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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 wh

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.)
- Twey 7mo ago
  > Are you implying other people's emotional immaturity is exclusively my problem to solve? Emotional maturity (from most standpoints) does not mean being completely emotionally unaffected by other people's communication. Insofar as it is emotional immaturity that gives rise to a particular emotional response it might be ethically that person's duty to work on it, if that's how your personal ethics works. But from a pragmatic perspective if you want to get something done that involves that person as a colleague or collaborator it's probably not going to be productive to continually bash your head on their psychological quirks until they go to therapy. You'll have much more luck adapting your own communication to be more aligned with their needs, regardless of how reasonable you personally think those needs are. If you can't or don't want to put in the effort to do that your other option is to make sure you surround yourself with people who can already communicate effectively and relatively comfortably in the communication style you consider natural. You can cut off relationships, move jobs, or fire people to purge everyone else from the circle of people you have to interact with. But you'll be missing out on all the positive contributions of those people, who probably bring viewpoints alien to you, and you run the risk of sycophancy. Plus you'll have a harder time finding people to date/collaborate with/employ/… if you restrict your pool that way. In practice I think people tend to end up somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. They'll decide a maximum investment of energy they're willing or capable of putting into accommodating other people's needs, and make sure that work × time doesn't exceed that threshold.
  - manofmanysmiles 7mo ago
    I agree with the pragmatism. I think pragmatically yes, it is my responsibility. In a very real sense, I am able to respond, being aware of the emotions, even if perhaps the person I am speaking to is not. I guess I have a hard time viewing this as anything but intentional emotional manipulation.
    - Twey 7mo ago
      Adapting your communication doesn't have to imply deception or even insincerity, it just means understanding what's important to your target audience and making sure to address it. Sometimes that's something like financial impact or user focus; sometimes it's emotional reassurance or intellectual challenge.
rawgabbit 7mo ago
”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.” The author argues brevity is more efficient even if it is rude so he argues for brevity. This is why engineers suck at politics and relationships. Brevity and efficiency is a false mantra to live by. It is better to be effective and get what you want without pissing off everyone. The authors’s example is a non starter. When he writes this approach is wrong…, he is starting a flame war even if he argues he isn’t. It would be better to say something like I disagree with this approach, then give your assumptions and reasoning. Even if you don’t get your way, you got it off your chest and came across as professional.
- dpark 7mo ago
  > It is better to be effective This is the key to this whole topic. It doesn’t matter what should be. It matters what is. Humans are emotional in nature and ignoring that is not effective. Also the undertone of this topic is always “I want you to be blunt to the point of rudeness (so I can be too).”
  - cineticdaffodil 7mo ago
    [dead]
  - throw10920 7mo ago
    > Also the undertone of this topic is always “I want you to be blunt to the point of rudeness (so I can be too).” No, it's not. I've met multiple people who subscribe to Crocker's Rules and none of them are intentionally rude. One of them is one of the more polite people I've met. Don't malicious ascribe false motives to others because you're offended at the idea that they're proposing. That's extremely bad form. That's not even what Crocker's Rules are. If you had read the article, you would know that.
npilk 7mo ago
The author is saying something different here - that in this mode, the speaker’s feelings about how the recipient will receive a blunt message are the speaker’s problem. In this case the recipient has already reassured the speaker they can handle their own feelings, but still meets resistance from speakers who are guilty or worried about how they will come across if they are too direct.
- dpark 7mo ago
  Eh, I think the author is also exaggerating the problem significantly. “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?” This isn’t a problem of overpoliteness. It’s a problem of almost nonsensical rambling. I’ve never worked with anyone who actually communicated like this and if they did, they would get pretty direct feedback that they need to stop this. This isn’t polite, it’s dithering. Professor Quirrell level lack of confidence.
  - throw10920 7mo ago
    > Eh, I think the author is also exaggerating the problem significantly. > “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?” You're cherry-picking the most extreme example out of the bunch as a way of discrediting the argument. If you actual read the other examples given: > The Slack message that starts with "Hey! Hope you had a great weekend :)"before asking a technical question or the PR comment that opens with "I'm not sure if I'm missing something here and sorry if this is a dumb question but" before raising a completely valid concern, or that incident text that spends two full paragraphs explaining that the author was sleep-deprived and had a lot on their plate and the monitoring tool had a weird quirk that they didn't know about and their lead had told them something ambiguous three weeks ago, before finally getting around to saying what actually broke and why. There's no exaggeration going on here. This is the norm for the majority of Slack conversations I've seen online, including my own job - out of the hundreds of people I've interacted with at my job, well over half of them do this.
throw10920 7mo ago
> The idea that how your audience receives the communication is their problem and not yours What? Literally reading the first paragraph of the post makes it clear that that's not what the argument is advocating for, at all.

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.)

Twey 7mo ago
> Are you implying other people's emotional immaturity is exclusively my problem to solve? Emotional maturity (from most standpoints) does not mean being completely emotionally unaffected by other people's communication. Insofar as it is emotional immaturity that gives rise to a particular emotional response it might be ethically that person's duty to work on it, if that's how your personal ethics works. But from a pragmatic perspective if you want to get something done that involves that person as a colleague or collaborator it's probably not going to be productive to continually bash your head on their psychological quirks until they go to therapy. You'll have much more luck adapting your own communication to be more aligned with their needs, regardless of how reasonable you personally think those needs are. If you can't or don't want to put in the effort to do that your other option is to make sure you surround yourself with people who can already communicate effectively and relatively comfortably in the communication style you consider natural. You can cut off relationships, move jobs, or fire people to purge everyone else from the circle of people you have to interact with. But you'll be missing out on all the positive contributions of those people, who probably bring viewpoints alien to you, and you run the risk of sycophancy. Plus you'll have a harder time finding people to date/collaborate with/employ/… if you restrict your pool that way. In practice I think people tend to end up somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. They'll decide a maximum investment of energy they're willing or capable of putting into accommodating other people's needs, and make sure that work × time doesn't exceed that threshold.
- manofmanysmiles 7mo ago
  I agree with the pragmatism. I think pragmatically yes, it is my responsibility. In a very real sense, I am able to respond, being aware of the emotions, even if perhaps the person I am speaking to is not. I guess I have a hard time viewing this as anything but intentional emotional manipulation.
  - Twey 7mo ago
    Adapting your communication doesn't have to imply deception or even insincerity, it just means understanding what's important to your target audience and making sure to address it. Sometimes that's something like financial impact or user focus; sometimes it's emotional reassurance or intellectual challenge.

rawgabbit 7mo ago

”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.” The author argues brevity is more efficient even if it is rude so he argues for brevity. This is why engineers suck at politics and relationships. Brevity and efficiency is a false mantra to live by. It is better to be effective and get what you want without pissing off everyone. The authors’s example is a non starter. When he writes this approach is wrong…, he is starting a flame war even if he argues he isn’t. It would be better to say something like I disagree with this approach, then give your assumptions and reasoning. Even if you don’t get your way, you got it off your chest and came across as professional.

dpark 7mo ago
> It is better to be effective This is the key to this whole topic. It doesn’t matter what should be. It matters what is. Humans are emotional in nature and ignoring that is not effective. Also the undertone of this topic is always “I want you to be blunt to the point of rudeness (so I can be too).”
- cineticdaffodil 7mo ago
  [dead]
- throw10920 7mo ago
  > Also the undertone of this topic is always “I want you to be blunt to the point of rudeness (so I can be too).” No, it's not. I've met multiple people who subscribe to Crocker's Rules and none of them are intentionally rude. One of them is one of the more polite people I've met. Don't malicious ascribe false motives to others because you're offended at the idea that they're proposing. That's extremely bad form. That's not even what Crocker's Rules are. If you had read the article, you would know that.

npilk 7mo ago

The author is saying something different here - that in this mode, the speaker’s feelings about how the recipient will receive a blunt message are the speaker’s problem. In this case the recipient has already reassured the speaker they can handle their own feelings, but still meets resistance from speakers who are guilty or worried about how they will come across if they are too direct.

dpark 7mo ago
Eh, I think the author is also exaggerating the problem significantly. “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?” This isn’t a problem of overpoliteness. It’s a problem of almost nonsensical rambling. I’ve never worked with anyone who actually communicated like this and if they did, they would get pretty direct feedback that they need to stop this. This isn’t polite, it’s dithering. Professor Quirrell level lack of confidence.
- throw10920 7mo ago
  > Eh, I think the author is also exaggerating the problem significantly. > “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?” You're cherry-picking the most extreme example out of the bunch as a way of discrediting the argument. If you actual read the other examples given: > The Slack message that starts with "Hey! Hope you had a great weekend :)"before asking a technical question or the PR comment that opens with "I'm not sure if I'm missing something here and sorry if this is a dumb question but" before raising a completely valid concern, or that incident text that spends two full paragraphs explaining that the author was sleep-deprived and had a lot on their plate and the monitoring tool had a weird quirk that they didn't know about and their lead had told them something ambiguous three weeks ago, before finally getting around to saying what actually broke and why. There's no exaggeration going on here. This is the norm for the majority of Slack conversations I've seen online, including my own job - out of the hundreds of people I've interacted with at my job, well over half of them do this.

throw10920 7mo ago

> The idea that how your audience receives the communication is their problem and not yours What? Literally reading the first paragraph of the post makes it clear that that's not what the argument is advocating for, at all.