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Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

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Re: Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

#361

Post by yencabulator »

kazinator wrote: post #357

People sometimes communicate unclearly on purpose: * to avoid committing to some specific work. * to avoid revealing that they haven't done some expected background investigation or groundwork. * to try to cover up simply not knowing stuff. * engineers may overthink a question and the answers for fear of saying something incorrect, because almost everything is riddled with conditions and limitations. And sometimes in…

> People sometimes communicate unclearly on purpose: > > * to try to cover up simply not knowing stuff.

One time, after interviewing more than a dozen candidates for a job position, I was pretty much convinced that the people who gave the shortest answers were the most knowledgeable. The most verbose candidate was used as an example to the recruiting agency, "we explicitly don't want this" -- he was invited for an interview only because he had successfully bluffed his way through the recruiter.

Re: Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

#362

Post by yencabulator »

lesuorac wrote: post #109
nmstoker wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such a shame when people aren't comfortable admitting they don't know something. Often it's way more valuable to know that, and safer in many cases too!

Safer when? Guessing the right answer in school was always acceptable. Just sitting silently always made the teacher upset. People are trained for ~10 years to just guess/make stuff up when they don't know.

My high school math teacher explicitly designed exams where answers were brief if you recognized the shape of the problem, but you could also just start doing the math and arrive at the answer about 1 page later. It was obvious who understood the problem and who was just stabbing in the dark.

My university CS intro course labs always had an extra "and see if you can do it in O(log n) instead" or such bonus question. The bonus part always "impossible" if you didn't get that a-ha moment.

I think you had bad teachers.. (which is unfortunately much too common)

Re: Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

#363

Post by yencabulator »

bauble wrote: post #172
nmstoker wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such a shame when people aren't comfortable admitting they don't know something. Often it's way more valuable to know that, and safer in many cases too!

Usually, people asking me questions don't want to hear "I don't know.". They want me to dedicate myself to solving their issue.

"I'll find that out for you"

Re: Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

#364

Post by theshrike79 »

cdavid wrote: post #223

A crucial point not mentioned yet: cross cultural issues. In an American culture, it is "self-evident" that clear communication is about being direct and to the point. But this is far from universal. More generally, western cultures tend to conflate earnest and truth. "Telling it like it is" is valued. We don't realize our own "phoniness". I have witnessed countless times people hitting a wall in meetings and other s…

> In all those cases, everybody thought they were very clear. I now work in Japan, and what Japanese would call very clear is very different from what we would consider clear in Europe or the US.

There was an anecdote (non-verified story) about this going around a few years ago.

A Big Company in Japan was expecting the big boss to come in and tell them what the plans were for the next year. A meeting was arranged with the smaller bosses. Big boss told them the plan and everyone just nodded and agreed that it was a great plan.

Big boss leaves.

There is a second meeting among the small bosses where they try to figure out wtf did big boss actually mean with his speech. It is culturally frowned upon to ask questions or admit you don't understand.

Re: Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

#365

Post by theshrike79 »

avisser wrote: post #224
tomg wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, if someone asked: "can you unbatch those 1k RPCs?" "Can we do _________?" is the worst question to ask me as an engineer. Like, yes, we probably _can_ do literally almost anything, with enough hours and money. But what's the budget? What really is _______? Eg: If it's "analytics to a page", what do we want to track? Where does the data go? How do people view the data? I need to know the answer to those…

One thing I love at my current job is people embracing the X/Y question terms. People will frequently ask on Slack, "How do I do X?" and immediately follow up with "I'm asking because in implementing process Y, it seems like I need an X." Helps so much getting to the root of the issue.

This problem is as old as time and was really prevalent in IRC channels relating to software a few decades ago.

Some friendly individual put up a site to explain the issue to newbies: https://xyproblem.info

Re: Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

#366

Post by quickthrower2 »

janj wrote: post #356
quickthrower2 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be interesting to see an example. I’ve been on the receiving end of people who want their question asked exactly as worded, cross-examination style, and it is not fun. I wonder if it is that? If the other person doesn’t answer how you expected, then expect that, persist, be kind and be calm. Assume the best intents. They might actually be saying dumb things to help themselves make sense. Here might be an exampl…

It's never a cross examination or contentious from my end. One recent edited example: My question: "I'm trying to investigate why a request is failing, I found it in aws, the logs for [service] contain a stack trace up to where the [microservice] request is made, logs are very sparse. Is there a way to get [microservice] stack trace?" [I included links to logs and relevant info] His response is "Do you want a stack t…

From that example. My take:

You explained clearly and respectfully with the background info what you need.

They came back with a question. An odd question. I suspect:

* They are not experienced

* They have been “punished” before because someone asked for “X, and common sense implies X,Y” but the requestor wanted “X,Z”. So they ask dumb questions to be sure.

* Not enough coffee, and realtime conversation they didn’t parse what you said properly.

I would take the question with a sense of calm and not worry. It is a good think they are asking questions. Encourage dumb questions. 1% of the time they are smart questions.

As a senior dev it could be your time to shine with some mentoring:

“It would be fantastic to have a stack trace on every log, but I suspect this would cause performance problems and increase our log storage costs. It is sufficient to only have stack traces when an exception occurs”

I guess you said something like this at the time.

By the way stack trace logs where there are no exceptions are something I have done, but not every log.

Aside: A stack trace for every log almost sounds like a cool startup idea or monitoring product differentiator, as long as the UX is good and it doesn’t add noise.

Re: Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

#367

Post by janj »

travoltaj wrote: post #359
janj wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never a cross examination or contentious from my end. One recent edited example: My question: "I'm trying to investigate why a request is failing, I found it in aws, the logs for [service] contain a stack trace up to where the [microservice] request is made, logs are very sparse. Is there a way to get [microservice] stack trace?" [I included links to logs and relevant info] His response is "Do you want a stack t…

Their answer sounds fine to me. Stack trace usually means a full stack trace. I've rarely seen one in production - it's usually for unhandled errors. Usually it'll be a one line log which will point you to the point in code where it's erroring out. Sounds like you just want the logs for the [microservice] for a particular failing request, and not the stack trace? It'd be bad communication on both sides, here.

I'm genuinely surprised that a question about a particular failed request could be interpreted as a request to start logging stack traces for all requests. One reason for the surprise is I also believe it would be unreasonable to log the stack trace for every request.

I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt, if my interpretation of something seems unreasonable I like to make sure there's not a more generous interpretation, and give the benefit of the doubt when possible.

Again it's about a pattern over time, not just one instance. I realize I'm consistently not being given the benefit of doubt so I work on my communication. It continues and I start to wonder if it's intentional. To answer your question in the other thread, it seems similar for some but not others.

I think some people form an initial impression of others and that impacts the communication going forward, probably not always intentional. I think also some people try to diminish others through public communication. I don't know if that is what I was experiencing but it could be the case, something to be aware of.

Re: Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

#368

Post by janj »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #366
janj wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's never a cross examination or contentious from my end. One recent edited example: My question: "I'm trying to investigate why a request is failing, I found it in aws, the logs for [service] contain a stack trace up to where the [microservice] request is made, logs are very sparse. Is there a way to get [microservice] stack trace?" [I included links to logs and relevant info] His response is "Do you want a stack t…

From that example. My take: You explained clearly and respectfully with the background info what you need. They came back with a question. An odd question. I suspect: * They are not experienced * They have been “punished” before because someone asked for “X, and common sense implies X,Y” but the requestor wanted “X,Z”. So they ask dumb questions to be sure. * Not enough coffee, and realtime conversation they didn’t p…

They are experienced, we were equals, maybe I'm just under him, maybe that was what we was trying to assert.

Again this was an observed pattern, not just one time.

Re: Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

#369

Post by defrost »

yrgulation wrote: post #324
defrost wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP comment here is clearly discussing culture and not the (say) Britannica definition of race. You're the person that has raised the notion of race and started waving it about like Boris Johnson with a dead cat.

I did, because op is explaining personality traits by means of race. A narrow view of the world.

You're confused, OP is explaining culture differences in places with different cultures.

No race was brought into this until you piped up and dragged it in.

Re: Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?

#370

Post by jiscariot »

imartin2k wrote: post #335
zwkrt wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all stereotypes. As I've done more therapy though I just realize that all the people that I know from the midwest really /really/ don't want to open up about how they are feeling. It isn't about swearing or being a part of 'polite society', it's about not addressing perceived issues interpersonally or in a group dynamic. Like I just see from my hometown near Minneapolis that people would rather just act like unc…

German here living in Sweden. The description sounds very much like Swedish/ Nordic behavior/mentality. And don’t many people in Minnesota actually have Scandinavian heritage?

Yes, but Minnesotans actually have a higher % of German heritage than Scandinavian.
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