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.
I subscribe to the thesis of Death of the Author, that just because someone came up with something, it doesn't necessarily given them a permanent special privilege in its interpretation. Everybody can understand the work as they prefer, and if anything, the work takes on a life of its own in greater society and evolves together with it. (Hence the limits on the duration of copyright.)
This is why many common idioms are now used in their opposite meaning, and we all understand, and it's fine. As a random example, "It's all downhill from here" can mean either "it gets easier" or "it gets worse". The meaning has changed over time. Also: "I could care less", etc...
> 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.
That's a distinction that's not as clear cut as you think.
The problem in the workplace setting is that the subject is the code/system/product/organisation, which has no feelings and hence can't be offended, but many people feel compelled to use an overly verbose style in order to avoid offending the humans charged with the care of the unfeeling object.
There is a certain freedom in treating things as things and calling out their objective properties as is, instead of dancing around the facts.
This is the very same thing as talking plainly and directly about taboo or sensitive subjects. Just do it! It's fine!
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?
If I understand you correctly, you are saying that taboos should not be examined from within the space where they hold effect, because doing so calls into question the whole concept of a taboo and robs all taboos of their usefulness, and that would summon evidence for, or even cause cultural decline?
That sounds suspiciously like something a taboo would say that has something to fear from being looked at. ;)
I think this chain of reasoning is made of links that do not self-evidently follow. From my lay perspective, taboos seem more complex, resilient and variable to require a perfectly dogmatic approach to hold up. If they were this easy to bring down, they'd all be gone.
I'm also not sure what a "culture without taboos" is, or one has ever existed. Also, what is meant by "peak"? Is there an optimal amount or set of taboos? How do cultures with taboo-ical differences (and their peaks) compare to each other across space and time?
I think it is good and healthy to approach taboos with curiosity, whether it is to interrogate them or to appreciate them more.
I've heard of taboos forbidding discussion in religious contexts, for religious (superstitious) reasons, but what definition of taboo are you using that it doesn't just mean "forbidden"?
There's a taboo to marrying your blood sibling, but discussing such marriages is fine. If a culture generally allowed marrying such a sibling I think it'd be past its peak, maybe. But I don't see how discussing it would contribute to that.
It probably depends on the measure used to define peak, but the removal of arbitrary limits on honest intellectual inquiry has huge benefits, eg the enlightenment, science, etc.
> There's a theory that a culture without taboos is past it's peak in some important way
That sound like yet another assertion that some people are so fond of and that I personally find totally baseless and irrelevant. You are simply proclaiming that a thing you like is good because it is good. So what? I don't like it and I want it gone. And I don't care that you think it is good unless you can come with some argument I can understand from my own set of values.
Crocker's rules are permission for others to be blunt, not an obligation. The fact that a person claims to operate under Crocker's rules doesn't mean anyone else is obliged to care. (Something the article's author appears to have missed.)
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.
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.
And as a writer: I find that my instinct to write caveats like "I know you're the expert on the codebase" corresponds to a process I need to follow to verify the information. Emails like this can take me hours to write, as I scour the codebase, logs, etc for the missing pieces of information demanded by "mere politeness". Here's an example of a reply I got:
> Thank you for your careful report, I will attend to it asap.
The response was short and to the point, because no other information was relevant. And, indeed, I have written emails like that in the past. But, from the article:
> 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.
Those things are often all relevant. I beg the author to read a book about system-theoretic process analysis (STPA). Some are freely-available from the MIT PSASS website: https://psas.scripts.mit.edu/home/books-and-handbooks/. Nancy G. Leveson's CAST Handbook is perhaps most directly applicable.
It's also a misinterpretation of the "nohello", which is about dragging things out over multiple messages and time to put the actual message. Just adding some pleasantries at the beginning isn't the same thing.
> 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.
This is not what the article says. The author is not advocating for removal of relevant information (including uncertainty markers and that which you describe as "true and important") - only information that is not relevant, such as "I'm not sure if I'm missing something here and sorry if this is a dumb question but" that is an example in the post.
And, if the information may be relevant, the author would ask you to include it - concisely, without fluff.
The main thing that Crocker's Rules are trying to cut out (in a LIMITED SPECIFIC OPT-IN BASIS) is specifically irrelevant information due to social graces/fear of offense. If it could be useful, the author (and Crocker) would have you include it.
> but an interruption can be a lot less disruptive compared to getting nerd sniped.
Theoretically yes. Practically, folks who avoid small talk deliberately usually have enough awareness to not interrupt unless they need your time. But yes, directness without judgment is bad.
Ironically, the author fails to apply that judgment themselves and wastes a ton of words on unnecessary and/or bad examples.
And, more importantly, they miss the core point of Crocker's rule: Invoking it doesn't mean you get to tell other people how to communicate. You just tell them they're not responsible for your emotional/mental state.
If those extra details upset OP, maybe they lack the maturity to invoke that rule.
> Practically, folks who avoid small talk deliberately usually have enough awareness to not interrupt unless they need your time.
It’s not whether you need my time it’s where it falls in my priorities which you do not know. By essentially not asking they will get it wrong more, in both directions.
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'.
> Communication is mind control. The point isn't the words, it is literally trying to get a person to do something.
You're describing manipulating people, not communicating with them.
The point of communication between engineers is usually to establish a mutual understanding, not make them do something you want. Through that mutual understanding you both come to agree on what should be done.
Often, coming to that mutual understanding on complex projects with experienced engineers can be difficult, because we're human and we inevitably misunderstand complex systems in a multitude of ways on our path to understanding them.
Being able to be brutally honest with each other about our misunderstandings is what the author is talking about. When you work with people who get that individuals misunderstanding things is part of the process, and nobody takes or imputes it personally, you are suddenly free to focus on the actual meat of the problem instead of worrying how people may or may not feel about it.
> The point of communication between engineers is usually to establish a mutual understanding...
I tried to let this pass in the discussion, I really did, but since it came up in various other replies I felt like I just couldn't. We need to get the hell over ourselves as a profession: the fact that someone is an "engineer" says nothing about their communications styles, needs, or preferences as a person.
There is absolutely nothing intrinsically different about two engineers discussing a software codebase and two doctors discussing a surgical plan. Or two artists discussing a mural design. Or two musicians discussing a score. Or two stone masons discussing an arch design. Two professionals are discussing a professional issue as peers, and they are both people, which means they will have preferences about their communication styles and needs and none of that is dictated or predictable based on their choice of profession. I have worked with engineers who valued social interaction buffering comments about their code; I have met musicians who valued just being told what to do better in the next run-through.
If you[0], as a person, value directness, bully for you. Express that need to your peers, ask them to respect it, be prepared to be annoyed when they don't. But don't assume or expect them to assume that that's your communication style — or that it should be your communication style — because you are an engineer.
[0] The reader of this comment, not directed specifically at the person who posted this.
Sometimes what you're trying to get them to do is understand something that you (think you) understand.
There's a reason software has tutorials as well as reference documentation. Sometimes telling someone something directly isn't as effective at getting them to understand it as explaining it more slowly or obliquely. Sharing your learning journey to arrive at the understanding is (one possibility for) presenting a working path to understanding.
It's also the case that, especially when someone's knowledge diverges a lot from your own, it may not be obvious to them what information is relevant to you — and it may even be surprising to you. As an extreme example, there was a bug where OpenOffice wouldn't print on Tuesdays [1]. This happens a lot with non-technical users, but can also happen with other technical people who don't have the same level of understanding of a particular subsystem (in both directions — if you understand it better they may not know what information is key to understanding its behaviour, and if they understand it better they may not realize what information they're taking for granted that you don't know — e.g. the famous joke about ‘monads are just monoids in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?’). As I've spent more time in technical discussions I've got better at homing in on the information I need — but I can't materialize information that wasn't given to me in the first place. So I'd rather people shotgun information at me than narrow it down to just the one point that they think is relevant.
> Being able to be brutally honest with each other about our misunderstandings
Being specific to misunderstandings is an element that's overlooked.
This advice tends to be taken onboard (often to extremes) by those who take it as a free pass to just say whatever comes to their mind, whenever they like, without explaining how they arrived there. Any excuse to avoid putting in effort to be understood or be conscious of the fact that human beings have emotions.
We are not robots.
I'm glad commenters here are aware of this, as HN sentiment is getting close to the point of treating each other as machines, whilst we train bots to have better communication skill such as empathetic reflection, and allow them more creativity and freedom.
Some people are more patient and sympathetic towards computers making mistakes and not following commands perfectly, or being too verbose, than we are with our fellow human beings.
The point of communication in general is to alter the recipient’s mental state in certain ways. Maybe you want to alter their mental state such that they understand a technical problem. Maybe you want it to be a state that causes them to explain something. Maybe you want to alter their mental state such that they pick you up from the airport.
The key thing is that there is a particular goal, and if you want to achieve that goal, you need to work with people as they are, not as you wish them to be.
This is patently false because no one can actually understand something from just trading RFCs or understand things from just purely reading the code. 90% of the time the damn thing is unspecified so you have to give motivating examples
> You're describing manipulating people, not communicating with them.
You interpreted the parent comment in a shallow and uncharitable fashion. You missed the deeper insight the statement has.
> The point of communication between engineers is usually to establish a mutual understanding, not make them do something you want. Through that mutual understanding you both come to agree on what should be done.
You are describing a form of mind control, just not the sci fi/fantasy version of total mind control.
If I start a conversation with you about a problem and we end with a mutual understanding (meaning I understand your perspective and you understand mine and we share perspective about the facts of the issue) then I literally used my words to directly impact your your mind (and you did the same). Assuming the "mutual understanding" lands in a place where we both agree the problem needs to be fixed, there's a really good chancw my words also impact your actions.
Mind control. Manipulation. Whatever. Communication literally controlled your mind and your actions or it wasn't effective communication.
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.
> The best team I've ever worked on had little social cushioning.
It is HARD to build this sort of thing in the modern workplace. We dragged politics into the workplace, in a way thats more about social signaling. We moved to work from home, removing the social interactions around the coffee pot and lunches that let you ask about peoples lives outside of work. Furthermore corporations took over the social channels: Slack/chat, email, zoom etc leaving people less inclined to be personal there. Where is the outlet to go bitch about your boss, your PM, your scrum master with your co-workers.
The blunt, no nonsense request to a colleague, who you just asked about their kids in a separate interaction, reads a lot different, without these interactions.
You communicate differently in person vs with async text.
If you don’t have your thoughts together, if you see a problem but are not sure of the fix, just say that.
Make it clear why you are communicating with me, do you have a specific request? A question? Just want to chat? Have a general discussion about an issue?
I totally missed/muddled the 'clarity' and 'unity' arguments in my response. It would have been a great final point. There is a big difference between being direct and being clear. When there is an issue, what I am often trying to communicate is my goal to get information and to get the rest of the team on the same page. I am seeking clarity and unity and the tool I am using is communication. But there is a difference between seeking clarity/unity and being direct. My points stand about the process of thought and the style of communication there. You can be clear without being direct and being direct is often not the right answer and not even possible.
In a previous life I was a pilot. Communication in aviation is exceptionally clear and direct. It is that way because time matters and understanding matters but also because the vast majority of situations have been clearly identified, thought out and formalized well before you are in the air. I suspect other environments have this too, like an operating room. In training we had a system of 'shacks' where if you messed up on the radio in the pattern the day before you owed a 'shack' (a beer to the common fridge) by the next day. The comms there were ridiculously direct and clear but also incredibly formalized. There were exact words for exact situations and the tree of possible interactions, and the communication required, were almost 100% memorized. However, as soon as things got a little out of the norm so did the comms. You really can't have perfect 'direct' communication with dynamic systems. The shack system was great because it shows both sides of the communication world. It emphasized the incredibly direct communication world but then when your mistakes came to light there generally was a lot of indirect communication involved discussing the shack.
I would hate to think that software design is so well thought out that all communication could be formalized like aviation or an operating room. It would mean the age of the code assistant really is going to take engineering away because anything so perfectly formalized can also easily be learned by an LLM.
> 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.
No, this is not what the author asks for. There's nothing in their article that says that people need to have "perfectly formed thoughts" or "only give them the information they asked for".
> It is selfish and impossible.
You fundamentally did not understand the point that they made (quite clearly). The thing that they are actually advocating for turns out to be neither.
> Communication is mind control. The point isn't the words, it is literally trying to get a person to do something.
Author also does not say that they think Crocker's Rules should be applied in all cases or that convincing someone of something is unnecessary.
> 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.
Author is not (specifically) talking about filler conversation.
And on top of that it's really clear that they're primarily talking about digital communication - where filler conversation is unnecessary, unlike verbal communication.
> The writer asks for it, so I will be blunt.
Before being blunt, try being correct. And responding to the points that the author actually made instead of constructing a whole field of strawmen.
> 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.
'Direct' can work and does work, depending on culture. There are direct cultures, where communication is primarily intended to convey information. There are indirect cultures, where communication is primarily intended to convey social status, manipulate social bonds, or perform culturally necessary rituals. With the actual information being secondary. In a direct culture you will tell say "I want to buy this bread". In an indirect culture, it might be more like "Hello, be greeted, o nicest and finest of all shop clerks, nice weather, $deity be praised for her mercy of having me walk this earth for one more day. All your wares look magnificent, but might I inquire if it would be possible, if it isn't inconvenient, reserved or forbidden, to maybe ask about how that very fine loaf of bread came into your possession? ...". All the while tourist me, back in the queue rolls his eyes in total annoyance, having suffered through innumerable minutes of waiting for people to get on with their useless diatribe.
Since HN is primarily engineers, time is precious on this earth, and secondary considerations should be secondary really: There is only one desirable mode of communications. The direct one. Everything else is a waste of time. Being indirect and long-winded isn't "bad at speaking and listening". It is being inconsiderate and rude. It is putting secondary things before the main issue. I think cultures need to be changed to be more direct.
Your last points are valid, sometimes you need some time and collect your thoughts. But in this case, you should just ask the other person to help you think, and directly tell them that you haven't fully formulated your issue and need help with that. That is a far more productive way to deal with the issue of half-formed thoughts and questions. Beating around the bush and using another person as a involuntary rubber-ducky is also rude, and only excusable in rare circumstances.
The Gladwellian direct/indirect dichotomy (or continuum) is a misapprehension of how language works. All communication is indirect in some sense because we don't have mind control powers over our fellow humans. Even saying ‘I want to buy this bread’ is indirect in a sense: you're not causing the baker to sell you the bread, nor even explicitly instructing them to, but just stating your personal internal desires. It is a cultural construct that being told someone's internal desire is supposed to function as a ‘direct’ instruction to satisfy it, and even in that there is a lot of room for ambiguity depending on context etc. For example, if I were speaking not to the baker but to my friend as we peruse the bakery together, ‘I want to buy this bread’ could have a variety of intended impacts on their actions. It could mean ‘let's come to an agreement about whether we should collectively buy this bread’. It could mean ‘pass me my wallet so I can pay for the bread’. It could mean ‘go and find me a shopkeep who can legally sell me the bread’. It could just mean ‘you are my friend and I'm telling you my internal monologue so that you can understand me better’.
If you interpret the language of a different culture (separated by space or time — try reading the ‘flowery’ language of Victorian or Elizabethan literature) too literally, it reads as ‘indirect’. But that doesn't mean that the native speakers from that culture consider it so. You're simply missing the cultural context that makes their phrasing as ‘direct’ to them as ‘I want to buy this bread’ is to you.
>There are indirect cultures, where communication is primarily intended to convey social status, manipulate social bonds, or perform culturally necessary rituals
Aside from the poor tone of this style of writing, short declarative statements don't convey the same information and leave a confusing message.
Without knowing how you arrived at "the point", you are pushing all the work onto the recipient (or worse, every reader of your comment on HN) to verify what you say and how much they can trust you. That could involve researching, checking your credentials, or putting in effort to understand/overlook the emotional tone.
"This is the answer. I have the answer" style dumping of information is a poor form of human-human communication, unless you are directly answering a closed-ended question.
Out of curiosity, are you a reader? When was the last time you read a full length chapter book for fun? Does it feel like work to you? Is it a slow process?
I ask not to insult, but to understand. I can't help but wonder if a lot of this demand for terse language comes from a simple inability to read well? Reading is really not supposed to feel like work to the educated, and it does not to me. For me its just a state of consciousness, and doesnt require any more effort than being awake does.
I am genuinely surprised to hear otherwise educated people imply that simply reading something a coworker wrote significantly slows down their work.
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!
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.
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).
”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.
There are even practical ways to allow this type of exchange. However, they require a truly egalitarian business relationship, mutual respect, and signaling mechanism to note when to be blunt and when to be decent.
If these conditions aren't met, then a subordinate could trivially get fired because they're superior hadn't had breakfast or lunch that day and was just hangry.
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).”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
> Are you implying other people's emotional immaturity is exclusively my problem to solve?
Ignoring others emotions is not a sign of emotional maturity.
The inability to empathize with others and make meaningful predictions about how their emotions will affect communications is specifically a lack of emotional maturity.
This kind of sentiment comes up every time this topic is raised. This idea that we should be able to treat people mostly like logical robots is not grounded in fact. The fact is that human emotions have a huge impact on the way they communicate and receive communications.
> Also when you state an absolute like the word of God, how do you expect it to be received?
Case in point. You had an emotional reaction to the parent comment, and you responded with an attempt to shame the communication style rather than address the factual content of the communication.
Your emotions dictated your response here, not the facts, and your response was emotional in content as much as factual. Hyperbole is specifically an appeal to emotion.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
This is why many common idioms are now used in their opposite meaning, and we all understand, and it's fine. As a random example, "It's all downhill from here" can mean either "it gets easier" or "it gets worse". The meaning has changed over time. Also: "I could care less", etc...
> 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.
That's a distinction that's not as clear cut as you think.
The problem in the workplace setting is that the subject is the code/system/product/organisation, which has no feelings and hence can't be offended, but many people feel compelled to use an overly verbose style in order to avoid offending the humans charged with the care of the unfeeling object.
There is a certain freedom in treating things as things and calling out their objective properties as is, instead of dancing around the facts.
This is the very same thing as talking plainly and directly about taboo or sensitive subjects. Just do it! It's fine!
This is like saying that telling someone their artwork sucks is not offensive because "the artwork has no feelings."
That meaning has not changed. Anyone who says "I could care less" to indicate maximal lack of caring is using the language incorrectly.
Do people really say this? Is it exclusive? I've only heard the inverse: "I couldn't care less".
Edit: genuine question. Please explain downvotes!
That sounds suspiciously like something a taboo would say that has something to fear from being looked at. ;)
I think this chain of reasoning is made of links that do not self-evidently follow. From my lay perspective, taboos seem more complex, resilient and variable to require a perfectly dogmatic approach to hold up. If they were this easy to bring down, they'd all be gone.
I'm also not sure what a "culture without taboos" is, or one has ever existed. Also, what is meant by "peak"? Is there an optimal amount or set of taboos? How do cultures with taboo-ical differences (and their peaks) compare to each other across space and time?
I think it is good and healthy to approach taboos with curiosity, whether it is to interrogate them or to appreciate them more.
There's a taboo to marrying your blood sibling, but discussing such marriages is fine. If a culture generally allowed marrying such a sibling I think it'd be past its peak, maybe. But I don't see how discussing it would contribute to that.
That sound like yet another assertion that some people are so fond of and that I personally find totally baseless and irrelevant. You are simply proclaiming that a thing you like is good because it is good. So what? I don't like it and I want it gone. And I don't care that you think it is good unless you can come with some argument I can understand from my own set of values.
Dead Comment
I do appreciate the OP as it stands!
> 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.
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.
> Thank you for your careful report, I will attend to it asap.
The response was short and to the point, because no other information was relevant. And, indeed, I have written emails like that in the past. But, from the article:
> 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.
Those things are often all relevant. I beg the author to read a book about system-theoretic process analysis (STPA). Some are freely-available from the MIT PSASS website: https://psas.scripts.mit.edu/home/books-and-handbooks/. Nancy G. Leveson's CAST Handbook is perhaps most directly applicable.
> 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.
This is not what the article says. The author is not advocating for removal of relevant information (including uncertainty markers and that which you describe as "true and important") - only information that is not relevant, such as "I'm not sure if I'm missing something here and sorry if this is a dumb question but" that is an example in the post.
And, if the information may be relevant, the author would ask you to include it - concisely, without fluff.
The main thing that Crocker's Rules are trying to cut out (in a LIMITED SPECIFIC OPT-IN BASIS) is specifically irrelevant information due to social graces/fear of offense. If it could be useful, the author (and Crocker) would have you include it.
Theoretically yes. Practically, folks who avoid small talk deliberately usually have enough awareness to not interrupt unless they need your time. But yes, directness without judgment is bad.
Ironically, the author fails to apply that judgment themselves and wastes a ton of words on unnecessary and/or bad examples.
And, more importantly, they miss the core point of Crocker's rule: Invoking it doesn't mean you get to tell other people how to communicate. You just tell them they're not responsible for your emotional/mental state.
If those extra details upset OP, maybe they lack the maturity to invoke that rule.
It’s not whether you need my time it’s where it falls in my priorities which you do not know. By essentially not asking they will get it wrong more, in both directions.
"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'.
You're describing manipulating people, not communicating with them.
The point of communication between engineers is usually to establish a mutual understanding, not make them do something you want. Through that mutual understanding you both come to agree on what should be done.
Often, coming to that mutual understanding on complex projects with experienced engineers can be difficult, because we're human and we inevitably misunderstand complex systems in a multitude of ways on our path to understanding them.
Being able to be brutally honest with each other about our misunderstandings is what the author is talking about. When you work with people who get that individuals misunderstanding things is part of the process, and nobody takes or imputes it personally, you are suddenly free to focus on the actual meat of the problem instead of worrying how people may or may not feel about it.
I tried to let this pass in the discussion, I really did, but since it came up in various other replies I felt like I just couldn't. We need to get the hell over ourselves as a profession: the fact that someone is an "engineer" says nothing about their communications styles, needs, or preferences as a person.
There is absolutely nothing intrinsically different about two engineers discussing a software codebase and two doctors discussing a surgical plan. Or two artists discussing a mural design. Or two musicians discussing a score. Or two stone masons discussing an arch design. Two professionals are discussing a professional issue as peers, and they are both people, which means they will have preferences about their communication styles and needs and none of that is dictated or predictable based on their choice of profession. I have worked with engineers who valued social interaction buffering comments about their code; I have met musicians who valued just being told what to do better in the next run-through.
If you[0], as a person, value directness, bully for you. Express that need to your peers, ask them to respect it, be prepared to be annoyed when they don't. But don't assume or expect them to assume that that's your communication style — or that it should be your communication style — because you are an engineer.
[0] The reader of this comment, not directed specifically at the person who posted this.
There's a reason software has tutorials as well as reference documentation. Sometimes telling someone something directly isn't as effective at getting them to understand it as explaining it more slowly or obliquely. Sharing your learning journey to arrive at the understanding is (one possibility for) presenting a working path to understanding.
It's also the case that, especially when someone's knowledge diverges a lot from your own, it may not be obvious to them what information is relevant to you — and it may even be surprising to you. As an extreme example, there was a bug where OpenOffice wouldn't print on Tuesdays [1]. This happens a lot with non-technical users, but can also happen with other technical people who don't have the same level of understanding of a particular subsystem (in both directions — if you understand it better they may not know what information is key to understanding its behaviour, and if they understand it better they may not realize what information they're taking for granted that you don't know — e.g. the famous joke about ‘monads are just monoids in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?’). As I've spent more time in technical discussions I've got better at homing in on the information I need — but I can't materialize information that wasn't given to me in the first place. So I'd rather people shotgun information at me than narrow it down to just the one point that they think is relevant.
[1]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...
Being specific to misunderstandings is an element that's overlooked.
This advice tends to be taken onboard (often to extremes) by those who take it as a free pass to just say whatever comes to their mind, whenever they like, without explaining how they arrived there. Any excuse to avoid putting in effort to be understood or be conscious of the fact that human beings have emotions.
We are not robots.
I'm glad commenters here are aware of this, as HN sentiment is getting close to the point of treating each other as machines, whilst we train bots to have better communication skill such as empathetic reflection, and allow them more creativity and freedom.
Some people are more patient and sympathetic towards computers making mistakes and not following commands perfectly, or being too verbose, than we are with our fellow human beings.
The key thing is that there is a particular goal, and if you want to achieve that goal, you need to work with people as they are, not as you wish them to be.
You interpreted the parent comment in a shallow and uncharitable fashion. You missed the deeper insight the statement has.
> The point of communication between engineers is usually to establish a mutual understanding, not make them do something you want. Through that mutual understanding you both come to agree on what should be done.
You are describing a form of mind control, just not the sci fi/fantasy version of total mind control.
If I start a conversation with you about a problem and we end with a mutual understanding (meaning I understand your perspective and you understand mine and we share perspective about the facts of the issue) then I literally used my words to directly impact your your mind (and you did the same). Assuming the "mutual understanding" lands in a place where we both agree the problem needs to be fixed, there's a really good chancw my words also impact your actions.
Mind control. Manipulation. Whatever. Communication literally controlled your mind and your actions or it wasn't effective communication.
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.
It is HARD to build this sort of thing in the modern workplace. We dragged politics into the workplace, in a way thats more about social signaling. We moved to work from home, removing the social interactions around the coffee pot and lunches that let you ask about peoples lives outside of work. Furthermore corporations took over the social channels: Slack/chat, email, zoom etc leaving people less inclined to be personal there. Where is the outlet to go bitch about your boss, your PM, your scrum master with your co-workers.
The blunt, no nonsense request to a colleague, who you just asked about their kids in a separate interaction, reads a lot different, without these interactions.
You communicate differently in person vs with async text.
If you don’t have your thoughts together, if you see a problem but are not sure of the fix, just say that.
Make it clear why you are communicating with me, do you have a specific request? A question? Just want to chat? Have a general discussion about an issue?
All fine, just be clear
In a previous life I was a pilot. Communication in aviation is exceptionally clear and direct. It is that way because time matters and understanding matters but also because the vast majority of situations have been clearly identified, thought out and formalized well before you are in the air. I suspect other environments have this too, like an operating room. In training we had a system of 'shacks' where if you messed up on the radio in the pattern the day before you owed a 'shack' (a beer to the common fridge) by the next day. The comms there were ridiculously direct and clear but also incredibly formalized. There were exact words for exact situations and the tree of possible interactions, and the communication required, were almost 100% memorized. However, as soon as things got a little out of the norm so did the comms. You really can't have perfect 'direct' communication with dynamic systems. The shack system was great because it shows both sides of the communication world. It emphasized the incredibly direct communication world but then when your mistakes came to light there generally was a lot of indirect communication involved discussing the shack.
I would hate to think that software design is so well thought out that all communication could be formalized like aviation or an operating room. It would mean the age of the code assistant really is going to take engineering away because anything so perfectly formalized can also easily be learned by an LLM.
No, this is not what the author asks for. There's nothing in their article that says that people need to have "perfectly formed thoughts" or "only give them the information they asked for".
> It is selfish and impossible.
You fundamentally did not understand the point that they made (quite clearly). The thing that they are actually advocating for turns out to be neither.
> Communication is mind control. The point isn't the words, it is literally trying to get a person to do something.
Author also does not say that they think Crocker's Rules should be applied in all cases or that convincing someone of something is unnecessary.
> 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.
Author is not (specifically) talking about filler conversation.
And on top of that it's really clear that they're primarily talking about digital communication - where filler conversation is unnecessary, unlike verbal communication.
> The writer asks for it, so I will be blunt.
Before being blunt, try being correct. And responding to the points that the author actually made instead of constructing a whole field of strawmen.
'Direct' can work and does work, depending on culture. There are direct cultures, where communication is primarily intended to convey information. There are indirect cultures, where communication is primarily intended to convey social status, manipulate social bonds, or perform culturally necessary rituals. With the actual information being secondary. In a direct culture you will tell say "I want to buy this bread". In an indirect culture, it might be more like "Hello, be greeted, o nicest and finest of all shop clerks, nice weather, $deity be praised for her mercy of having me walk this earth for one more day. All your wares look magnificent, but might I inquire if it would be possible, if it isn't inconvenient, reserved or forbidden, to maybe ask about how that very fine loaf of bread came into your possession? ...". All the while tourist me, back in the queue rolls his eyes in total annoyance, having suffered through innumerable minutes of waiting for people to get on with their useless diatribe.
Since HN is primarily engineers, time is precious on this earth, and secondary considerations should be secondary really: There is only one desirable mode of communications. The direct one. Everything else is a waste of time. Being indirect and long-winded isn't "bad at speaking and listening". It is being inconsiderate and rude. It is putting secondary things before the main issue. I think cultures need to be changed to be more direct.
Your last points are valid, sometimes you need some time and collect your thoughts. But in this case, you should just ask the other person to help you think, and directly tell them that you haven't fully formulated your issue and need help with that. That is a far more productive way to deal with the issue of half-formed thoughts and questions. Beating around the bush and using another person as a involuntary rubber-ducky is also rude, and only excusable in rare circumstances.
If you interpret the language of a different culture (separated by space or time — try reading the ‘flowery’ language of Victorian or Elizabethan literature) too literally, it reads as ‘indirect’. But that doesn't mean that the native speakers from that culture consider it so. You're simply missing the cultural context that makes their phrasing as ‘direct’ to them as ‘I want to buy this bread’ is to you.
Very strange way to say being polite.
TL;DR.
Talking takes time and effort. So does listening. Be brief. Get to the point.
Without knowing how you arrived at "the point", you are pushing all the work onto the recipient (or worse, every reader of your comment on HN) to verify what you say and how much they can trust you. That could involve researching, checking your credentials, or putting in effort to understand/overlook the emotional tone.
"This is the answer. I have the answer" style dumping of information is a poor form of human-human communication, unless you are directly answering a closed-ended question.
I ask not to insult, but to understand. I can't help but wonder if a lot of this demand for terse language comes from a simple inability to read well? Reading is really not supposed to feel like work to the educated, and it does not to me. For me its just a state of consciousness, and doesnt require any more effort than being awake does.
I am genuinely surprised to hear otherwise educated people imply that simply reading something a coworker wrote significantly slows down their work.
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!
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.
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.
If these conditions aren't met, then a subordinate could trivially get fired because they're superior hadn't had breakfast or lunch that day and was just hangry.
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).”
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.
“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.
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.)
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.
Ignoring others emotions is not a sign of emotional maturity.
The inability to empathize with others and make meaningful predictions about how their emotions will affect communications is specifically a lack of emotional maturity.
This kind of sentiment comes up every time this topic is raised. This idea that we should be able to treat people mostly like logical robots is not grounded in fact. The fact is that human emotions have a huge impact on the way they communicate and receive communications.
> Also when you state an absolute like the word of God, how do you expect it to be received?
Case in point. You had an emotional reaction to the parent comment, and you responded with an attempt to shame the communication style rather than address the factual content of the communication.
Your emotions dictated your response here, not the facts, and your response was emotional in content as much as factual. Hyperbole is specifically an appeal to emotion.
What? Literally reading the first paragraph of the post makes it clear that that's not what the argument is advocating for, at all.
Dead Comment
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."
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.
:D
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.
I thought that would be too obvious to state.
This feels like a koan about the subjectivity of which details are important to include.
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.