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Obviously I wasn't there and am going by your accounting of the conversation, but from the way you laid it out, the questions I brought up are the questions you
by Volundr 4y ago
Obviously I wasn't there and am going by your accounting of the conversation, but from the way you laid it out, the questions I brought up are the questions your manager thought they were asking you. Hence the confusion, followed by frustration.
From my interpretation of the conversation, you thought the question was: "Should we rewrite the checkout page in React, yes or no?"
And responded with "Why do you want to rewrite it in React?" (paraphrasing)
Meanwhile the manager thought they were asking: "Please discuss the reasons why we should and should not rewrite the checkout page in React, including your recommendation on a course of action"
And you responded with "Why do you want to rewrite it in React?"
Spelled out like that it's hopefully a little clearer that the "why React" was part of the question. They don't know if the page is performing "well" or whatever that means (even from an engineering standpoint it's hard to define, render time? bandwidth? server CPU?). They might know if users are complaining about checkout being slow, but even then users tend to leave rather than complain. If you were to tell them that the checkout page was performing "poorly" and React could fix it, that's the kind of information they were hoping to obtain from this conversation.
Similarly in my machine learning question, my CIO was actually asking me "how do you think machine learning can benefit this business?" And I responded with "how do you think machine learning can benefit the business?" He didn't know, he was asking me. He had just heard about the wonders of machine learning and was fishing for how it could benefit this business. Just like your manager had heard about React and was fishing for how it could benefit the business.
If your manager were here replying to comments I'd advise them to remember that engineers in general (spectrum or not), tend to be the literal sort, and if you aren't getting the answers your looking for it's often useful to examine the words you used and ask if you are actually asking the question your hoping to get answered or relying on subtext. But for the engineer's side of this conversation, it's important to ask if the question your answering is actually what they are asking, or if you failed to parse their intentions.
- larve 4y agoThanks for the response. I do agree to all of these suggestions, and honestly we can't just make up hypothetical scenario after hypothetical scenario of what the best way to phrase things are. It depends so much on me, the manager, the time of day, the team culture. I think my point in the article is to say: I am autistic, and I might not communicate the way you are expecting. If I am asking questions, it is for what I think is a good reason. What I am not doing is rejecting your question and not acknowledging I am wrong. If I wanted to reject your opinion, I would reject it, not mess around asking oblique questions. It's great that everybody seems to think this is my problem alone to solve, and I'm somehow doing this on purpose. I am not, I am trying very hard to get better, part of which is to share my experiences. Yet, that also seems to be criticized ("who puts so much effort into analyzing these situations?"). I have very productive relationships with other engineers and product managers and business owners, so clearly this can work out just well, but that's not what I wanted to cover here. I will in the future however, and I covered a tiny aspect of "digging deep into business questions, as an engineer" here: https://dev.to/wesen/worse-ux-for-a-better-product-how-to-think-in-outcomes-29hp https://dev.to/wesen/worse-ux-for-a-better-product-how-to-th...
- pdenton 4y agoInstead of saying you're autistic, say you have autism. What you are is a human being, most likely. Having autism is just one of your traits. TL;DR Autism is what you've got, not who you are.
- larve 4y agoMany autistic people prefer to say they are autistic. Hopefully it's become clear that I think this way, and I can't just not think this way. Thinking is my main way of interacting with the world, it's not just "a trait".
- naasking 4y agoYou can ignore the parent comment. It's become fashionable these days to not use certain descriptive labels in a traditional manner because a certain class of people feel it's dehumanizing by "reducing one to one's condition". For instance, someone isn't "diabetic" they're a "person with diabetes", because the diabetes is just something they have it's not who they are. You're not "autistic", you're a "person with autism", and so on. It's just a semantic game that is only making communication more verbose for no meaningful gain, as if everyone didn't already understand "autistic" to mean "person with autism".