific word, I meant it. You aren't alone. My professional written communication is meticulous. I think carefully about my audience and optimize word choice for very low probability of accidental collision or misinterpretation. I don't think everyone should communicate this way all the time, but I do think everyone should recognize that loose communication…

> think carefully about my audience Consider that you may not be doing this very well. Or that it is even possible to even know what your audience is (going to be). I have found the less I assume about my audience, and thus the more verbose and elaborate I am, the better the reception of my communication tends to be, on the whole. I'll save the terse and meticulous for people who I know and level with in terms of tha…

> I have found the less I assume about my audience, and thus the more verbose and elaborate I am, the better the reception of my communication tends to be, on the whole.

I think knowing your audience is key. Am I creating something meant to be read in 90 seconds by high level leadership to reinforce the importance of the project, or to another team meant to help inform them what is needed on their end, or as an enduring detailed document record meant to show due diligence and proper protocol? I could write a document that contained all of those things and more, and no one read it.

You rarely have no idea who your audience is likely to be. Your town’s local paper, national paper, and financial paper are all written differently for different audiences and different assumptions on shared information, priorities, etc. A local paper is going to focus on impacts to Smalltown USA, where a financial paper is going to focus on market effects and will likely assume its audience has a higher baseline understanding of financial concepts than a local paper would.

People that can tell a good joke is another version of this. If it is the wrong audience or the wrong situation, that joke will fall flat. You have to be able to “read the room” to get people to laugh with you.

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

#294

Post by unethical_ban »

crispyambulance wrote: post #279
hellohello2 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you be so critical of a stranger's work given that you haven't even seen it? "that reason was most likely because" -> Bear in mind you do not actually know the given situation.

None of us knows the exact situation but the fact that the person said his documentation was "complete, correct, and relatively terse" is a red-flag. It seems to me like smug over-confidence. If the document really was so clear and error-free, then why would the boss try to "fix it"?

Assuming you're correct that the commenter is unaware of their communications deficiencies, then as much of your confident criticism should be directed at a manager who would silently change a spec sheet for some reason, and not coach the employee on why that was needed.

If it was truly a manager, where the main role of their job is to manage the performance of their employees, then they failed here.

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

#295

Post by brnt »

542354234235 wrote: post #293
brnt wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> think carefully about my audience Consider that you may not be doing this very well. Or that it is even possible to even know what your audience is (going to be). I have found the less I assume about my audience, and thus the more verbose and elaborate I am, the better the reception of my communication tends to be, on the whole. I'll save the terse and meticulous for people who I know and level with in terms of tha…

> I have found the less I assume about my audience, and thus the more verbose and elaborate I am, the better the reception of my communication tends to be, on the whole. I think knowing your audience is key. Am I creating something meant to be read in 90 seconds by high level leadership to reinforce the importance of the project, or to another team meant to help inform them what is needed on their end, or as an endur…

> I think knowing your audience is key.

> You rarely have no idea who your audience is likely to be.

Let's agree that it's a sliding scale, especially in corporate settings. Who's your audience when you write documentation?

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

#296

Post by brnt »

ehaliewicz2 wrote: post #290
brnt wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> think carefully about my audience Consider that you may not be doing this very well. Or that it is even possible to even know what your audience is (going to be). I have found the less I assume about my audience, and thus the more verbose and elaborate I am, the better the reception of my communication tends to be, on the whole. I'll save the terse and meticulous for people who I know and level with in terms of tha…

"Clearly if your manager passes your doc through an LLM, you made an error in judgment" It could also be the PM, passing everything through an LLM to make it "more understandable". Clearly, they didn't care enough to check the result.

Agreed, but that's outside my direct sphere of influence. If anyone passes my text through a spell checker, I would use it to adjust my process too.

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

#297

Post by anthuswilliams »

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…

> Why is it always our burden to learn and improve

That's what the 400k/yr is for.

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

#298

Post by antisthenes »

pixl97 wrote: post #259
digi59404 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you’re right, it’s not great to assume this beforehand. Many things are negotiable, but there are a whole lot of things that aren’t. When you’re faced with convincing someone of $TruthA or $FactA and one of those two collides with a persons worldview, makes them uncomfortable, or causes them pain. Sometimes that truth or fact will be thrown out because of its ramifications. For example, if we’re in Iowa, an…

>For example, if we’re in Iowa, and you prove to me that plastic straws don’t kill turtles.. Black swans. Quite often the they are telling a correct truth, but failing to give it proper scope. For example no turtle in Iowa falls victim to straws because of these species. It's the difference between "There are no black swans in ______" and "There are no black swans"

Much of humanity's misery is not taking the time to understand probability.

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

#299

Post by OkayPhysicist »

mjburgess wrote: post #193
yyy3 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Writing has always been a great burden. It should not be elevated to, nor equivocated with, some great utility or intellectual practice. That was for an era where sound was harder to record and transmit than words; and where meetings required moving around the world. Okay Socrates[1]. Obviously writing has not been a "great burden" because it's 5000 years later and we're still all doing it. It hasn't been enough of…

So you prefer writing. Either way, writing is dying. It's dying because speaking and meeting can now be transmitted as easily. This itself should, empirically, demonstrate the point. The podcast killed the book, the meeting killed the memo. All around us writing is dying, and writing no one wants to read even more quickly. Soon, in my view, writing will be seen as an instrumental intermediate artefact for technical o…

This is a staffing problem, not a human one. There's plenty of non-knuckledraggers to hire, sack the illiterate and hire some competent people.

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

#300

Post by MollyRealized »

cthor wrote: post #145
mjburgess wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

It is not insane, but we are talking at cross-purposes here. It is not insane to tell someone to write for their audience.
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