7 ms·

I firmly believe this is almost exclusively a didactic issue, ie. the person explaining does not or cannot reflect what is common knowledge and what needs to be

I firmly believe this is almost exclusively a didactic issue, ie. the person explaining does not or cannot reflect what is common knowledge and what needs to be explained in addition to the new ideas. This comment resonated with me so much "I’ve been on the receiving side of this before. What typically happens is the Dunning-Krueger Effect. This is typically understood as incompetent people are too incompetent to determine that they are incompetent, but its lesser-known corollary is that competent people assume everyone else is competent too, and thus they don’t have to explain themselves. Once you understand this, the reason for poor communication becomes clear. The team doesn’t bother to explain their presumptions, falsely assuming that everyone is on the same page. They feel free to use original concepts they developed, internal team slang, unexplained acronyms, etc. Then they’re baffled why people are so stupid and can’t understand their outstanding presentation that obviously went over all the details. " I, too, have been on the receiving end of such treatment multiple times. I wouldn't call exclusive or inside knowledge "competence". What shocks and baffles me is exactly this phenomenon: Companies have inside knowledge, which an outsider starting fresh could not possibly know. An outsider also has a really hard time grasping and sorting the new inside information. Yet, it is common of engineers to not reflect at all about "what can this person know and understand without working here 5+ years", and prematurely jump to conclusions that outsiders are slow, and they are lazy to not aquire this information on their own. This behavior is not competent, or smart if you ask me. When you try to communicate the issue at hand, it might also fall on deaf ears, because reflecting about such meta levels of knowledge is a skill not everyone posesses and could easily understand. In the end, either side, the insider and the outsider, can experience a lot of frustration, because their viewpoint is so incompatible with the other.

idworks1 5y ago
You have summarized my first two months at a new job. I joined as a lead and spend a good deal of time in meetings where they discuss new features and tasks. Before the meeting, I open the company's acronym cheatsheet just to be able to keep up. Then after a long monologue from a manager that ends with "Any questions," I'm the guy who asks: "What's <product-name>?" It sucks because I appear incompetent. But it has also helped us onboard people better. One of the first tasks I assigned to my team was to update the README.md files of all code bases they touch. It might seem obvious to the old timers what everything does, they have spend years working on it. But to the avalanche of new developers they are hiring, a code base that has code and no description is a source of confusion.
- belval 5y ago
  This is really doing god's work though. A lot of teams I've been on were deep into a mess of their own make due to this. You build a whole terminology around you work and not it takes twice the time to onboard anyone. This is also an issue with people that like to pick non-descriptive name for their projects (although I might just be grumpy on that one). Don't call your pipeline workflow "Optimus Prime", it means jackshit to everyone else.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
While poor explanation is a likely culprit in many cases, I think there is something more to this. I think a lot people (especially males, could be linked with men lower performance in education) subconsciously don't want to listen. This happens a lot to me, people ignore my warnings and believe giving me some long explanation will be helpful just for me to flat out ignore them and read the source material.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  Could you rephrase the last sentence?
  - sul_tasto 5y ago
    This happens a lot to me. People ignore my warnings. They believe that giving me a long explanation will be helpful. However, I just ignore what they say, and then I go read the source material.
    - _y5hn 5y ago
      It's happening again!
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      When someone explains something to me, and I go blank, what I have gotten in the habit of doing is to just produce what I think they want without worrying much at all if I have it correct, and then ask them to point at the first thing wrong with it. Typically, with a report, I just say "give me one example, one row, that isn't right". Once I have the boundary of my understanding pinpointed, it's fairly easy to infer a lot of complex details about what they want that are hard for them to articulate and for me to understand when described. This may not be ideal, but it's more practical for me to build my own mental model with help than try to translate someone else's. Source material, I dunno. It tends not to be up to date or relevant and I don't know where to focus.
perl4ever 5y ago
>This behavior is not competent, or smart if you ask me One job I had, my manager decided early on that I was a complete idiot and insubordinate. Freely asking any "dumb" question that came to my mind was a no-no, and even more so was asking other people to verify what my manager told me - it was seen as undermining their authority. A later job, my manager formed the opinion that I was really smart in the beginning, and so when I fail to understand something, they blame themselves for not being able to explain. Sometimes I feel bad they are so self-critical. "Fish can't teach you about water" Even if people are not consciously intending it, though, being bad at knowledge transfer is in everybody's self interest. Perfect communication would facilitate workers being interchangeable cogs.
- judahmeek 5y ago
  But wouldn't perfect communication also level the playing field in terms of asymmetrical information, which would also be in everyone's self interest?
  - llampx 5y ago
    Classic prisoner's dilemma
- jbuhbjlnjbn 5y ago
  I left out the option of doing it on purpose, conciously or unconciously, but you are right, it could be that as well. I think in the long run it will hurt you to actively refuse to help your colleagues, because they are smart, they will pick this up and be reluctant to work with you and share information with you as well. Not helping the people you work with has its advantages too, like more time and more focus for your own stuff, maybe even more carreer opportunities, but for me it is simply not an option anymore. I tried that, but it made me negative and miserable, so I gave it up. Now I try to be the engineer I personally would like to work with on a daily basis. If people get it, great, if not, it doesn't matter too much anyways. I do it for myself as well.
a_c 5y ago
While I agree with you that it is a didactic problem, I also think it is an optimisation heuristic. When working with engineers, it is expected that they know what, for example, git/version control is, hence such jargon will be sprinkled in conversation freely. That's how we compress the communication bandwidth. It is enormously costly if we document everything in a context free manner that anyone newly into the topic can understand, and people still won't understand. It is also why learning from/teaching to users seem futile and why adhering to common UX patterns help adoption. We basically don't know our user and our user don't know us. So users commonly assume whatever product they use is omnipotent (having all features) while we, as product owner, need our product passing the Mom Test. One would only spend so much effort on bridging the understanding gap. On internet, not so much, hence the copious amount of flame war. In a compassionate working environment, better. In family setting, ideally infinite.
- leroman 5y ago
  > While I agree with you that it is a didactic problem, I also think it is an optimisation heuristic. When working with engineers, it is expected that they know what, for example, git/version control is, hence such jargon will be sprinkled in conversation freely. That's how we compress the communication bandwidth. It is enormously costly if we document everything in a context free manner that anyone newly into the topic can understand, and people still won't understand. This is exactly the reason I ask some common knowledge jargon during interviews. I start by saying, "hey, I know this is silly but I'm going to ask you some basic questions, please explain to me what you think it means.. JSON, REST..." You'd be shocked how many strange / ridiculous answers I get, along with a few that after 10 words I know I'm speaking with someone that has a change getting the position. This is part of an initial 30 minute phone interview.
lupire 5y ago
The Dunning-Krueger effect is not what is described above, and the primary evidence for it is an incorrect statistical methodology (it's impossible to assess your own knowledge as <0 or >100%. See gwern.net or Wikipedia for more.

idworks1 5y ago

You have summarized my first two months at a new job. I joined as a lead and spend a good deal of time in meetings where they discuss new features and tasks. Before the meeting, I open the company's acronym cheatsheet just to be able to keep up. Then after a long monologue from a manager that ends with "Any questions," I'm the guy who asks: "What's <product-name>?" It sucks because I appear incompetent. But it has also helped us onboard people better. One of the first tasks I assigned to my team was to update the README.md files of all code bases they touch. It might seem obvious to the old timers what everything does, they have spend years working on it. But to the avalanche of new developers they are hiring, a code base that has code and no description is a source of confusion.

belval 5y ago
This is really doing god's work though. A lot of teams I've been on were deep into a mess of their own make due to this. You build a whole terminology around you work and not it takes twice the time to onboard anyone. This is also an issue with people that like to pick non-descriptive name for their projects (although I might just be grumpy on that one). Don't call your pipeline workflow "Optimus Prime", it means jackshit to everyone else.

jokethrowaway 5y ago

While poor explanation is a likely culprit in many cases, I think there is something more to this. I think a lot people (especially males, could be linked with men lower performance in education) subconsciously don't want to listen. This happens a lot to me, people ignore my warnings and believe giving me some long explanation will be helpful just for me to flat out ignore them and read the source material.

perl4ever 5y ago
Could you rephrase the last sentence?
- sul_tasto 5y ago
  This happens a lot to me. People ignore my warnings. They believe that giving me a long explanation will be helpful. However, I just ignore what they say, and then I go read the source material.
  - _y5hn 5y ago
    It's happening again!
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    When someone explains something to me, and I go blank, what I have gotten in the habit of doing is to just produce what I think they want without worrying much at all if I have it correct, and then ask them to point at the first thing wrong with it. Typically, with a report, I just say "give me one example, one row, that isn't right". Once I have the boundary of my understanding pinpointed, it's fairly easy to infer a lot of complex details about what they want that are hard for them to articulate and for me to understand when described. This may not be ideal, but it's more practical for me to build my own mental model with help than try to translate someone else's. Source material, I dunno. It tends not to be up to date or relevant and I don't know where to focus.

perl4ever 5y ago

>This behavior is not competent, or smart if you ask me One job I had, my manager decided early on that I was a complete idiot and insubordinate. Freely asking any "dumb" question that came to my mind was a no-no, and even more so was asking other people to verify what my manager told me - it was seen as undermining their authority. A later job, my manager formed the opinion that I was really smart in the beginning, and so when I fail to understand something, they blame themselves for not being able to explain. Sometimes I feel bad they are so self-critical. "Fish can't teach you about water" Even if people are not consciously intending it, though, being bad at knowledge transfer is in everybody's self interest. Perfect communication would facilitate workers being interchangeable cogs.

judahmeek 5y ago
But wouldn't perfect communication also level the playing field in terms of asymmetrical information, which would also be in everyone's self interest?
- llampx 5y ago
  Classic prisoner's dilemma
jbuhbjlnjbn 5y ago
I left out the option of doing it on purpose, conciously or unconciously, but you are right, it could be that as well. I think in the long run it will hurt you to actively refuse to help your colleagues, because they are smart, they will pick this up and be reluctant to work with you and share information with you as well. Not helping the people you work with has its advantages too, like more time and more focus for your own stuff, maybe even more carreer opportunities, but for me it is simply not an option anymore. I tried that, but it made me negative and miserable, so I gave it up. Now I try to be the engineer I personally would like to work with on a daily basis. If people get it, great, if not, it doesn't matter too much anyways. I do it for myself as well.

a_c 5y ago

While I agree with you that it is a didactic problem, I also think it is an optimisation heuristic. When working with engineers, it is expected that they know what, for example, git/version control is, hence such jargon will be sprinkled in conversation freely. That's how we compress the communication bandwidth. It is enormously costly if we document everything in a context free manner that anyone newly into the topic can understand, and people still won't understand. It is also why learning from/teaching to users seem futile and why adhering to common UX patterns help adoption. We basically don't know our user and our user don't know us. So users commonly assume whatever product they use is omnipotent (having all features) while we, as product owner, need our product passing the Mom Test. One would only spend so much effort on bridging the understanding gap. On internet, not so much, hence the copious amount of flame war. In a compassionate working environment, better. In family setting, ideally infinite.

leroman 5y ago
> While I agree with you that it is a didactic problem, I also think it is an optimisation heuristic. When working with engineers, it is expected that they know what, for example, git/version control is, hence such jargon will be sprinkled in conversation freely. That's how we compress the communication bandwidth. It is enormously costly if we document everything in a context free manner that anyone newly into the topic can understand, and people still won't understand. This is exactly the reason I ask some common knowledge jargon during interviews. I start by saying, "hey, I know this is silly but I'm going to ask you some basic questions, please explain to me what you think it means.. JSON, REST..." You'd be shocked how many strange / ridiculous answers I get, along with a few that after 10 words I know I'm speaking with someone that has a change getting the position. This is part of an initial 30 minute phone interview.

lupire 5y ago

The Dunning-Krueger effect is not what is described above, and the primary evidence for it is an incorrect statistical methodology (it's impossible to assess your own knowledge as <0 or >100%. See gwern.net or Wikipedia for more.