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Big mistakes I’ve made in my career as a software engineer

• yosito 5y ago
  > When you ask questions in-context, both you and your colleagues waste less time. I wholeheartedly agree with this. If you can save an hour of frustration by having a 5 minute chat in Slack, why wouldn't you do that? Your team will be infinitely more productive. Yet I've worked with managers who prefer their team to figure everything out on their own, and perceive questions as laziness or incompetence. There is a balance with the threshold for asking questions, and it helps if the manager and their team either have the same balance, or some flexibility. If not, the working relationship is often doomed. > some [cultures] are high-context communicators and read in-between the lines (like people from Germany) while other cultures are low-context communicators and require explicit and redundant communication As an American who also studied communication, and has lived abroad for years, I'm definitely a low-context communicator, both in how I communicate to others, and how I expect them to communicate to me. While I understand high-context communication culturally speaking, I don't see how it can work in software engineering, unless your whole team had the same education, works with the same stack, and has worked on the same apps for their entire careers.