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There's this myth that IT people can't communicate. Maybe it's because I'm in IT that I think it's quite the opposite: we communicate very well and precisely.

There's this myth that IT people can't communicate. Maybe it's because I'm in IT that I think it's quite the opposite: we communicate very well and precisely. The real issue is that middle management has a ton of politics that muddle up everything. I can say to my team that I messed something up and that we have to fix it; but I've seen people higher up who will bend over backwards just to not have to roll back a decision (and sometimes not even a very important decision). So maybe someone had already sold to the boss that the equipment was good for another 10 years.

wjnc 3y ago
In my opinion IT people are often great at communicating clearly and with what in other parts of business would be called vision. They think ahead and see connections between processes and systems that non-technical management (even the process owners) miss. They can see the dot on the wall and deliver a program brining you there. However, and that’s the big gripe, each and every one IT proposal I see costs money. It not just costs money, everything costs money, but it raises the long term average cost per unit. Even when we are dismantling ancient and totally non functional systems, the TCO of the modern solution is higher than the previous. Look I’m here on HN, can program a bit, understand quite large parts of the tech stack. But not why even highly capable IT-staff and management whom I have confidence in can’t seem to explain their contribution to the basic underpinning of business: average cost should go down over time and with scale. (Advice about how to talk about this with IT people is more than welcome! A lot of organizational distrust and poison sadly follows from this.) One of the more current examples is that IT-staff forgets that they are 2-3x more expensive per FTE than general workers. So when I see a plan and calculate how much middle management should save in reduced workload thanks to plan X both sides don’t like the outcome. The end of the day picture that companies exist by grace of customers willing to pay for your product (and cost loading!) is lost at that moment.
liquidpele 3y ago
I find it’s more that people suck at listening, not communicating. IT people will happily explain if you ask and listen, but frankly most people dont like to feel dumb for asking questions. When was the last time a manager asked you what you needed to do your job better?
macNchz 3y ago
I’ve seen too much bad communication between software teams and nontechnical management firsthand to agree it’s a myth–I do think technical folks often communicate well and precisely amongst themselves, but often there’s just a fundamental lack of understanding as to what management cares about and needs to know about. The answer to “why are we planning to spend so much time on this non customer-facing project” isn’t to just dive in and start talking about Kubernetes node pools and pod affinity rules, it’s to talk about how we’ll be able to cut cloud spend by 20% right off the bat while improving site speed, which is important because churn is up 25% YoY and a majority of recently churned clients have complained to support about slowness before cancelling. So frequently I’ve seen former, then the engineers go off in a huff that management won’t support their project, and management goes off wondering why engineering is screwing around while customers are churning.
- pyrale 3y ago
  > but often there’s just a fundamental lack of understanding as to what management cares about and needs to know about. At some point, you've got to think about whose role it is to manage who. If your management needs to be spoon-fed the decisions they must sign off, and reacts poorly to signal that is not perfectly worded or inadequate because the relevant information was not transmited down, what use are they?
  - therealdrag0 3y ago
    They need to be spoon fed in the sense that you’re their eyes and ears. However they are human, so to win the war of attention, you have to communicate well and maybe be persuasive because there’s 10 other reports or peers doing the same thing. Their job is not to merely sign off but to triage too many problems to find at once.
    - pyrale 3y ago
      If they don't have the attention for a problem, then maybe they should let me handle it? Once again, if they want a say in my problems and they don't give me the necessary information to frame that problem for their specific context, I can't help. Information needs to flow both ways, and in so many situation, the reason information pushed up is not relevant is that context wasn't pushed down.
jbaber 3y ago
Management is absolutely necessary. A good manager is worth their weight in gold. But sometimes, management is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8miwsWtzRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8miwsWtzRw
wang_li 3y ago
IT people are terrible communicators if they have to speak to someone outside their domain. I’ve seen plenty of miscommunications because people don’t try to grasp whether the other person gets what they’re saying. You can have network, storage, os, and developers talking and using the same words and not conveying anything useful to each other because the words mean something specific to each party, but not the same thing. I don’t know if they’re to deep in their own bubble or if it’s just arrogance and they do not want anyone knowing what they’re doing.
3c6bYDXLMj 3y ago
[dead]
superhuzza 3y ago
Unfortunately, playing politics is part of communicating.
guhidalg 3y ago
Exactly, use the politics to your advantage! Depending on who you're talking to, you have to have a different raison d'etre. o Talking to HR: "We need to do X to reduce/increase headcount needs". o Talking to legal: "We need to do X to comply with Y regulation or decrease our exposure" o Talking to other teams: "We need to do X because our current system can't scale to take your load". o Talking to other teams that don't want to work with you: "We need to do X because your system can't scale and we're going to drop our dependency on you". o Talking to the business: "We need to do X to save $$$ this year" But if you simply say "We need to do X because of [highly technical reason]" then no one outside of your team is going to care or help you.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
People in upper management only speak in dollars. If you can't speak in dollars you literally can't speak their language. They shouldn't have asked management for money, they should have presented management with two alternatives: pay $x now to upgrade network infrastructure, or pay $y later in rush fees, IT overtime, and customer loss due to degraded UX. Then you let them make the decision. It's absolutely possible the business was in a temporary cash crunch or needed the money to get a more important revenue-generating initiative past the finish line, and eating the higher costs later might make more sense to the business.
- jbaber 3y ago
  A response to that would be that translating different work scenarios into $ is management.
- nitwit005 3y ago
  Assuming the story is accurate, it was not money that ultimately swayed them, but directly experiencing the problem.
- katbyte 3y ago
  That sounds like the job of management to do..
uxp8u61q 3y ago
So somehow everyone believes that IT people don't communicate well, but the IT people know that they actually communicate well. Erm, okay. I feel like there could be another explanation, but it escapes me.
btbuildem 3y ago
I'd agree that tech folks in an org can communicate very well and precisely -- among themselves. But there's a gaping chasm in communication between the technical and non-technical people. It comes from a difference in motivation, in what the different "tribes" believe to be important. Bridging this gap is more about translation and seeing the others' perspective than anything else. This is the reason project managers exist, and why their existence is mostly miserable. We need to acknowledge that every layer of this cake thinks they're the most important, but in a de-facto dictatorship fuelled by customer spending, the lines of power are closely aligned with the flow of money. Tech decisions are approximately irrelevant to the people closer to the money stream, and they're primarily evaluated in terms of potential profits and actual costs. In other words, tech only becomes important when it facilitates more profits or incurs unexpected expenses.
danielheath 3y ago
This leads to the obvious conclusion that effective engineering in large organisations is about being able to talk to the political caste and identify who needs to be brought on-side. If someone told the boss the equipment is good for 10 years, maybe you can work with them to come up with new requirements the old equipment can’t meet, and let them present those requirements to the boss, so they have a reason to support instead of opposing you. The alternative to this sort of political shenanigans is to be ineffective, or to work in a small enough company that you don’t need to.

wjnc 3y ago

In my opinion IT people are often great at communicating clearly and with what in other parts of business would be called vision. They think ahead and see connections between processes and systems that non-technical management (even the process owners) miss. They can see the dot on the wall and deliver a program brining you there. However, and that’s the big gripe, each and every one IT proposal I see costs money. It not just costs money, everything costs money, but it raises the long term average cost per unit. Even when we are dismantling ancient and totally non functional systems, the TCO of the modern solution is higher than the previous. Look I’m here on HN, can program a bit, understand quite large parts of the tech stack. But not why even highly capable IT-staff and management whom I have confidence in can’t seem to explain their contribution to the basic underpinning of business: average cost should go down over time and with scale. (Advice about how to talk about this with IT people is more than welcome! A lot of organizational distrust and poison sadly follows from this.) One of the more current examples is that IT-staff forgets that they are 2-3x more expensive per FTE than general workers. So when I see a plan and calculate how much middle management should save in reduced workload thanks to plan X both sides don’t like the outcome. The end of the day picture that companies exist by grace of customers willing to pay for your product (and cost loading!) is lost at that moment.

liquidpele 3y ago

I find it’s more that people suck at listening, not communicating. IT people will happily explain if you ask and listen, but frankly most people dont like to feel dumb for asking questions. When was the last time a manager asked you what you needed to do your job better?

macNchz 3y ago

I’ve seen too much bad communication between software teams and nontechnical management firsthand to agree it’s a myth–I do think technical folks often communicate well and precisely amongst themselves, but often there’s just a fundamental lack of understanding as to what management cares about and needs to know about. The answer to “why are we planning to spend so much time on this non customer-facing project” isn’t to just dive in and start talking about Kubernetes node pools and pod affinity rules, it’s to talk about how we’ll be able to cut cloud spend by 20% right off the bat while improving site speed, which is important because churn is up 25% YoY and a majority of recently churned clients have complained to support about slowness before cancelling. So frequently I’ve seen former, then the engineers go off in a huff that management won’t support their project, and management goes off wondering why engineering is screwing around while customers are churning.

pyrale 3y ago
> but often there’s just a fundamental lack of understanding as to what management cares about and needs to know about. At some point, you've got to think about whose role it is to manage who. If your management needs to be spoon-fed the decisions they must sign off, and reacts poorly to signal that is not perfectly worded or inadequate because the relevant information was not transmited down, what use are they?
- therealdrag0 3y ago
  They need to be spoon fed in the sense that you’re their eyes and ears. However they are human, so to win the war of attention, you have to communicate well and maybe be persuasive because there’s 10 other reports or peers doing the same thing. Their job is not to merely sign off but to triage too many problems to find at once.
  - pyrale 3y ago
    If they don't have the attention for a problem, then maybe they should let me handle it? Once again, if they want a say in my problems and they don't give me the necessary information to frame that problem for their specific context, I can't help. Information needs to flow both ways, and in so many situation, the reason information pushed up is not relevant is that context wasn't pushed down.

jbaber 3y ago

Management is absolutely necessary. A good manager is worth their weight in gold. But sometimes, management is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8miwsWtzRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8miwsWtzRw

wang_li 3y ago

IT people are terrible communicators if they have to speak to someone outside their domain. I’ve seen plenty of miscommunications because people don’t try to grasp whether the other person gets what they’re saying. You can have network, storage, os, and developers talking and using the same words and not conveying anything useful to each other because the words mean something specific to each party, but not the same thing. I don’t know if they’re to deep in their own bubble or if it’s just arrogance and they do not want anyone knowing what they’re doing.

3c6bYDXLMj 3y ago

[dead]

superhuzza 3y ago

Unfortunately, playing politics is part of communicating.

guhidalg 3y ago

Exactly, use the politics to your advantage! Depending on who you're talking to, you have to have a different raison d'etre. o Talking to HR: "We need to do X to reduce/increase headcount needs". o Talking to legal: "We need to do X to comply with Y regulation or decrease our exposure" o Talking to other teams: "We need to do X because our current system can't scale to take your load". o Talking to other teams that don't want to work with you: "We need to do X because your system can't scale and we're going to drop our dependency on you". o Talking to the business: "We need to do X to save $$$ this year" But if you simply say "We need to do X because of [highly technical reason]" then no one outside of your team is going to care or help you.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago

People in upper management only speak in dollars. If you can't speak in dollars you literally can't speak their language. They shouldn't have asked management for money, they should have presented management with two alternatives: pay $x now to upgrade network infrastructure, or pay $y later in rush fees, IT overtime, and customer loss due to degraded UX. Then you let them make the decision. It's absolutely possible the business was in a temporary cash crunch or needed the money to get a more important revenue-generating initiative past the finish line, and eating the higher costs later might make more sense to the business.

jbaber 3y ago
A response to that would be that translating different work scenarios into $ is management.
nitwit005 3y ago
Assuming the story is accurate, it was not money that ultimately swayed them, but directly experiencing the problem.
katbyte 3y ago
That sounds like the job of management to do..

uxp8u61q 3y ago

So somehow everyone believes that IT people don't communicate well, but the IT people know that they actually communicate well. Erm, okay. I feel like there could be another explanation, but it escapes me.

btbuildem 3y ago

I'd agree that tech folks in an org can communicate very well and precisely -- among themselves. But there's a gaping chasm in communication between the technical and non-technical people. It comes from a difference in motivation, in what the different "tribes" believe to be important. Bridging this gap is more about translation and seeing the others' perspective than anything else. This is the reason project managers exist, and why their existence is mostly miserable. We need to acknowledge that every layer of this cake thinks they're the most important, but in a de-facto dictatorship fuelled by customer spending, the lines of power are closely aligned with the flow of money. Tech decisions are approximately irrelevant to the people closer to the money stream, and they're primarily evaluated in terms of potential profits and actual costs. In other words, tech only becomes important when it facilitates more profits or incurs unexpected expenses.

danielheath 3y ago

This leads to the obvious conclusion that effective engineering in large organisations is about being able to talk to the political caste and identify who needs to be brought on-side. If someone told the boss the equipment is good for 10 years, maybe you can work with them to come up with new requirements the old equipment can’t meet, and let them present those requirements to the boss, so they have a reason to support instead of opposing you. The alternative to this sort of political shenanigans is to be ineffective, or to work in a small enough company that you don’t need to.