11 ms·

I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me

• oncallthrow 7mo ago
  This is pretty autistic. I kind of agree, being somewhat on the spectrum myself. But I think the world would be a considerably worse place if everyone abided by such rules.
  • dennis_jeeves2 7mo ago
    >considerably worse place if everyone abided by such rules Those rules are not meant for everyone.
    • d-us-vb 7mo ago
      The blog post is an open letter: the author wants everyone reading to follow the those rules.
      • Smaug123 7mo ago
        No. Crocker's rules are a request for people to act a certain way with respect to you, not wrt anyone else.
        • wk_end 7mo ago
          Crocker's rules themselves might be, but the essay is plainly contemptuous of people who aren't naturally disposed to follow them.
        • pibaker 7mo ago
          Should every incident report be written twice, once for normal people and once for the developmentally challenged then?
          • devmor 7mo ago
            How do you figure that the author is “developmentally challenged”? It sounds to me like they are able to handle their insecurities in a more mature and emotionally balanced way than most others.
            • slopinthebag 7mo ago
              They wrote an entire article about how they hate when someone says they hope they had a nice weekend...
              • devmor 7mo ago
                If that is what you took from the article I think you might have some language development issues yourself, friend.
                • slopinthebag 7mo ago
                  Be more direct with me. Don't say things like "If that is what you took" or "I think", you're just wasting my time.
          • Smaug123 7mo ago
            … I don't know what your incident reports look like, but if there's anywhere it's normal to optimise for communicative clarity rather than social wheel-greasing, it's an incident report!
    • wk_end 7mo ago
      That's the theory, but there's absolutely normative statements in this piece. For example: > When you spend the first third of your message establishing that you are a nice person who means well, you are not being considerate but you are making the recipient wade through noise to get to signal. You are training them to skim your messages, which means that when you actually need them to read carefully, they might not. You are demonstrating that you do not trust the relationship enough to just say the thing and you are signaling a level of insecurity that undermines the technical credibility you are trying to establish. Nobody reads "hope you had a great weekend" and thinks better of the person who wrote it, they probably just being trained to take you less seriously in the future, or at worse, if they're evil loving of Crocker's [sic?] like myself, they just think about the couple of seconds of their life they will never get back. This very much sounds like the author believes that everyone who doesn't abide by these rules - not just him, not just people who've agreed to them, everyone - is deficient in some way. And it's not just a slip - this attitude is pervasive throughout the post.
      • kuboble 7mo ago
        Yes, exactly. I strongly prefer directness in technical communication at work. But the way the article author phrases his preferences as absolute truth rubs me the wrong way. Also if I worked with that person then after reading the article I would have perhaps the opposite reaction to the author's intentions. You still have to walk on eggshells to not offend him by including any bit of information that he might consider not relevant enough.
        • erikerikson 7mo ago
          I love this point as much as I hate it in practice. We all have different preferences and it is more helpful to be clear about ours rather than declare them "correct". The way we expect these differences to be navigated can become oppressive.
  • titanomachy 7mo ago
    Some people have an attitude to work resembling “I spend most of my day here, so having enjoyable professional relationships with my coworkers is a major determinant of my quality of life.” And there are other people who have an attitude closer to “it’s my goal to deliver value efficiently and get paid. I’m not here to make friends. Any meaningful human interactions happen outside of work.” I don’t know enough about autism to know if that’s the right label for the second category. (I’ve had coworkers who identified as autistic who seemed to deeply care about whether I enjoyed working with them.) I think these two types of people can work together productively, but I don’t think they’ll ever totally understand each other.
  • alexjplant 7mo ago
    The problem is that too many people couch pettiness and personal attacks in the philosophy of "being direct" or "telling it like it is". OP specifically mentions that criticism must be made on technical merits. The people that hand-wave this distinction away are absolutely insufferable.
  • junon 7mo ago
    That's the point; you're supposed to agree on this level of directness beforehand, expressly and explicitly.
  • InsideOutSanta 7mo ago
    Reading the article, I also feel that all of his examples are poor communication, both the "courteous" and the "direct" ones. You can communicate clearly and succinctly and also be considerate of the person you're talking to.
• camel_gopher 7mo ago
  You can communicate like this and have it be effective if you have an established good relationship with the recipient. That’s why team cohesiveness is important. Context of whom you are communicating with is also important. That’s the trade off of approaches like these rules. In some situations they are fine. In others not so much.
  • hluska 7mo ago
    I don’t agree - the type of communication between certain members makes a team harder for everyone to join. You end up with tribal knowledge to the extreme if you communicate like this. It’s why it is unbelievably bad advice - it claims it respects a listener’s time yet creates an environment where the majority won’t listen.
    • andrewflnr 7mo ago
      > You end up with tribal knowledge to the extreme if you communicate like this. Wait, what? How does a team habit of bluntly stating facts result in "tribal knowledge"? If anything it should be the opposite. The approach in the article has problems but I don't believe that's one of them.
  • andrewflnr 7mo ago
    Yes, in particular emotional trust is key. Maybe a few people can just declare their own emotional reactions away and have that stick, but you can't ask that of other people. We're still just apes. So if you want brief, clear communication, you need people to actually believe in their guts that when you tell them something they did is broken, it's not a personal attack.
• hluska 7mo ago
  This is a recipe for disaster. Please don’t follow Crocker’s Rules; just get better at communicating than the person who wrote this.
  • altairprime 7mo ago
    Your comment declares your opinion without explanation, and so lacks substance and is unpersuasive as written. More information would help HN readers evaluate your claims fairly rather than dismiss you. In specific, I’d love to hear your views on these questions so I can give you serious consideration: > This is a recipe for disaster. What about Crocker’s Rules, and/or this post’s advice to follow them, do you consider a recipe for disaster? > Please don’t follow Crocker’s Rules; What outcome are you hoping will result from granting your request? Do you have personal experiences with Crocker’s Rules underpinning this advice? Do you tend to experience social discomfort typically, atypically, or infrequently / never? > just get better at communicating than the person who wrote this Other than the presumed adherence to Crocker’s Rules in writing this, which is addressed by the questions above, do you have other criticisms of their writing to present? What communication ideals do you consider as better models than Crocker’s Rules? Do you consider there to exist appropriate circumstances for Crocker’s Rules?
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
• barelysapient 7mo ago
  I'd prefer we instead all use Non-violent Communication. No need for permission. The world would be more beautiful place if we all had giraffe ears.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• IanCal 7mo ago
  Some of those examples are genuinely different as they convey different intent and certainty. Also some of the basic small talk level things are also there to gauge someone’s responsiveness right now. To ask directly can mean “I believe my issue is important enough to immediately change what you’re thinking about to my problem without checking first”. You might complain about breaking your flow, which is fine, but an interruption can be a lot less disruptive compared to getting nerd sniped. > Both messages contain the same information, however one of them respects time. Unless you’re an incredibly slow reader this is a tiny amount of time. > The fact that you were stressed, or that you had inherited the config from someone else, or that the documentation was unclear3, or that you asked your lead and they said it was probably fine, none of that is relevant to the incident report. You can document contributing factors if they are actually actionable, meaning if there is something structural that needs to change, name it specifically and attach a proposed fix to it. Those are absolutely relevant! A lead told you to do it? Documentation unclear? One stressed person unable to hand over the task? And you don’t have to have a solution there to highlight a problem. > If the payment service went down because a config value was wrong, the incident report should say: the payment service went down because config value X was set to Y when it needed to be set to Z. Contains zero useful information as to how this happened. It’d be like saying you don’t want to know what the user did before the crash, just that it crashed but shouldn’t have done because it got into invalid state X.
  • andrewflnr 7mo ago
    Yeah, skip the fluff about my having a good weekend if you need me to fix something, but a lot of those uncertainty markers aren't fluff, they're essential to honest, accurate communication. Similarly, many times when you say a variation on "I know you're the expert on the codebase" or whatever, that's because it's true and important. Something I think is a problem, which this article wants me to phrase as a short, plain declaration, might actually just be a misunderstanding on my part. If I get one of those messages, I'm not going to see my time being respected. I'm going to see an arrogant jerk too lazy to learn what they're talking about before shooting off their mouth.
    • wizzwizz4 7mo ago
• poszlem 7mo ago
  I actually thought this was going to be an article about talking with an AI, i.e., something with no feelings, not about interacting with other human beings. Treating all social cushioning as useless noise is simplistic. Communication between humans is not the same as communication with a compiler. The problem is verbosity, and lack of clarity, not politness. Those are different things
• anthonySs 7mo ago
  usually the people who ask for the most direct advice are also the ones who so vehemently disagree with it when it's something they don't like
• analognoise 7mo ago
  “My quirky autism excuses me being an asshole” is how most of this reads. “Maximally direct” people need to learn how to mask better, and if it costs them too much then they’re not suited for professional work anyway.
  • dolebirchwood 7mo ago
    The irony of your comment's tone is overwhelming.
    • analognoise 7mo ago
      Thought I’d try maximally direct communication.
  • sgarland 7mo ago
    Being direct isn’t being an asshole. Sprinkling random compliments and self-deprecating comments into useful feedback in a professional environment is disrespectful of time. I’m convinced that the root cause is people are afraid to be wrong. Either they’re fearful of being fired, or think people will respect them less if they admit not knowing; the result is that everyone dances around objectivity. I don’t care if you make an honest mistake. Hell, I don’t even care if you make a careless mistake, as long as you fix yourself. Everyone messes up - it’s how you act afterwards that matters.
    • sidpatil 7mo ago
      > I don’t care if you make an honest mistake. Hell, I don’t even care if you make a careless mistake, as long as you fix yourself. Everyone messes up - it’s how you act afterwards that matters. You're not the one in control of their employment status and workplace reputation.
• manbitesdog 7mo ago
  Maybe this is a bit US-centric, direct negative feedback is very common in many cultures, e.g. Dutch
  • KingMob 7mo ago
    Definitely sounds like the US. When I worked a Radboud University in the Netherlands for a summer, they were definitely more direct than I was used to, and kept work more work-focused. But they also combined that with a culture of quitting on time, and going out to socialize a bit before dinner, which I think was vital to sustain interpersonal connections. I liked that style a lot, but Americans are very bad about quitting on time, which necessitates more socialization at work itself.
  • kelnos 7mo ago
    Probably. I'm from the US, and I know a few Dutch people, and I find their approach to direct negative feedback off-putting to the point of feeling rude, even when knowing what to expect from them. (I'm sure they find my communication style long-winded, frustrating, and a waste of their time.) It's a cultural thing, to be sure, and what you grew up with and are used to tends to dominate how you feel about things.
  • smartbit 7mo ago
    IMHO the Dutch are more direct for the same reason they are less sensitive to authority and approach their superiors as equals. Netherlands effectively being a River Delta, there always was the threat of water, a force greater than anyone. IOW if a flood comes, both the king and the peasant start digging. This is completely different from neighboring countries UK and Germany, which both traditionally had strong sense of hierarchy and not contradicting the master.
    • pibaker 7mo ago
      > IOW if a flood comes, both the king and the peasant start digging. By the same reasoning, India, Bangladesh and China — all ancient civilizations threatened by great rivers — should have developed similar egalitarian cultures but the reality is the polar opposite. Maybe something as complex as human civilizations can't be the result of just one geographical feature.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• Hobadee 7mo ago
  As with everything, I think there is an appropriate middle ground here. There is definitely too much beating around the bush in a lot of professional work, but some of that is actually useful and even good. Context doesn't always matter, but sometimes it does. Manners aren't always important, but sometimes they are. A proper balance of direct and indirect is the appropriate tack to take.
• d-us-vb 7mo ago
  While I agree with the sentiment for the effect its adherents want to have, but... Why not just "Communicate clearly"? - Don't add fluff - write as plainly as possible - write as precisely as is reasonable - Only make reasonable assumptions about the reader - Do your best to anticipate ambiguity and proactively disambiguate. (Because your readers may assume that if they don't understand you, what you wrote isn't for them.) - Don't be selfish or self-centered; pay attention to the other humans because a significant amount of communication happens in nuance no matter how hard we try to minimize it.
  • wnoise 7mo ago
    Because those are far more general than what he is asking for, and what he is asking for will usually not be seen as covered by your generalization.
• kixiQu 7mo ago
  > If the payment service went down because a config value was wrong, the incident report should say: the payment service went down because config value X was set to Y when it needed to be set to Z. The number of junior engineers I have had to coach out of this way of thinking to get the smallest fragment of value out of a postmortem process... dear Lord. I wonder if this person is similarly new to professional collaboration. The larger personal site is very aesthetically cool, though – make sure you click around if you haven't!
  • qaadika 7mo ago
    Yeah, I wonder if the author has been in a situation where a brief explanation was taken by a higher up (or a cc'd higher-up x2, or x3) as "It was entirely my fault and I'm withholding details that would further implicate me and giving only the facts that don't." I've had to work to balance emails like this between "they don't want the nitty gritty, they just want to be satisfied the issue is solved" and "They will definitely want the nitty gritty and think something is up if the details seems suspiciously sparse". Especially if the recipients are technical, and they know that you know that they're technical. what are you hiding, Qaadika? you're usually more verbose than this.
  • allreduce 7mo ago
    What's the mistake here? Shouldn't an incident report start with this and then continue with an analysis of the process, without too much "internal perspective"? In my mind, the internal perspective might be useful to jot down when doing the analysis, but is too noisy to be useful to disseminate.
    • kixiQu 7mo ago
      So I know it's a little bananas to answer this with a link to material the length of a novel, but my feeling is that the real spirit of a postmortem is best carried across by: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/stamping-on-eventstream/ https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/stamping-on-eventstream/ He goes through the process, which he describes: > The constant zooming-out is key here: it’s not enough to find out why things broke, but find out why “why things broke”. In theory you’re supposed to keep doing it: if someone skips a step because of managerial pressure, you ask why the manager was pressuring them in the first place. If the manager was worried about production quotas, find out how the quotas were decided. You just keep going and going and going. There are different procedures folks can use to capture bits of this to different degrees, but I think this write-up illustrates well both how exhausting it is to do this right and what the value can be. Even if your goal is to get to Action Items, this kind of understanding of your event is what should generate them. If a person doesn't understand the value, I would imagine they would write something very close to TFA's > when something goes wrong [...] they explain why they made the decision, and then explain the contextual factors that influenced that, and then explain why those contextual factors existed, and then explain why it would have been unreasonable to expect them to anticipate the downstream effect of those factors, and by the end you have some fat five paragraphs that contains maybe one sentence worth of information and reads like a legal defense brief written by someone who knows they are guilty.
• bcrosby95 7mo ago
  > "The caching layer is causing a 400ms overhead on cold requests. Here's the trace." This reminds me of when my kids declare "I'M HUNGRY". Cool story bro, I'll record it in my journal.
• moron4hire 7mo ago
  This article spends a lot of words to tell us that we should be more succinct in our communication.
  • lr0 7mo ago
    I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time
• BiraIgnacio 7mo ago
  There's nothing wrong in being nice and some chit-chat. Any kind of work, well most kinds of work, are about people and relationships. Building something with people when people can't relate to one another is quite hard.
• treetalker 7mo ago
  > The person invoking Crocker's Rules is saying, in effect, "your feelings about how I might receive this are your problem to manage, not mine, just give me the information." Isn't it quite the opposite? The person invoking Crocker's Rules is saying, in effect, "my feelings about the information and how I might receive it are my problem to manage, not yours, just give me the information."
  • atmavatar 7mo ago
    I expect it's a bit of both. I can't speak for other parts of the world, but in the US, it's not uncommon for people to walk on eggshells while reporting information to coworkers (and especially managers) because there's absolutely a large cohort who will shoot the messenger. Crocker's Rules are undoubtedly a reaction to the extreme whereby managers in particular fail to receive receive crucial information because their reports are too afraid to pass it along. In other words, people fail to communicate out of fear born from an assumption on how the person they're communicating with will react. The original quote would have you ignore your own fear and hand over the information, while your modified version would indirectly address your fear by refusing to take responsibility for how the recipient might feel. Whichever way you go with it, you're largely accomplishing the same thing.
    • treetalker 7mo ago
      FWIW, I based my version on the source of Crocker's Rules linked in the article itself.
  • jerbearito 7mo ago
    Yes, but it's also both. Everyone should manage their own feelings and exchange information both efficiently and respectfully.
    • treetalker 7mo ago
      I don't disagree that all people should. But Crocker's Rules are specifically to give the other person permission to give it to you straight because you assume responsibility and maturity to deal with the information itself, regardless of social niceties. And those rules cannot be imposed on the other person: invoking them yourself doesn't mean you can be an asshole back — as the very description of the rules linked in this article explains.
• TehShrike 7mo ago
  I agree to a certain point, but I think about it in different terms – some people want to avoid any form of disagreement in order to maintain a kind of politeness, but I want to work on a team where people care enough to disagree with each other if something is wrong: https://joshduff.com/2024-07-18-communication-culture.html https://joshduff.com/2024-07-18-communication-culture.html
• mdx97 7mo ago
  I'd say I generally agree with this sentiment, but it's important to first build the proper rapport with the recipient. If you show them kindness and respect outside the bounds of technical conversations, they'll be much more likely to assume the best of you when you communicate straight-forwardly over technical matters. You also should take care to avoid crossing the line into just being a jerk. This type of thinking is also often used by people who are simply arrogant and rude and are patting themselves on the back for being that way in the name of "directness" or "efficiency".
• hyperpape 7mo ago
  Given the subject, it is funny to me that this post is meandering and repetitive.
• soupfordummies 7mo ago
  Eh pick your battles. This doesn’t bother me nearly as much as meetings that could be emails (or worse— a couple chat messages back and forth).
• 1970-01-01 7mo ago
  This sounds absolutely perfect for interaction with an LLM. It should be a toggle switch in settings.
• torben-friis 7mo ago
  I find it funny that the post promotes stripping useless information and yet a ton of the most useful information in those examples is placed in the skippable part. Your coworkers are under too high a load, documentation is faulty, chain of communication is breaking down, your coworker lacks expertise in something. All of those are calls to action!! And no, you can’t tell the other person to “just communicate if it’s actionable” because they might not realise it. There’s lack of seniority, there’s tunnel vision…
• tmoertel 7mo ago
  I agree with the sentiment that gratuitous happy-talk adds noise to what ought to be clear, bottom-line-up-front engineering communications. But the recipients of those communications are people, and most people have feelings. So a good engineer ought to optimize those communications for overall success, and that means treating the intended recipients as if they matter. Some human-level communication is usually beneficial. So, to use an example from the original post: > "I hope this is okay to bring up and sorry for the long message, I just wanted to flag that I've been looking at the latency numbers and I'm not totally sure but it seems like there might be an issue with the caching layer? There’s a lot of noise in this message. It’s noise because it doesn’t communicate useful engineering information, nor does it show you actually care about the recipients. Here’s the original post’s suggested rewrite: > The caching layer is causing a 400ms overhead on cold requests. Here's the trace. This version communicates some of the essential engineering information, but it loses the important information about uncertainty in the diagnosis. It also lacks any useful human-to-human information. I’d suggest something like this: > Heads up: It looks like the caching layer is causing a 400ms overhead on cold requests. Here's the trace. Let me know how I can help. Thanks! My changes are in italics. Breaking them down: “Heads up” provides engineering context and human-to-human information: You are trying to help the recipients by alerting them to something they care about. “It looks like” concisely signals that you have a good faith belief in your diagnosis but are not certain. “Let me know how I can help” makes clear that you share the recipients’ interest in solving the problem and are not just dumping it at their feet and turning your back on them. You and they are on the same team. “Thanks!” shows your sincere appreciation to the recipients for looking into the issue. It’s a tiny contribution of emotional fuel from you to them to give them a boost after receiving what might be disappointing news. In sum, strip the noise and concisely communicate what is important, both engineering information and human information.
  • wilkystyle 7mo ago
    I agree with your point about human level communication and treating the recipients like they matter. I generally tend to prefer communication that is more on the blunt/direct side, but if there's one thing about communication that I've learned throughout my career, it is that the people who do best are adept at communicating well with a wide variety of people with different communication styles and preferences. The people who try to force everyone else to fit into a specific bucket of communication style, or who refuse to deviate from their own strict communication preferences no matter the audience, those are the people I see struggle to find success relative to their peers.
• jancsika 7mo ago
  Directness can be taken to imply trustworthiness, as the author seems to be doing. But it can just as easily be taken as a sign of ineptitude, technical-mindedness, boorishness, courage, immaturity, confidence, impatience, or a dozen other attributes depending on context and participants. For that reason, reading this is like reading a blog on poker strategies from someone who is only vaguely aware there are different suits in the deck. It's of course fine to ask others to play as if all the cards are diamonds, which is what I take this as. But the way it is written does strongly imply the author has a hard time imagining what the other suits could be for, or how an awareness of them could change their perception of card games. Honestly, it's refreshing to imagine the lack of "suits" in this sense-- e.g., spending the day with a group of people who not only all claim to couple directness with trustworthiness, but who all earnestly deliver on that claim. I also get the sense that the author is probably not "sticky" in their judgments of others-- perhaps they'd initially judge me as inconsiderate for using niceties but quickly redefine me as trustworthy once I stopped using them. I would like to know from the author: in the real world, are you aware of the risks of directness without a priori trust or full knowledge of someone else's internal state? I mean, for every one of you, there are probably several dozen people who claim to want unadorned directness but (perhaps unwittingly) end up resenting what they ultimately take as personal, hurtful criticism. And some number of them (again, perhaps unwittingly) retaliate in one way or another. And I haven't even delved into the social hierarchy of jobs-- it's a mess out there!
  • mizzao 7mo ago
    Agree, and you use especially good analogies here! As I've moved from an IC into a leadership position, I've had to learn to employ a variety of different communication styles beyond "super direct" which is what I did at the beginning — almost all of which were learned as a result of undesired side effects of directness. As they say: Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment... and s/judgment/communication.
• dang 7mo ago
  Related. Others? Crocker's rules - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12881288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12881288 - Nov 2016 (54 comments)
• tombert 7mo ago
  Everyone says that they value directness, and from what I can tell the vast majority of people actually don't. For example, I had a job interview a couple years ago where the interviewer showed up fifteen minutes late for a thirty minute interview. Eventually he did show up, and the interview proceeds more or less fine, and near the end he asks if I have any questions. I said "is it common to show up fifteen minutes late for interviews that you schedule? Because it comes off as unprofessional to me". He started giving me a bunch of excuses about how busy he was and eventually I interject and say "Listen, I don't really care. I'm sure your reasons are valid to you but from my perspective it just looks like you were happy enough to let me waste half the interview just sitting around staring at my watch." A day later the recruiter tells me that they don't want to move forward. I asked if they gave a reason why and apparently they thought I wasn't a good "culture fit". I wish I could say I'm above it and that I'm some hyper-stoic who always wants the most direct version of everything, but I'm certainly not immune to wanting some niceties instead of complete blunt directness all the time. I try and be above it, but I'm not.
  • andrewflnr 7mo ago
    A passive-aggressive interview "question" is a hilariously bad example of "directness". Nah dude, you were just a jerk.
    • tombert 7mo ago
      Probably. I would argue that showing up extremely late for an interview that you scheduled is considerably more jerk-ish. It also wasn’t passive aggressive, or at least it wasn’t intended to be. I actually wanted to know if that was just a thing that was common in the company so I could plan accordingly.
      • bibabaloo 7mo ago
        Asking that question just signals that you don't obey social cues. Most hiring managers won't like this, as they don't want to be responsible for hiring someone volatile like this. I think the only place you could get away with this is if you're interviewing with a C-Suite member who has nobody to answer to.
• userbinator 7mo ago
  In these times of heavy LLM use and the characteristic verboseness of their output, someone following Crocker's Rules might also be perceived as more human.
• devmor 7mo ago
  I personally vastly prefer directness when I’m spoken to - but it’s important to recognize that most people do not have the emotional conditioning to handle that. This is not something that will change within our lifetimes. Learn soft skills, learn how to be indirect. You don’t have to be as verbose with it as some of the examples in this article. “Gassing them up”, “Letting them down gently”, “Little white lies”, etc - these are all examples of how benign emotional manipulation is essentially the crux of pleasant social interaction in most of the Western world. It’s not my personal preference but it works because most people have unhandled insecurities.
• holden_nelson 7mo ago
  I feel like the author is either embellishing the examples of frivolous communication they give or they work with some absolute headcases. On my team we all trust each other to be fairly direct. On the flip side, “softening” a remark can signal to the recipient that you’re open minded to other solutions. “We should do X.” and “how would you feel about doing X?” accomplish the same thing but the second one fosters more psychologically safe discussion in my opinion.
• roenxi 7mo ago
  If we accept that any one person can take responsibility for their feelings then it follows that everyone is responsible for their own mind. Otherwise what exactly are we saying? And emotions are complex, especially offence, it is practically impossible to say that something will reliably offend a specific person without trying it and seeing how they react. Even for the reactee. Someone can easily say "whatever happens I won't get offended". But they might get offended anyway and then we're rolling the dice on whether they are vindictive enough to hold a grudge. People learn that lesson then don't stir the pot without reason. Rather than saying "I don't get offended" it is generally better to prove it and push people for feedback from time to time. There is also a subtle point here in things like "if the design is wrong, say it is wrong" - how is someone supposed to know if the design is "wrong"? Philosophically it isn't possible for a design to be wrong, the idea is nonsense. Designs have trade-offs and people might or might not like the trade offs. But a design can't be wrong because that implies there was already a right solution that people could deploy. If someone is going to be direct that is also a problem they run in to constantly - they're going to be directly saying things that are harsh and garbled. A lot of humans aren't comfortable being that person, there is a more comfortable style of being clear about observations, guarded about making value judgements from them and associating with like-minded people from the get-go rather than pushing to resolve differences. And spending a lot of time playing social games to work out how to organise all that.
  • nighthawk454 7mo ago
    I think the point was that directionally, on average, we might need to swing the pendulum the other way. Incidentally, this reply.
  • retsibsi 7mo ago
    > If we accept that any one person can take responsibility for their feelings then it follows that everyone is responsible for their own mind. I don't think this follows! People are very different, so something can be genuinely true of a subset without generalising to everyone. Crocker's Rules definitely wouldn't work for me, but it's explicit in them that they can only be self-invoked. Some people seem genuinely to be very thick-skinned (but easily annoyed by indirection and politeness) and able to 'take responsibility for their own feelings' in this sense. I doubt (m)any of them are truly unoffendable... and one could argue that they should be taking responsibility for their own feelings of frustration triggered by normal politeness... but I assume they know themselves well enough to know that they are better off when people try to be as direct as possible when interacting with them. Where it breaks down is if/when they treat this as an objectively superior state of being and mode of interaction, and use it as an excuse to be rude to others.
• randallsquared 7mo ago
  Based on his more recent posts (e.g., on Facebook), I doubt Lee Daniel Crocker would approve of Crocker's Rules any longer.
• makach 7mo ago
  Seems very vulcan. Works with vulcans and to some extent vulcan wannabees. Words have meaning, and how we express ourselves through our words is how we lead and share knowledge. There is nothing wrong with being honest, but honesty without love and care is brutality.
  • Antoniocl 7mo ago
    I see your point, and think one of the merits in OP's argument is precisely what you're saying: words have meaning, and saying something like "I think that X is probably the case" when you're virtually certain that X is the case dilutes the meaning of words. That said, I think throughout the post OP is mixing different dimensions of communicatiom together in a way that confuses the conversation - namely conciseness, directness, and explicitness - which while often overlapping aren't exactly the same.
• jandrewrogers 7mo ago
  This post is a poor exposition of Crocker’s Rules. Crocker’s Rules were a reaction to the avoidance of direct discussion of topics where some people treat the mere act of discussion in any capacity as offensive. Sacred cows and taboos for which there are social consequences even when asking honest questions. Crocker’s Rules, practically speaking, were a declaration that no good faith discussion was intrinsically offensive ipso facto for the person making the declaration. All taboos were open to good faith arguments and attempts at rigorous intellectual inquiry. This article is focused too much on communication style and not enough on the subject of communication. The latter was the crux of it. Crocker’s Rules were about being able to rigorously discuss topics that society has deemed to be beyond discussion without taking offense at the fact it is being discussed. I was present when Crocker’s Rules were “invented”. I see a couple other handles here that may have been as well.
  • Barbing 7mo ago
    Anyone have a preferred resource? I do appreciate the OP as it stands!
  • eucyclos 7mo ago
    This sounds like a refutation of the concept of taboos as a useful category, by the definition I use a taboo is something that may not be discussed openly. There's a theory that a culture without taboos is past it's peak in some important way- does crocker have any response to that criticism?
    • jojomodding 7mo ago
      Is the critique any more substantial than "the vibes are off?"
      • hx8 7mo ago
        The critique is "Taboos probably have a use." I think it's a good faith point. It's not as strong of a critique as "Taboos have purpose {x}" [Maintain ethical standards, promote public safety] or to say "Taboos probably have a use because {y}" [They are in almost every society, some rules should be rules but not laws].
• lich_king 7mo ago
  If you're running your open source project or other hobby endeavor, you can do it however you want. People will either adapt to your style or leave. The same, with some caveats, applies to running your own company (the caveats being lawsuits and needless drama if you take it too far). But if you're a line employee for a corporation, this is the wrong approach, for two reasons. First, you will encounter many people who misinterpret directness as hostility, simply because your feelings toward another person are hard to convey in a chat message unless you include all that social-glue small talk. And if people on average think you're a jerk, they will either avoid you or reflexively push back. But second... you're not that brilliant. Every now and then, the thing you think is wrong isn't actually wrong, you just don't understand why your solution was rejected beforehand. Maybe there are business requirements you don't know about, maybe things break in a different way if you make the change. Asking "hey, help me understand why this thing is the way it is" is often a better opener than "yo dude, your thing is broken, here's what you need to do, fix it now".
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• exe34 7mo ago
  I've been wrong enough times to make me want to preface anything I think is wrong at work by something along the lines of "Am I misunderstanding this or are you doing x, because I think that will clash with y". let them decide if it's worth looking at or not - I've been right enough times that they will want to.
• rich_sasha 7mo ago
  The discussion shows just how many different communication styles there are. So many comments about "XYZ is the right way", "ABC is always wrong" or "I did UV to someone who says they like UV and they took offence". It shows me: - there are many communication styles and people tend to think their preferred one is obviously right - people are often unclear on what they actually value in communication (and might like the opposite of what they say they value) - people seem also to, at times, confuse other people's different communication style for rudeness, indecisiveness or small-mindedness. So I guess the reasonable policy is to adopt a hybrid approach. Be tolerant of other people's comms style, try to be concise with enough politeness added in that you don't offend people, even if they say they want you to be ruthlessly direct. When you need to, try to steer the conversation towards your preferred style. Maybe "ok, I understand the background, let's try to distill the facts now", or equally "I feel I need more context before we continue, let's slow down and...". For example, I have worked in a number of medium sized (50-200) companies that were so proud of being flat structured meritocracies, where anyone can say anything directly to their superiors. Every single time it turned out to be BS, higher ups wanted deference and following chains of command. But that sounds less catchy.
• debo_ 7mo ago
  Look man, people are going to talk they way they talk. Just let them do it and deal with it for God's sake. This reminds me of a front-page post a little while ago where someone wrote how much it stressed them out when people routinely apologized for delayed responses. Get over it. I also sometimes wonder if folks writing these articles have had to work closely with people from culturally different places. I've had coworkers that literally could not be direct if their life depended on it for that reason, and I learned to deal with it.
• svrtknst 7mo ago
  It's easy to win an argument when you get to construct both sides. You can easily be direct and to the point without being brash. You could, also, be wrong or misinformed, so I don't see the big deal about "Hey -- the latency numbers look pretty heavy. Should they be in the 400s?" or "I don't believe this is the best approach, we'll get issues with XYZ".
• kelnos 7mo ago
  I'd love to say that I value directness, but I frankly just kinda don't, for the most part. I don't want people to overly obfuscate what they are saying or beat around the bush, but... I have feelings. Often my feelings aren't rational. Often I have feelings about things when I should be more detached. But that's just how I am. I don't want someone to come up to me and say, "Your code is wrong; you should have done ABC". I want them to say "Hey, I ran into a problem with your code. I think here on line 123 you meant to do ABC but you did XYZ by accident. What do you think?" I'm not a dispassionate, disinterested observer. I do have some attachment to the code I write. I know -- and admire -- people who don't, but I'm just not one of them. I like it when someone is polite when they point out my mistakes.
  • Springtime 7mo ago
    > I don't want someone to come up to me and say, "Your code is wrong; you should have done ABC". I want them to say "Hey, I ran into a problem with your code. I think here on line 123 you meant to do ABC but you did XYZ by accident. What do you think?" It's also a sign of good faith and tentative analysis since while that example sounds cut and dry sometimes context/details can be overlooked even those familiar with something. Even in the article while the headline and main text suggest they'd be happy with bluntness to the point of rudeness the actual full examples at the end show the language used is merely succinct while still being helpful, with the second example also substituting the more direct 'you' for the diffused 'we'.
• EliRivers 7mo ago
  Like it or not, in many places amongst many peoples, beginning a conversation with zero social niceties or couching carries a negative message that makes people simply avoid interacting with that self-styled hyper-efficient colleague.
• satisfice 7mo ago
  “You are demonstrating that you do not trust the relationship enough” This is entirely rational when a relationship is not strong, and a misstep could cause it to sour in a way not easily remedied. If I have to work with you, and can’t fire you, then I don’t want to foul the nest. As my coworkers get to know me, they will drop the unnecessary politeness automatically, according to Zipf’s law. They will find I react well to straightforward communication once we have established trust.
• stephbook 7mo ago
  Sorry if that sounds inconsiderate, but I don't feel like changing my communication style just for you. I hope you have a great day.
• rf15 7mo ago
  There's also the opposite end, where people who randomly shout explicitives or argue in bad faith seek refuge in arguing that it's just Crocker's Rules.
• slopinthebag 7mo ago
  > I personally value directness, so when someone communicates with me in that way, it does influence how I perceive them, even subconsciously. I would also argue that this effect happens to most people, including those who aren’t aware of Crocker’s Rules or don’t particularly care about them. When someone is overly direct with me I take it as them being upset or confrontational. So I suppose it does influence how I perceive them. Honestly this is just indicative of a lack of social skills. The "social cushioning" actually has a purpose in that it provides context around the discussion so that neither party gets the wrong idea about the state of mind of the other person. The choice to either engage or not in social niceties is a way of communicating intent. The author complains about a lack of signal, but being completely direct excludes far more. > Nobody reads "hope you had a great weekend" and thinks better of the person who wrote it, they probably just being trained to take you less seriously in the future, or at worse, if they're evil loving of Crocker's like myself, they just think about the couple of seconds of their life they will never get back. Wtf? Some people do actually appreciate that if it's genuine. And it often is. I wish the cashier a good day, should I just stay silent and shove my money in their face in order to reduce the signal to noise ratio? Do these people socialise with others on a regular basis?
• leke 7mo ago
  I'm English and have been living in Finland for decades. This is a very Finnish thing in the workplace and I love it. Now and again we will get some new "foreign guy" and it reminds me that some cultures (not all) are following these over polite, social formatting rules. It's a bit annoying, but they eventually assimilate :P
• PetriCasserole 7mo ago
  Coming from a former production manager, communication takes style and you have to meet people where they are at. If they're at "Crocker's Rules," awesome! That takes 25 to 50% of the work out of the writing. They could be at "my best work was just trashed and I'm ready to quit," to which you could slow your roll and work through the crisis. Keep adding to your comm tools and you won't need one-size-fits-all theories.
• krn1p4n1c 7mo ago
  Is this appropriate to apply to the managerial conversation closers like “let’s take this offline”?
• Jach 7mo ago
  What a strange post... The linked sl4 source (http://sl4.org/crocker.html http://sl4.org/crocker.html) is short enough it could have been quoted in full. It's Yudkowsky's version, I think this is the first I'm hearing via jandrog's comment that it's not exactly faithful to the original (which I presume originated on an extropian mailing list). On the SL4 mailing list, people would sometimes join and note that they operated under the rules. Stuart Armstrong had an aside to such a declaration once: "I'm not convinced that Crocker's rules are particularly useful (rephrasing the same idea to make it more polite doesn't lose anything, can be more convincing to the target, and will often generate more insights in yourself than a curt dismissal), but it's up to everyone to choose their approach." I think that aside is part of the same strangeness and confusion as this post. Operating under the rules is something you do for yourself -- the "begging" that you're doing to other people is asking them to communicate to you in a manner that is optimized for information, not for being nice. The problem isn't necessarily that people dance around the issues (though that can and often is a problem), the problem is that they simply won't communicate the issues or other information in the first place, and so leave such out, especially if they can't figure out a nice way to say it. Also, if you are writing for someone who is operating under the rules, for you to respect their wishes that doesn't mean you have to be rude or omit politeness or be blunt, it just means you should include all the information you want to say, and not worry about it not being phrased nicely, though of course you can phrase things how you please. To beg others to follow Crocker's rules is basically saying "I am tired of having to use delicate language and sometimes having to avoid talking about things for you, can't you just grow up and let me be lazy and direct and sometimes rude as I tell you everything I have to say?" There are more sensitive ways to make such requests (and ruder ones too), it's probably better to use such methods if you want people to adopt your preferences in receiving information. It's also important to ask if people want certain information in the first place -- I asked a departing intern once (who sadly ended up not being very strong, at least compared to most interns our team had) if they would like some more candid feedback from me before they left, and they declined. That's fine. I think it's usually better to lead by example and just ask people to be direct if you notice them communicating to you in overly sensitive ways and perhaps leaving important things out, and link them to Crocker's rules if you want. Often the rules aren't needed and you can just create a direct and information-rich culture to begin with, or in specific circumstances (e.g. code reviews) use short hand symbols like "Nit: " or "Blocker: " that compress all the niceties you'd otherwise be encouraged to say. When someone new joins, they can read the room, but pay attention if some people express things like "I wish people were nicer here". Maybe they're a snowflake who needs to grow up, or maybe your environment is just toxic and so unpleasant and full of assholes that it gets in the way of productive work. Again, Crocker's rules is about receiving information independent of nice/rude presentation, it doesn't require rudeness or even directness or bluntness since none of those are automatically implied by efficient communication. (Efficient communication optimized for information is not just a character count.) A personal example from 12 years ago: after I was rejected after an onsite job interview, with such rejections notoriously (and for sound legal reasons) omitting many details about the precise whys for the rejection, I invoked Crocker's rules in my request for further feedback and actually received some more useful information than the initial rejection. "The particular role ... required more experience ... There was also the sense that the manner in which you had answered questions came off a bit rough around the edges ... We tend to look for engineers who are very curious, passionate, and large drive/motivation to learn more - it seemed we didn't get those senses from you." The last bit especially was kind of an oof, but it was certainly useful feedback that going forward I, believing myself to actually be curious and wanting to learn more (passion has always been a problem though), would need to make more efforts to show those traits.
• michaelmior 7mo ago
  > This is the literal opposite of professionalism I'm curious what definition the author is using of professionalism.
• tejohnso 7mo ago
  > Anyone is allowed to call you a moron and claim to be doing you a favor. (Which, in point of fact, they would be. One of the big problems with this culture is that everyone's afraid to tell you you're wrong Absurd. You can point out how and why someone is wrong without insulting them by calling them a moron. Telling someone they're a moron is only stating your personal opinion in an offensive way, without any useful proof.
• mcherm 7mo ago
  Many people are taking what I believe to be the wrong message here. I believe the author's intent was (or should have been) to describe how THEY wanted to receive communication, not how EVERYONE should. A skilled communicator will craft their message for the audience. Some want "just the facts" with no social lubricant. Others want the banter to build person-to-person relationships. Some want a quick statement of context for everything. If you can adjust the message to the audience you will be more successful at working with them. I have begun including "how I want you to communicate with me" as part of my standard "introduce myself to new team members" talk.
  • lr0 7mo ago
    > I believe the author's intent was (or should have been) to describe how THEY wanted to receive communication, not how EVERYONE should I thought that would be too obvious to state.
    • wat10000 7mo ago
      Most of your post discusses communication in general terms. When you say that it’s unprofessional and rude to begin a Slack message with a greeting before getting to the meat of the issue, there’s no indication at all that you only meant this to apply to Slack messages sent to you personally. At one point you say, “Nobody reads ‘hope you had a great weekend’ and thinks better of the person who wrote it.” Who is going to read that and think that “nobody” only applies to you? If you really meant this to describe how you want to receive communication, not how everyone should, well, this is an example of catastrophically bad communication. Maybe you’d benefit from some of the mindset that leads people to write and appreciate useless greetings.
      • lr0 7mo ago
        > At one point you say, “Nobody reads ‘hope you had a great weekend’ and thinks better of the person who wrote it.” Who is going to read that and think that “nobody” only applies to you? I argued why I believe this does not a good way of communication in business or professional-focused environment, because as explained, habitual padding tends to train readers to skim, because they learn that the lines often contain little of substance. For people who value directness (which, in my experience, includes many in serious professional settings) this kind of attitude is not appreciated. That said, it is simply my own rationale for preferring a more direct style of communication. >Maybe you’d benefit from some of the mindset that leads people to write and appreciate useless greetings. I come from a culture where elaborate politeness and social niceties are not only common but often expected, and I do practice them in the appropriate contexts. However, when the goal is to build something, solve a problem, or exchange ideas efficiently, I prefer a norm I explained, that is, directness and the substance of the message to take over.
• neogodless 7mo ago
  Am I the only one confused by the very first quote? > "your feelings about how I might receive this are your problem to manage, not mine, just give me the information." Followed immediately by > a person receiving a message bears responsibility for their own emotional reaction to its content So it's not "your feelings about how I might receive this" but rather "my feelings about how I might receive this are my problem to manage." EDIT: Ooops I found a comment expressing this thought: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47372043 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47372043
• throwaway613746 7mo ago
  [dead]
• jrmg 7mo ago
  It’s been my experience that those that most loudly say they value extreme directness like this are also those with the most fragile egos. If you directly tell them something they did is wrong or non-optimal, they conclude that you’re an idiot, don’t change anything (or, worse, double-down), and will sometimes even berate you (directness!). You need to couch your discussions with them more than is usual with others.
  • mayhemducks 7mo ago
    Absolutely ridiculous. My EGO IS NOT FRAGILE. Your ego is fragile... pfft. :D
• jmward01 7mo ago
  The writer asks for it, so I will be blunt. They are demanding people have perfectly formed thoughts crafted in a way to give them just the information they wanted with no consideration for the process of thinking or consideration for the person speaking. It is selfish and impossible. Articles like this, I think, expose how bad we have gotten at both speaking and listening. "I personally value directness, so when someone communicates with me in that way, it deos influence how I perceive them, even subconsciously." Communication is mind control. The point isn't the words, it is literally trying to get a person to do something. I often point out to people that if you just couldn't see people's lips move then speech would appear like the sci-fi definition of psychic powers. The better a person is at communication the more they will fit their message to the audience to get the action intended. If 'direct' really works then over time it will be used but the fact that direct isn't used often implies strongly that it doesn't work for most people or it has secondary effects that are too negative. Demanding the exception is a pretty big ask especially if your aren't willing to meet half way. A second aspect here is that while communicating we are developing our thoughts. We need time to tease out our real intentions and filler conversation helps that. Arguing 'they should have just said x from the start' is 20/20 hindsight a lot of the time. Expecting me to come to you with a terse, perfect information drop tailored to your quirks or else you will get annoyed with me is your problem, not the speaker's. In the end speakers are practicing a really hard skill and the author ignores how hard it is. Learning to listen when someone has a hard time communicating something is also a really hard skill that this article completely ignores. If I could sum this article up it would be 'I want to give up trying to learn how to listen so now it is your fault I don't understand you'.
  • charlie0 7mo ago
    At lot of this isn't true in practice because we live in an async word. Perfect example is giving bad news. So much dancing verbal dancing around it when people really know the answer. The best team I've ever worked on had little social cushioning. This doesn't mean people were being mean to each. The directness of everyone on that team was great because we could work towards resolving issues quickly and without any fluff. This also allowed us to find the best solution.
• sillywabbit 7mo ago
  I used to value this sort of communication. Sometimes I still do. Some feedback I got once that seems relevant to anyone who prefers this style: ---- Key takeways: 1. People are more important than code. 2. People have a right to work in an environment free of perceived hostility. 3. There is a legitimate reason for the perception and hard work may be necessary to understand why this is. Ask yourself these questions periodically during a conversation: 1. Am I listening to the other person? 2. Is there an equal amount of give and take or is my primary objective to make someone understand my point of view? 3. Does the person want to understand what I am saying?
• jpdb 7mo ago
  Asking (begging?) people to communicate with you in a certain way because you think it is depriving you of your attention(time?) is _much_ more selfish because you are depriving people of the opportunity to control how they are perceived. How and what people think of me is extremely important to me. I want to be perceived as someone who is effective _and_ pleasant to work with. Changing my voice to suit your inability to summarize and interpret the ideas being communicated is selfish and antisocial behavior. You are not a being of pure logic. The way I say something to you _will_ effect your perception of me AND the topic at hand. > Politeness has a place, but I beg you put clarity first. Having conversations with little-to-no noise as possible has a place, but I beg you to consider that the person conversing with you has a baseline level of empathy and ego and is not a p-zombie. Wanting to be seen a certain way is just as (if not more) important than the extremely minor distress you feel by having to read some extra words.
  • rahimnathwani 7mo ago
    "I want to be perceived as someone who is effective _and_ pleasant to work with." That seems like a good reason to adapt your communication to your audience. If x finds preamble unpleasant, but you use unnecessary preamble when communicating with x, that won't help you be perceived as pleasant to work with.
    • jpdb 7mo ago
      > If x finds preamble unpleasant, but you use unnecessary preamble when communicating with x, that won't help you be perceived as pleasant to work with. Absolutely! But OP isn't suggesting preamble is unpleasant, they are saying there is little or even no value and to remove it altogether. Even if OP did in fact mean to suggest this when speaking to them directly, it is unbelievably selfish to ask (let alone _beg_) someone to eschew their voice just so you don't have to read a few more words and "waste calories" to gather the information they believe is important. The pleasantries and preambles and hollow words _are_ important. People might be adding them without having deep thoughts on them to the point where they explicitly include them, but they want to signal to you that they consider your humanity. That signal isn't noise, it's a very minute sign of camaraderie. If OP doesn't value that signal, that's fine, but pretending it's noise is antisocial.
• stego-tech 7mo ago
  This is why I love Boston: everyone here, at least in public, operates by Crocker’s Rules. Blocking the whole escalator at rush hour? “ONE SIDE, ASSHOLE” while someone pushes them aside and moves up. Shoving past exiting riders on the T rather than letting them off first? “LET US EXIT, ASSHOLE” as they’re shoulder-checked. SUV or Monster Truck in the compact car spaces? “CAN’T YOU READ, ASSHOLE” as the tiny car beside them deliberately flings their door open into their bodywork. I love it. Fastest I’ve ever adapted to a new city thanks to the glut of direct feedback. Haven’t been called an asshole in a decade. —- Humor aside, yeah hi I am one of those people who thrive on the sort of direct feedback Crocker’s Rules permit, because context switching sucks and the “wind up” of flowery communication ratchets my OCD into outright anxiety as it tries to pick out every possible level of nuance, tone, intent, and outcome. If I fucked up, man, just tell me how and show me how I can do better next time. That’s all I need. I don’t need a weighted blanket and hot tea’s worth of communication coziness, I just need actionable feedback so I can apologize, fix it, and get back to work.
• some_random 7mo ago
  I'm a big fan of nohello.club but this is way too far, if nothing else statements like "I'm not sure if I'm missing something here and sorry if this is a dumb question but" communicate something of actual value, a confidence level. Yeah the long rambly hellos can be annoying but surely the time you've spent skimming though them for your entire life can't be more than the time spent writing and posting this blog?
  • Normal_gaussian 7mo ago
    I love that site. The most ridiculous thing about the "hello" senders is that they end up sitting there waiting for you to reply.
• lproven 7mo ago
  This post, and the pithier original, is absolutely astonishing to me as a Brit who has lived and worked in Europe all my adult life. Now I think I see why some American-dominated FOSS communities object to my writing, and why I get hatemail, blogs and comments attacking me online, and entire threads of abuse here on HN. A light has dawned. I am not planning to change, though. Deal with it. What it is saying in pointlessly flowery language is: "Please just be direct." Spelled out: "cut the crap, don't waste my time and your words. Say what you mean." In England, where there is a strong north/south cultural divide, being very direct is seen as a stereotypically Northern attribute. In the south, especially the south-east (around the capital), people are more flowery. I'm from Lancashire, although I left young. Half my family is Irish. In my culture, speaking directly is seen as a virtue. It's a good thing. Burying your message in pointless verbiage is not polite: it's wasting time. We'd call it a "load of hot air". The expression is embedded in the title of this book: https://www.withouthotair.com/ https://www.withouthotair.com/ The author was from Newcastle, in the heard of the north-east. I regard being blunt and direct as respectful. It implies: "I think you are an adult. I appreciate that your time is valuable, so I will not waste it." I think this is the default cultural position of where I'm from. Blather, hot air, floweriness, excess verbiage: this is the stuff of professional liars, like salespeople and politicians. If someone wraps how they speak in layers of pointless drivel it means they are trying to hide what they have to say, and if they fell the need to do that, you should not trust what they say, and indeed, trust them. I am shocked and amazed that there needs to be a phrase for this in American discourse. I am nearly 60 and I never knew. I spent 3 a lot of time for 2 years in Norway, where this is normal: Norwegians are even more blunt than Northern Brits. I liked it a lot. (I recently did a very brief interview with a Norwegian senior civil servant for work and he was full of praise for my Norwegian.) I like the people, I like the place, I like the manners. Example here: https://nlsnorwayrelocation.no/the-unwritten-rules-of-norwegian-social-etiquette/ https://nlsnorwayrelocation.no/the-unwritten-rules-of-norweg... Czechs are even more blunt. I like it. As a beginner in their formidably complex language, brevity is helpful. I walk into a bar and people to go: "How many?" "Just you?" "For one?" It's great. Gets to the point, easy to understand, easy to answer. The Finns even more so. There is a Finnish comic book about this: https://yle.fi/a/3-8406344 https://yle.fi/a/3-8406344 It's also a recurrent theme of the excellent Scandinavia and the World. Apparently Chinese people admire Finnish brevity. https://satwcomic.com/manners-are-important https://satwcomic.com/manners-are-important So this is not just Europe. It's just you, America. If you need a polite way to say "cut the crap", this is a hint: you have a problem.
• RHSeeger 7mo ago
  It bothers me that the article seems imply there is only minimal truth and wasting a ton of time. > What it means in practice is that your colleague can write "this approach is wrong, here's why" instead of "hey, hope you're doing well, I had some time to look at your PR and I just wanted to shared a few small thoughts, please take these as just one perspective, and of course you know the codebase better than I do, but I was wondering if maybe we could potentially consider [useful thing here]" and then bury the actual point six paragraphs deep. Both messages contain the same information, however one of them respects time. There's a LARGE grey area between those two. It's entirely possible to value someone's emotions _and_ not waste a bunch of time. And yes, other people's emotional reactions to what you say _should_ matter to you. Because 1) empathy matters and 2) you need to continue working with those people. It's a pretty widely held belief that the people are say "I'm not being mean, I'm just stating the truth; I'm a straight shooter" and, in fact, just jerks.
  • sieabahlpark 7mo ago
    [dead]
• xivzgrev 7mo ago
  Author has a point that some people take it too far but he's losing forest for trees. People are responsible for their emotional responses. But you also will be impacted by their reaction. It's unrealistic to assume that people will always act unemotional - they are not Spocks. It makes sense to do some padding / emotional prework. If you don't you will end up actually spending MORE time getting what you want. Example: you are giving feedback to a peer Direct: this is a poor user experience. Our customers tell us they want xyz, but this experience is doing the opposite. Can you change it? Padded: hey can I share some feedback on this experience? (Yes) ok our customers tell us they want xyz, but the experience seems to be doing the opposite. Can you help me understand? Most people would feel more defensive and closed with the first approach than the second, which will make it less likely they will want to help, listen to you, or take you seriously. They'll just be focused on defending themselves. Whereas with the second, you can start to have an actual discussion. And it's not just the opener, it's throughout. Words have power. Two sentences can mean the same thing but can lead to different reactions from people. Or you might not mention something that significantly influences how something is interpreted. I just gave this feedback yesterday to a team member. The problem was in a presentation she presented a strong conclusion based on a shaky methodology and people tore into it. She basically was attributing an effect to a change pre/post, not with a holdout. Her underlying data was sound, she had diligently collected the timing of events and such, but she didn't realize how pre/post methodology could be perceived as shaky. The whole thing could have been avoided had she said something like "we didn't have a hold out, and all of this effect likely isn't from the cause, but directionally there's smoke - our campaigns performed x before, and y after. So this is worth testing to help validate this hypothesis" Now their message goes from "This big bad thing happened so I'm going to fix it" to "I don't know exactly what happened, but there's one factor that directionally had an impact so I'm going to test it to validate and can scale from there". Both essentially say the same thing: there's an opportunity for upside and that's why this is worth testing. But the reaction will be different, so it behooves all of us to be mindful of that.
• mapontosevenths 7mo ago
  "Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best." - Robert Heinlein
• jrm4 7mo ago
  This may be the most wrongheaded and intellectually lazy post I've seen on this site, and I'm glad to see folks responding accordingly.
• mayhemducks 7mo ago
  I find that context has a strong affect on how I decide to communicate. How I respond to communication in a professional setting, both emotionally as well as practically, depends on whether the message is an asynchronous medium like email, or a fully synchronous medium like a face to face meeting in person. It depends on what I'm doing in the moment, what I have been doing recently, and what I will be doing in the near future. It depends on who is communicating to me, their role within the organization, how their role relates to mine, whether it is one-to-one, or one-to-many, or many-to-many. And a whole host of other contextual things, some even subconscious. There are times when I become very tilted if I feel like someone else is not respecting my time. There are other times when I become similarly frustrated if I feel like someone else is not allowing enough time to discuss something important, or if they seem like they are being dismissive of a topic I care about. My own emotional response to communication is another input I can use to evaluate reality. My emotions are indicators of certain things, but they are not straightforward, flashing neon signs that explain exactly what's going on in clear and simple terms. The gut thoughts need to be combined with the brain thoughts for a more complete picture, and that increases uncertainty. The situation also matters. If I am debugging a problem in production that is costing the organization, and therefore me, a lot of money, most of my focus is going to be dedicated to finding and fixing the problem. If you interrupt that with "how was your weekend?" you can probably expect me to be like, "what is wrong with you? can't you see this plane is on fire?". This is my emotional reaction. My rational reaction is - if you aren't helping, you are in the way. This reaction is due 100% to the way I was brought up - when I wasn't helping I WAS in the way, and I would be asked by my parents step aside, watch and learn. And that was the right thing to do because it improved safety and lowered risk. My point is, there is an infinite pool of influences that contribute to the way people choose to communicate. And the way someone chooses to communicate is not always 100% under their conscious control - some of it is instinct, more like a reflex. I very much value clear and straight-forward communication that respects everyone's time - in the right context. And my own expectations of this kind of communication has damaged my relationships on numerous occasions as well. I also very much value the creative process of talking things through - in the right context. I also tend to find this draining. If there is too much of it all at once, I have to recharge somehow.
• tracerbulletx 7mo ago
  The idea that how your audience receives the communication is their problem and not yours is entirely why some engineers are shit communicators and seem lost when facing the realities of human culture and politics. You might wish the world would all just think exactly like you but the moods, interest, and preferences of the people around you are YOUR PROBLEM and you need to engage with them if you want to accomplish anything unless you're some kind of prodigy who will be accommodated because of your unique capabilities (almost no one who thinks they are this are).
  • ectospheno 7mo ago
    While “perception is reality” is indeed a thing in life so is respecting diversity. If this person prefers to be spoken to in a certain way then it is polite to respect their wishes. You can have your own preference and they should likewise respect yours.
    • helterskelter 7mo ago
      It's polite to try and meet somebody half way, but I've dealt with people who want to lay out all the rules for communication and it typically boils down to a one-sided arrangement where the world is supposed to work for them, but they're unwilling to do the same for the world. Unless somebody has a real limitation (like ESL or a mental handicap), I just ignore these kinds of requests. Make a good faith effort to not be an asshole, but don't give an inch to petty dictators; they have damaged egos and get satisfaction from having people comply with arbitrary requests or demands, and asking for changes to your language is often just the beginning.
  • 5o1ecist 7mo ago
    [dead]
  • manofmanysmiles 7mo ago
    Are you implying other people's emotional immaturity is exclusively my problem to solve? Also when you state an absolute like the word of God, how do you expect it to be received? The article seems to imply to me: form relationships where direct truth is welcomed while acknowledging that people do have emotions. Facts can be true and the feelings can be strong at the sam time. Attaching emotions to facts intentionally is intentionally adding a non-factual dimension to the conversation. If you consider emotions as facts, and are communicating with me, I prefer if you express them as directly and honestly as possible so they can be included in the discussion. Intentionally not expressing emotions clearly while using them to communicate is inherently without integrity. Specifically the words are not aligned with the emotions. The lack of integrity is structural (as opposed to some ambiguous moral ideal.)
• seu 7mo ago
  > you are making the recipient wade through noise to get to signal Because we all know that human beings are actually computers in disguise, or radio receivers, and everything that matters is "perfect", "unpolluted" transmission of messages. :shrug:
• tonnydourado 7mo ago
  I hate hello-how-are-you-then-wait-before-asking messages as much as the next autistic programmer, but both examples in the "more examples" section still kinda read like an asshole, because they present as fact things that often either aren't, or you couldn't be absolutely sure of it. For instance: > "The caching layer is causing a 400ms overhead on cold requests. Here's the trace." Cool, but how do you know that? Are you sure you're interpreting the trace correctly? How many measurements have you done? Sure that there isn't a historic reason why the caching layer behaves in this way, or a conflicting requirement that lead to choosing this latency over some other, worse consequence? In the same way: > "The current error handling swallows exceptions silently, which is making debugging hell. We should propagate errors to the caller" Agree in principle, but did you check git blame to see if there was a rationale? Or asked someone else? How much change would this require? Could it break consumers of our code? Granted, the "polite" messages didn't care any of this information either, but at least they didn't almost preemptively shut down the conversation by laying down what is at best an well informed guess and at worse purely personal opinion as if it's irrefutable truth. Perhaps instead of debating whether to be (too?) polite or direct, it's better to focus on providing as much information as you can, anticipate follow up questions, and close with clear actionable next steps, something which is also missing from both versions of the messages. "Well, those are hypothetical examples" cool, another evidence that we're all talking out of our asses about the sex of the angels, here. Maybe if the author didn't try so much to characterize themselves as perfectly infallible information delivery machine, then I wouldn't have nit-picked so much their half-assed hypotheticals.
• booleandilemma 7mo ago
  This isn't how humans communicate. We're not robots (or LLMs, for that matter). Embrace the small talk. And when things are serious, trust that we'll naturally skip the small talk and speak urgently.
• kid64 7mo ago
  I think the author's sentiments can be neatly summarized as follows: "I wish I didn't live in a society".
  • thyristan 7mo ago
    There are better and worse societies in this matter. I'm glad I live in a society where it is acceptable for a bartender to just bluntly ask "what do you want?" without all the pointless chitchat. Or for me to go to my boss and tell him "there is a problem with X, we should do Y, even if you earlier said Y is bad.".
    • kid64 7mo ago
      I'm glad fer you too.
• n0um3n4 7mo ago
  Agreed.
• npilk 7mo ago
  I find this happens naturally on high-trust teams highly motivated by their work, and I doubt just asking for it like this will be effective.
• wakawaka28 7mo ago
  >So a person receiving a message bears responsibility for their own emotional reaction to its content. If someone tells you your code is wrong, your emotional response to that is your problem to manage, not theirs to preemptively defuse. Our emotions are ultimately our own problem, but you are sorely mistaken if you think the emotions of others can't cause you major problems. There is some merit to keeping social chatter to a minimum in important communication channels, and not being personal. But if you're just gonna try to steam roll everyone else with your opinion, and insult them and their work directly under the pretense of being "objective" then you are going to have a hard time. It usually doesn't even work if you are in a management position, because subordinates will tend to undermine such a manager (if they even stay).
• fl0ki 7mo ago
  My best professional relationships are between people who are confident enough to take direct feedback and appreciate it rather than resent it. However, my worst professional relationships are with people who will rebuke your feedback whether you Crocker it or not. If you're direct, they'll say you should have been more diplomatic about it, but if you're diplomatic, they'll say you're being dishonest and should have been direct. There is no right way to approach it, these people will always find a way to criticize the delivery, and to delegitimize the feedback because of it.
• r0p3 7mo ago
  I read this passage on the blog's diary page and I found it beautiful and poignant. https://lr0.org/diary/ https://lr0.org/diary/ > Last week I had an argument with my Mother of which I was righteous and she was in error. In the end, I managed to convince her of my points. She accepted them. But then she said, “Okay, what about mercy?”. She told me then about a man from town who once had a serious argument with his distant brother. Time passed. And when he finally saw him, he chose to forgive everything. That story stayed with me. After the discussion was over and the house grew quiet, I began thinking about moments in my life, times when I insisted on being right, when I held onto pride, when I could have been softer but wasn’t. And I cried.
  • Ylpertnodi 7mo ago
    Big difference between being 'right', and 'correct'.
• oh_fiddlesticks 7mo ago
  This is just advocating being lazy in communication. Which is entirely expected and in harmony with our time starved work environments.
• smcg 7mo ago
  Something I noticed when working for a company that claimed to "value honesty over fear of offending someone else" is that they are still very selective of what you are allowed to say. Can't make fun of the giant American flag right as you walk in the door, that's unpatriotic. And don't mention any of the misdealings of past or current investors.
• schubart 7mo ago
  There’s a typo in the article: “deos” -> “does”. How did I do?
• willrshansen 7mo ago
  It's called tact. It's not mutually exclusive to effective communication.
• gjvc 7mo ago
  hoped it would be Steve Crocker; was disappointed.
  • dgeiser13 7mo ago
    I was hoping it would be Steve "The Colonel" Cropper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Cropper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Cropper
• ccppurcell 7mo ago
  This is a false dichotomy between spending the first third of your message on niceties and being maximally blunt. I don't agree that you do not owe other people a modicum of consideration about their emotional state. I advocate a middle ground and also empathy and curiosity. I think you can keep in mind that you might be wrong and treat people with respect without wasting their time. Something like "please check these lines/this function/whatever again. I think it will have such and such an effect. I did this test, here's the output". Seems fine to me.
• snmx999 7mo ago
  There is also a middle ground. You don’t have to prepend your message with several sentences of fluff, but asking a question instead of stating your message can be much better receives. Just stating facts may sound like an accusation and especially if your analysis is not correct it makes your message poorly received.