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>considerably worse place if everyone abided by such rules Those rules are not meant for everyone.
by dennis_jeeves2 7mo ago
>considerably worse place if everyone abided by such rules
Those rules are not meant for everyone.
- d-us-vb 7mo agoThe blog post is an open letter: the author wants everyone reading to follow the those rules.
- Smaug123 7mo agoNo. Crocker's rules are a request for people to act a certain way with respect to you, not wrt anyone else.
- wk_end 7mo agoCrocker's rules themselves might be, but the essay is plainly contemptuous of people who aren't naturally disposed to follow them.
- pibaker 7mo agoShould every incident report be written twice, once for normal people and once for the developmentally challenged then?
- devmor 7mo agoHow 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 agoThey wrote an entire article about how they hate when someone says they hope they had a nice weekend...
- devmor 7mo agoIf that is what you took from the article I think you might have some language development issues yourself, friend.
- slopinthebag 7mo agoBe 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 agoThat'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 agoYes, 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 agoI 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.