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Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

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Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#91
> A number of companies I know of have put velocity & reliability/safety/etc. into their values and it's failed every time.

I have a 'slow is fast' mantra and it's definitely something that a lot of people misunderstand, willfully or otherwise.

I've often shrugged it off as the fact that going fast is exhilarating, while the effort of 'making the change easy' starts to sound dangerously like discipline. Perhaps I've downplayed the fact that A->B can sound an awful lot like A & B.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#92
In the IT industry this scenario is fantastically common:

Here is a proposal. It has this HUGE upside and this SMALL downside

response: because of this HUGE downside, and the TINY upside, I reject this proposal

If they said "what if the upside wasn't as big as you stated but the downside is larger than you stated" at least you could discuss the evidence. But people love to leap on problems and devils-advocate them into the ground.

You see this all the time in IETF mailing lists. I'm not talking about nit-picking during working group last call on a standard, thats justified. People who simply want to be contrarian, take a devils-advocate stance, leap on any stated downside and on the premise its the proof, destroy the original idea, irrespective of the relative merits pro and con.

So, "we should move to Postgres because of its support of IPv6 and JSON" dies on "but the sheer amount of code we have in MySQL makes this untenable" -which is not a good argument, given the budget and willingness to incur the cost. It doesn't address the upsides of the move at all. Or "but we don't know all the places which use the old SQL forms" which is true, but presupposes we couldn't handle case-by-case the legacy calls into the old SQL binding, or find some way to uncover them.

The negative case arguments used, typically are shorthand for "I don't want to think about this"

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#94
This is something that I'm learning to appreciate. My recent HN traffic spike (Woe of WebSocket) had many people missing the point.

I'm preparing to launch my SaaS, and I'm wondering do I start with the fun and cheeky marketing "Hey, this was designed for board games, but you can use it for so much more" OR do I pair with "Infrastructure designed for JamStack" (which is a bit of a lie).

I've started writing the Amazon style press release and FAQ to help me, but I'm excited to start the train on selling a crazy new platform.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#96
post #52

Nuance is hard to convey in groups, but I believe that *a small part of the problem is a lack of design*. Many peoples' eyes glaze over when they see a wall of text in an email and they just skim rather than read. Some simple things to enhance communications can be the following. * Use a few bullet points to put attention on the main points you want to convey. * Without going overboard, use a tasteful amount of graph…

How much do you want to bet most people will read your first bullet point, ignore the rest, and drop all the nuance? Hell, I've learned not to ask more than one question in an email. The first one is the only one to get answered.

I’m not trying to out myself as an unnuanced consumer of communication, but I literally did just that reading the parent comment. I wonder what is the percentage of the HN audience that did that

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think maybe you mean misinterpret? Or maybe we need a new word: disinterpret.

I think interpret was accurate already. I will definitely interpret something differently from someone else without either of us necessarily being guilty of active perversion.

Then you're "interpreting differently" = misinterpret. Everyone interprets everything to understand it at all but you misinterpret it when you understand it differently than intended. And maybe you disinterpret when you do so intentionally.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#98

I read it and felt kind-of bitter. On one hand, yeah, may be nuanced message doesn't work at scale. However, when saying literally two things (vs one) became nuanced. I wound understand if it was a speech talking about a dozen of different things and their interplay... These were literally two things - create a solid product and let's move forward fast. That's it. Also, why the hell whole hierarchy of middle manageme…

But if those two things (velocity and reliability) are at opposing ends of an engineering spectrum, then different teams will make different decisions about how best to trade one off for the other, and then the org as a whole is unfocused.

The problem is the thinking that there is some fixed bucket of speed and a fixed bucket of robustness ingredients and a fixed bucket of product output. That the only way to get any reliability is to displace some speed, or that if you want to move ahead at all you have to throw reliability out entirely.

When in fact these things, and 100 other goals and considerations like being green or hiring fairly or paying interns better etc... merely influence each other a little and don't preclude each other except at absurd hyperbolic extremes.

The different goals DO influence each other. But the output product can in fact have a whole bunch of both speed and reliability, probably at the expense of yet another dimension like cost, but actually the same applies there too, you can possibly have all 3, at least to some degree, if the leadership is insightful enough to figure out a way like employing underutilized people or geography, or gamification or crowdsourcing or alternative incentives, whatever.

Pay more or sacrifice in one dimension to get more in another is merely the obvious and easy way, not the only way dictated by some zero sum law of conservation.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think interpret was accurate already. I will definitely interpret something differently from someone else without either of us necessarily being guilty of active perversion.

Then you're "interpreting differently" = misinterpret. Everyone interprets everything to understand it at all but you misinterpret it when you understand it differently than intended. And maybe you disinterpret when you do so intentionally.

Incorrect.

Re: Nuanced communication usually doesn't work at scale

#100

Nuance is hard to convey in groups, but I believe that *a small part of the problem is a lack of design*. Many peoples' eyes glaze over when they see a wall of text in an email and they just skim rather than read. Some simple things to enhance communications can be the following. * Use a few bullet points to put attention on the main points you want to convey. * Without going overboard, use a tasteful amount of graph…

I wouldn't dream of sending an email of more than a few sentences without breaking into sections. In longer messages I will also use highlighter to emphasize 1-3 key sentences and move supporting details to an appendix, footnotes, or links.

But there are some people you can't get through to, no matter what.

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