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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

#41

Post by thaumasiotes »

apsurd wrote: post #11

Agree with the problem but this list reads like a vent. Communicating effectively is the central problem of all humanity! This vent criticizes developers for not knowing how to listen. that's why it comes off condescending. The root problem is that people don't know what they don't know. The best communicators are translators. People listen because the message becomes self evident in their understanding. It's hardly…

> Communicating effectively is the central problem of all humanity!

If that were true, there'd be something about it in the Bible.

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

#43

Post by thaumasiotes »

colechristensen wrote: post #24
c0balt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is just my interpretation but OP effectively argued "too many ineffective meetings, we should have less unnecessary meetings and a clearer, independent direction". The commenter above argued that the problem was slightly different, it's not too many meetings for communication but too many that are not achieving effective communication. A meeting in itself does not create communication (of information and e…

Y'all are saying the same thing over and over with slightly different words proposing that the different way of saying it has a meaningful impact on the message. It doesn't. >"too many ineffective meetings, we should have less unnecessary meetings and a clearer, independent direction". >it's not too many meetings for communication but too many that are not achieving effective communication ^^ there's no meaningful di…

The distinction is explicit in the statements you quoted. One is advocating for lessening the number of meetings. One is saying that won't help, and instead advocating for increasing the quality of meetings.

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

#44

Post by bawolff »

heyalexhsu wrote: post #5

Or maybe we're spending too much time on communicating. If too much time is allocated then its hard to stay focused and there's always the next time that can be used to clarify. Cut all the unnecessary meetings and only allocate the minimum viable time to communicate. Then everyone will be listening.

Spending time "on" communicating is not the same thing as communicating.

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

#46

Post by faangguyindia »

ethan_smith wrote: post #35
faangguyindia wrote: post #18

Most of the problem is that talking to non technical people is frustrating, they often start like 1. Can u add X 2. Can u change Y Without understanding cost of doing all this. Yes, i can do all and everything you ask for, but each action has a cost, which you fail to understand. We cannot do everything if we need to launch a reliable product.

This is kind of the exact thing the article is about though. They're not "failing to understand" costs - they just have different context. Your job is to help them make informed tradeoffs, not to expect them to already know what things cost before asking.

it's not possible to make everyone understand nuclear physics, there is certain threshold of cognitive skills/motivation required for that.

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

#47

Post by mechsy »

mixermachine wrote: post #33
heyalexhsu wrote: post #5

Or maybe we're spending too much time on communicating. If too much time is allocated then its hard to stay focused and there's always the next time that can be used to clarify. Cut all the unnecessary meetings and only allocate the minimum viable time to communicate. Then everyone will be listening.

In my experience in software architecture, drawing a diagram often saves you >60 minutes of discussion and potentially multiple meetings. This works even with a badly drawn but truthful one. Use an Ai agent + Mermaid.js for a quick scribble if you are in a remote meeting. Use white boards or pen + paper in a local meeting. Diagrams are so much clearer then words, especially if the concept or logic in question is not…

Yes, it helps to keep the bigger picture (pun intended) in focus and something tangible to criticise. Same for design docs. Otherwise, the conversation‘s spotlight just keeps moving around and might even follow whatever thread one of the more prolific speakers just came up with, which carries the danger of derailing the whole thing and adjourning without a decision.

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

#48

Post by monegator »

onion2k wrote: post #17

You assume what they say is the same as what they are thinking The converse is also true. People saying something assume that people listening are understanding and thinking about the same thing. This is why it's important to write things down in details and as-unambiguous-as-you-can forms. If you're in a meeting and someone puts up a slide deck with a 6 word bullet point that 'explains' what they want, that is a sig…

> about the same thing

yes. I have to keep telling my colleagues "about what?" for about 4-5 times in a row, at least twice daily, until they finally realize they have to tell me which client, feature, product or whatever else they are referring to.

Even if i know exactly what yhey are talking about.

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

#49

Post by atoav »

apsurd wrote: post #11

Agree with the problem but this list reads like a vent. Communicating effectively is the central problem of all humanity! This vent criticizes developers for not knowing how to listen. that's why it comes off condescending. The root problem is that people don't know what they don't know. The best communicators are translators. People listen because the message becomes self evident in their understanding. It's hardly…

I am a developer, I also have worked enough other jobs to know how important communication is and how bad developers can be at it.

A typical pattern I recognized is that many developers communicate like bad medical doctors: they do "Mhh, Ahh" and then after a way to short period they fire out a diagnosis of what you need, sometimes without you even having said everything relevant yet.

It is nothing new that people in software are at times not the best communicators. For the first part the interesting bit isn't what your clients want, it is what they need. Unless they are the usually rare customer that has a good understanding of how software could solve their problem elegantly, you will have to assume it was someone's job to come up with something and that someone has never written or thought a lot about software before. That doesn't mean their ideas are worthless, but it means the work of finding the requirements and coming up with a solution is usually not done when you arrive. And the way to get it done is communication, by observation and by having them explain the processes.

Many software developers are in fact really not listening in my experience. Not that developers are the only people that happens to, doctors or other technicians also come to mind. They are often trying to quickly come across as competent by showing off their good grasp of the subject. To them you are a clear case of some category of problem they have dealt with a hundred times. This can work for them.. Until it does not.

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

#50

Post by apsurd »

huswepcc wrote: post #39
apsurd wrote: post #11

Agree with the problem but this list reads like a vent. Communicating effectively is the central problem of all humanity! This vent criticizes developers for not knowing how to listen. that's why it comes off condescending. The root problem is that people don't know what they don't know. The best communicators are translators. People listen because the message becomes self evident in their understanding. It's hardly…

Passing on what an ancient greybread told me. He said look at it as a Noisy system (signal is always lower than noise no matter what you do) with bounded chimps inside it. Bounded meaning there are upper limits to what anyone can do. And there are upper limits to how frequently model updates of the chimp brain can happen per unit time. And the limits of a group are much lower. At the extreme end Large institutions on…

Sounds like innovator's dilemma + a quote i saw recently:

Former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: “Consensus ... is the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved.”

I buy that inevitably the system becomes it's own constraint and local optimum. But working together is a practical reality too. Worth making the best of.

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