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!
Someone's artwork _should_ be possible to (negatively) criticise. Of course, just saying "it sucks" is not constructive or helpful.
You can definitely hurt someone's feeling with unconstructive criticism of thier art. However, pointing out areas to improve should not be too painful to the artist, as they can make newer, better works.
I suppose a difficuly can arise if people get too attached to things they make (art, code, writing, whatever) and don't see any one thing as just a step on the road to even better things.
I think my roundabout point is that companies, code, policies, etc aren't just "things without emotions that can't be offended" because they're all made (or maintained) by people (like art).
There's a difference between constructive directness and immature ad hominem remarks. Kinda illustrates the problem with the authors take. Not everyone can handle it like an adult
People really say this ("I could care less") to express that they do not care at all. I've seen it happen here on this site. Calling out the sheer absurdity of it, even in a respectful way, is not universally well-received. Unfortunately, I could care less about this, as it sounds very grating to me.
I try to remember that I ain't got no problem with other "illogical" uses of negation and could this one in a similar light, but it's more easily said than done.
I assumed it was an American thing. I've never heard anyone on this side of the Atlantic say it – even though Americanisms are being adopted more by the younger generations who are more influenced by online culture.
No, people who properly speak American English say "I couldn't care less" as well. It's just that there are a lot of people who don't speak the language correctly, and no social will to try to get them to learn to speak it correctly.
> But if you are the kind of person who cries out against this abomination we must warn you that people who go through life expecting informal variant idioms in English to behave logically are setting themselves up for a lifetime of hurt.
Downvotes are likely coming from the fact that this comment is quite off topic / doesn't reply to the substance of the comment you are replying to.
While it's often not helpful for folks to point out that something is a quick internet search away, performing one is usually best before going off topic. Doing so would have resulted in the answer to your question pretty quick.
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.
Not should, can't. The assertion I'm referring to is that once something can be rationally discussed it's no longer a taboo, and once a culture has no taboos it has no real vitality or potential for growth left.
Nothing there about causing cultural decline, just evidence of it, and thereby limits on the kind of culture that can host the attitude you describe.
> once something can be rationally discussed it's no longer a taboo
This appears to be an entirely impractical definition, to the point that it would not allow a taboo to ever exist in a group of people capable of any sort of rational discussion. Any two moderately curious and independently-minded people could simply destroy any taboo by talking about it. They could even do it on purpose, using this fatal weakness.
Taboos, as in: the actual attitudes and behaviors of people, do not simply disappear the moment they are named or even questioned. I think we have to allow for taboos to be more nuanced, or we will struggle to describe the actual, interesting phenomenon, let alone do anything useful with it.
> once a culture has no taboos it has no real vitality or potential for growth left
That's an extraordinary claim on multiple levels, even when allowing for different ideas of what taboos are and how they work. I already mentioned some questions this raises, which makes it surprising to find the naked claim simply restated, in an even stronger form.
It's the kind of sentence that can sound really deep and powerful in passing, but when you look at it, is really only a huge, gaping question mark in a fancy dress.
I would not. But I don't see how that's relevant here.
I'm also not going to guess what point you're trying to make. I'd ask you to explain how exactly you think Overton windows relate to our argument about taboos, because, despite a superficial similarity, taboos and Overton windows deal with different things and are very much not the same; but I'm not interested in this style of discussion, sorry. Have a nice day!
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.
Try to start up a conversation about the relative merits of marrying your siblings and I bet everybody else in the room will suddenly get very uncomfortable. They'll be thinking "Of all possible things we could talk about, why this??"
You're right that taboos also concern actions, not just discussion, but in this case it's probably both.
I see a problem here with your example: "everyone else". If you're going to have a sensitive discussion it should involve the minimum number of people.
> They'll be thinking "Of all possible things we could talk about, why this??"
Sure, but the point is that they should just say that, and the person who raised the issue must then explain why it's worth their time. Maybe there's an important point they're trying to make, maybe not.
The critique is "Taboos probably have a use." I think it's a good faith point. It's not as strong of a critique as "Taboos have purpose {x}" [Maintain ethical standards, promote public safety] or to say "Taboos probably have a use because {y}" [They are in almost every society, some rules should be rules but not laws].
The problem I see is taboos assume the act is always wrong, and preclude consideration for edge cases where it might be the lesser wrong. Consider the incest taboo--yeah, there are very good reasons for this. Should you enter a sexual relationship with a relative? I think society is better off prohibiting this. But what about "What, my wife is actually my sister????" Is forcing them to divorce actually the best answer? (And, yes, it happens. Bump into an unknown sibling, there's a substantial chance you'll fall for them.)
I'd agree- I think the analysis I was referring to believed that analyzing a taboo makes it no longer useful as a shortcut. Guess that didn't come across enough for anyone to offer a refutation.
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.
My impression was that that taboo first got a firm foothold a couple of hundred years later, after the second world war showed what industrialised genocide looks like. How could the fundamental equality of all humans otherwise have been accepted as true and taboo to talk about at the same time as women being denied suffrage until the early 19-hundreds, or eugenics being openly discussed well into the 1930ies?
> 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.
Right. Nohello isn't about not saying hello. It's about not sending a message with nothing but a greeting and leaving the recipient waiting to find out what you want. It's about being efficient and respectful of the recipient's time.
If you're so pathologically "efficient" that you are bothered by reading the word "Hello" in "Hello. Please join the bridge. The site is down.", that's a you problem, not a hello problem.
> 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.
Look at the actual examples they give of what you should say. Everything but the bald assertion is stripped away.
If you're saying the actual proper behavior is a middle ground: I agree! But that's not what the article is saying. (At least, not clearly, which would be its own irony.)
> Look at the actual examples they give of what you should say. Everything but the bald assertion is stripped away.
Right, I think the examples aren't the best. But, around the examples, look at what the author is advocating for:
> to skip social cushioning
> "your feelings about how I might receive this..."
> bears responsibility for their own emotional reaction to its content
> When you spend the first third of your message establishing that you are a nice person who means well
...etc. They're pretty clearly emphasizing the emotional content of messages, rather than informational content.
Then they explicitly say that the intent is to provide relevant information:
> 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.
...and then separate that from emotions:
> But confessing your emotional state and your reasoning process and your extenuating circumstances is not documentation, it is self-absolution
Yes, I agree that the author probably should have been a bit more clear, because people can get upset when it comes to workplace politics/communication, and clarity never hurts. But I'm pretty sure that the intent is what you'd want it to be.
> 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.
You read far too much into my word choice. I think you could substitute any technical profession (I would include everything you mentioned explicitly) for "engineer" and what I wrote would be equivalently true. I just happen to have the most direct experience with engineers, and the original article was about engineers.
It's true of the technical aspects of art too: professional musicians rehearsing, for example. It's less true when you get into the ingantible parts of art, though... taste is inherently personal.
That’s fair! There were a couple comments that used similar language; I didn’t mean to call you out. Yours was the first I saw with it, so I hit reply. Thanks for clarifying.
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.
Totally agree with this! Being "kindly honest" is way better than being "brutally honest". Being honest and direct is important of course. I have often found that delivering constructive criticism in the so-called sandwich manner often obfuscates the message, so delivering it directly is much better. However, being kind to the receiver of the feedback by having empathy for them and supporting them as they process that feedback will help land that message far more effectively than being "brutal" about it.
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.
Unless you are as open to having your mental state altered by the other person as you expect the other person to be to having theirs altered by you, I don't think you're really communicating.
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.
> 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
If you take 'direct' vs. 'indirect' literally, you are right. Everything is somehow indirect, because language tries to represent reality, but isn't identical to reality.
But you are missing the point. The real issue is information density. Indirect communication generally has lower information density: You give examples of various possible interpretations of one phrase, and the more possible interpretations there are, the lower the information density is. The longer the phrase is, the lower the information density. One can come up with a few counter-examples, where for example a very long and very indirect phrase might just have one very unique and direct interpretation, but those are rare. In general, direct communication conveys more information with less words.
Sure, if we want to shift topic from directness to density, but that's not a cultural difference either: all (spoken) languages famously transmit at about 39 bits per second [1]. Specific idioms, especially newer ones, might be a bit more or less information-dense, but there will always be others that make up for it. And if an idiom falls too far below the 39 B/s rate it'll get worn down over time to something shorter.
If you are shortening your communication you are doing it by reducing the information content. In some cultures it's acceptable to spend longer buying bread than in others, so you might take the time to exchange more information with the baker. But that is a (to them, if not to you) valuable interaction that they have chosen to have, filled with information whose exchange is (to them) just as important as the price of bread.
>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.
Not the GP, but I'm an avid reader. One of the books I read (Strunk & White's Elements of Style) had this to say to aspiring writers: "Omit needles words."
I think the point is that some of the extra words OP is complaining about aren't needless. It's on the writer to know their audience, but it's also asking a lot to tune a message in a PR review to the one particular person who demands bluntness, especially if they don't know that person well. If the majority of people in the organization respond positively to a certain style (which may involve some amount of phatic speech), then the person who is "over-writing" here is probably making a good decision.
Once I build rapport with someone, I tend to be more blunt, but still balance that with the fact that other people may be reading the interaction, and I don't want to model a rude communication style.
An organization can choose to promote a very direct approach to feedback (Bridgewater is famous for this), but it requires top-down work to get everyone on the same page, not just expecting one developer to mind-read another.
Nobody is advocating for a rude communication style; the disagreement is over what constitutes rudeness.
Some people/cultures see being blunt or to the point as rude.
Others see beating around the bush, wasting time and hogging the listener's brain space with fill material that serves no purpose other than delaying the actual closure/completion of the thought (including insisting on various rituals, either verbal or, in some cases, physical, such as drinking a cup of tea (or coffee) and not broaching the actual subject until both parties have finished drinking), or perhaps (though I suspect this is less common as an actual motivation than generally supposed) taking pains to respect the imagined feeling of the listener, and possibly most importantly, to reaffirm the social hierarchy, as rude.
Very much so. I started reading adult novels at 7 years old, and by the time I was 12 or so, I could if I was hurrying read 5 or 6 novels a day. I read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time in 5 days at that age. I've reread it again another 4 times or so.
My personal library is somewhere in the region of 5,000 to 7,500 of my favourite books. I estimate that I have read at least twice as many books as I own, and probably more: in the tens of thousands, I'd think.
I am also a professional writer and have been for 30 years. I've had 2 short books published, many hundreds of articles for about 15 different print magazines and professional paid articles on 3 commercial websites.
Currently, I am the Linux and FOSS reporter for the Register:
I knew little of the man. I had to read at least 30,000 words about him in a single morning in order to learn enough about the man to write his obituary. It was hard work.
> When was the last time you read a full length chapter book for fun?
I have about 25 on the go currently. Most recent start was Polostan by Neal Stephenson. I also have 1 print magazine subscription on top of that, but mostly, I read online now, several tens of thousands of words a day every day.
I think it is far to say I am a big and voracious reader.
Why? Do you think I object to excessive verbiage because I struggle through it? No. I can at a push read about 3000 words a minute but I normally cruise along at 1,500 or so. When I see "estimated reading times" on things online, I typically find they are approaching 10x longer than I take.
FWIW I can also read 5 or 6 other languages than English, but I am painfully slow in all of those. Currently I'm reading a copy of Charlie Hebdo I bought at FOSDEM and the new Astérix album. :-)
> Do you think I object to excessive verbiage because I struggle through it?
That was the heart of my question, yes. The only way I could fathom it was to think that maybe some people just found reading generally difficult. The hypothesis being that those few extra words hurt, because reading in general was high effort.
It seems I was very far off the mark, at least in your case. For what it's worth, I've enjoyed several of your recent pieces and found both the Mills and Hoare obituaries to be both informative and empathetic.
Now I wonder if it is sometimes the opposite problem: A skilled writer losing patience when someone less skilled is at the wheel. Others in his thread explored that theory, and it seems they may be onto something.
> Now I wonder if it is sometimes the opposite problem: A skilled writer losing patience when someone less skilled is at the wheel. Others in his thread explored that theory, and it seems they may be onto something.
Could be.
The KISS principle applies in communication as in the rest of life.
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).”
> 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.
> Literally doing what you accuse me of in the same sentence.
Factually incorrect. Did you forget what you wrote in your own comment?
>> Also the undertone of this topic is always “I want you to be blunt to the point of rudeness (so I can be too).”
You are claiming to speak for everyone who supports Crocker's Rules. You are asserting that you can read the minds and motives of the few people you've met who've talked about this and hundreds or thousands of others that you've never met and will never meet. You are engaging in a blatantly bad-faith and indefensible mindset on a mass scale.
I, am not. I merely read your comment and what you wrote, and pointed it out. That's not ascribing false motives, that's just reading comprehension, which is something you appear to lack, given your failure to read the original article, Crocker's Rules, or my comments.
> This article isn’t really about Crocker’s rules. It links to them but rather misunderstands the point.
You failed to correctly characterize (or argue against) either the author's points or Crocker's Rules, so this isn't really relevant.
Factually you ascribed false motives to me because you're offended at the idea that I proposed. You are upset because I said that this is topic is generally broached by people who wish they could be blunt and rude, so you're mischaracterizing both my words and intent.
> You are engaging in a blatantly bad-faith and indefensible mindset on a mass scale.
You could just disagree and say I'm wrong instead of pretending like I'm committing a war crime with a comment on HN. "Mass scale" is some over the top dramatic nonsense.
> You are claiming to speak for everyone who supports Crocker's Rules.
You think I was making a claim that literally, 100% of cases fit into this?
It's poor taste to insult others' reading comprehension. Just in general it's a childish ad hominem. But also if you can't understand nuance and you read basic statements as "literally this applies in 100% of situations", you live in a glass house. (I don't think your house is literally made of glass.)
See also: "BOCTAOE"
> You failed to correctly characterize (or argue against) either the author's points or Crocker's Rules
The very fact that the author is "begging" others to "follow Crocker's rules" in their communication says the author doesn't understand Crocker's rules.
Crockers rules are specifically an obligation to the person operating under Crocker's rules. NOT an obligation to anyone else. No one else is obligated to forgo politeness because the author says the follow Crocker's rules.
"Please follow Crocker's rules when you send me messages!"
"I am dumbass, and I hope you had a great weekend."
> so this isn't really relevant.
Disingenuous nonsense on a discussion forum. "I don't agree with your perspective so it's not relevant."
To be fair, while the motives for falsely claiming that you can read thousands of peoples' minds are pretty limited, there are other motives than just because you're offended. Do you think that you're a psychic, instead?
> because you're offended at the idea that I proposed. You are upset because I said that this is topic is generally broached by people who wish they could be blunt and rude, so you're mischaracterizing both my words and intent.
Still incorrect. I described the words that you wrote in your comments. No amount of (now blatant and intentional) lies will change that. You claim here that you said it is "generally" broached - no, you didn't, you said always, and you know that very well.
> You could just disagree and say I'm wrong instead of pretending like I'm committing a war crime with a comment on HN. "Mass scale" is some over the top dramatic nonsense.
Still lying. You know I'm not pretending you're committing a war crime, and that I used "mass scale" to point out that, as egregious as it is to claim that you can read others' minds and intents, it's even worse to pretend that you can do that for hundreds or thousands of people.
> You think I was making a claim that literally, 100% of cases fit into this?
>> Also the undertone of this topic is always “I want you to be blunt to the point of rudeness (so I can be too).”
Even if you meant 90% of the time (which you very clearly did not say), you're still making the clinically insane claim that you are able to read the minds and intentions of a huge number of people.
> It's poor taste to insult others' reading comprehension.
It's far worse taste to respond to comments without actually reading them first, as you have repeatedly now.
> But also if you can't understand nuance and you read basic statements as "literally this applies in 100% of situations"
Again, let me quote you your own words:
> Also the undertone of this topic is always “I want you to be blunt to the point of rudeness (so I can be too).”
Note the "always". Admit it - you said something insane because you thought you wouldn't get called out on it.
> The very fact that the author is "begging" others to "follow Crocker's rules" in their communication says the author doesn't understand Crocker's rules.
>> so this isn't really relevant.
> Disingenuous nonsense on a discussion forum.
No, it's factually true. If you make an irrelevant response because you're not responding to someone's points, your response is not relevant. This is tautologically true.
> "I don't agree with your perspective so it's not relevant."
Are you one of those people that can't tell the different between opinion and fact/reason? Because it sure seems like it - it doesn't look like you're capable of understanding that, because you badly misunderstood the author's points and argued against a strawman, your response is not relevant. It's not an opinion - it's just fact.
At this point, because it's clear you cannot tell the difference between perspective/opinion and fact/logic, and because you've lied about your own words that are written above, there isn't much of a point to continuing the conversation - if you write more lies, I'll point them out so that future HN readers browsing this thread about Crocker's Rules won't be misled, but I know that I cannot convince someone who is operating emotionally, not intellectually, and is willing to lie about their own words despite them being less than a page above in the same thread.
If I described someone as always smiling, would you suppose this is an assertion that they literally never make a non-smiling facial expression? If I said "The phone calls I receive are always SPAM", would this mean I've literally never received a non-spam call? Do you truly not understand the phrasing here or are you just pretending not to?
> If you make an irrelevant response because you're not responding to someone's points
I have responded thoroughly to your weird nitpicking and I responded directly to your claim that I mischaracterized the author's point by showing how they misunderstand Crocker's rules. You even quoted it but you apparently didn't read it.
You're very self righteous in your indignation, so much so that you would rather repeat the same thing over and over rather than actually converse.
Even if we pretend, for the sake of argument, that "always" doesn't mean "always", and that they didn't mean it like that in the first place and then changed the goalposts when they were called out on it, they're still making an insane claim - either out of malice, or clinical insanity (e.g. you think that you can read others' minds).
> I have responded thoroughly to your weird nitpicking
They very clearly have not. They still haven't admitted to either insanity or malice in their statement
>>> Also the undertone of this topic is always “I want you to be blunt to the point of rudeness (so I can be too).”
Note also the repeated attempts to distract from this wild claim with fallacies, misdirection, and emotional manipulation:
> You're very self righteous in your indignation, so much so that you would rather repeat the same thing over and over rather than actually converse.
...and then, of course, the root of the whole argument was their failure to read and understand either Crocker's Rules or the author's point:
>> 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.
...which is, of course, factually an incorrect understanding or response to either the author or Crocker.
> I responded directly to your claim that I mischaracterized the author's point by showing how they misunderstand Crocker's rules.
And yet again we see that they're incapable of using logic, and are just operating emotionally, because...
> You even quoted it but you apparently didn't read it.
Failure of reading comprehension strikes again - I already responded to this point, and they completely missed it:
> You failed to correctly characterize (or argue against) either the author's points or Crocker's Rules, so this isn't really relevant.
This is factually true. Their comment "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." is wrong and irrelevant regardless of whether they're responding to the author or Crocker.
It does not matter whether the author got Crocker right or not. The objective truth is that this user's arguments are irrelevant to both.
We've already gone over each of these points at least once above, so if we keep looping, this is probably a bot, and I'll just stop responding after another marker for future readers.
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.
> 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.
It absolutely does have relevance to Crocker's Rules. People exchange pleasantries because there's a cultural tendency to treat a direct, to-the-point message/request out of nowhere without the phatic rituals as off-putting and mildly offensive/insensitive.
This is pretty universally understood in most software engineering cultures in the West, which the author (and certainly the vast majority of HN) appear to reside in. It seems like you probably just don't exist in the same culture - but there's nothing wrong with that, you just have to be aware that that's how we do it.
Crocker's rules are about not burying honesty beneath politeness.
Someone can maybe squint real hard and see the word "Hey", in "Hey, the site is down" as politeness obstructing communication. But at that point, I hope the person seeing it this way operates under Crocker's Rules, because I would say they are a moron. There is a world of difference between basic human pleasantries and niceness that actually obscures communication.
Crocker's rules also explicitly state that others are allowed to disregard niceness, not that they are obligated to. Indeed, if you are offended or bothered by someone being polite, then under Crocker's rules, that would be your problem.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> Ignoring others emotions is not a sign of emotional maturity.
I completely agree.
> The inability to empathize with others and make meaningful predictions about how their emotions will affect communications is specifically a lack of emotional maturity.
I completely agree.
> 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.
Yes I did. I am still curious how OP expects that to be received.
> 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.
> Yes I did. I am still curious how OP expects that to be received.
I’m curious why you perceive their statement to be made as if it’s a pronouncement from God and not a simply a statement of their view on the issue.
> I think I agree here too. What do you mean?
I mean that you both responded emotionally and communicated with an emotional appeal. You exaggerated what OP actually said and called it a mandate from God. This isn’t factual engagement. It’s emotional.
It’s not a case of “try harder”. My only point was that emotions run through all human interactions. That’s how it actually is. People very, very frequently make decisions based entirely on emotion and then produce a logical argument post hoc for the decision.
It’s valuable to be aware of how humans actually act.
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.
> 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.
No, abiding by Crocker's rules isn't that you don't take into account other people's feelings. It's that other people don't have to take into account your feelings.
> Note that Crocker's Rules does not mean one is authorized to insult people; it means that other people don't have to worry about whether they are insulting you. Crocker's Rules are a discipline, not a privilege. Furthermore, taking advantage of Crocker's Rules does not imply reciprocity. How could it? Crocker's Rules are something you do for yourself, to maximize information received - not something you grit your teeth over and do as a favor.
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.
> At one point you say, “Nobody reads ‘hope you had a great weekend’ and thinks better of the person who wrote it.” Who is going to read that and think that “nobody” only applies to you?
I argued why I believe this does not a good way of communication in business or professional-focused environment, because as explained, habitual padding tends to train readers to skim, because they learn that the lines often contain little of substance. For people who value directness (which, in my experience, includes many in serious professional settings) this kind of attitude is not appreciated. That said, it is simply my own rationale for preferring a more direct style of communication.
>Maybe you’d benefit from some of the mindset that leads people to write and appreciate useless greetings.
I come from a culture where elaborate politeness and social niceties are not only common but often expected, and I do practice them in the appropriate contexts. However, when the goal is to build something, solve a problem, or exchange ideas efficiently, I prefer a norm I explained, that is, directness and the substance of the message to take over.
As you said yourself, this is very culture dependent.
In my culture, elaborate politeness is NOT expected, and when I first started working with foreigners I had some funnily awkward (awkwardly funny) social interactions where they greeted me with customary "How are you? How was your day" and I started politely but awkwardly going over my day thinking "this is not your damn business".
My point being, if you work in a culture that expects some behaviour, it is necessary to follow it. Breaking the protocol (even by omission) is a signal in itself, and if the signal is understood as "I don't like you" or "I am rude" or "I am better than you" then it's counterproductive. Especially important if you're not close with the person communicating with, so misunderstandings are likely.
The discussion shows just how many different communication styles there are. So many comments about "XYZ is the right way", "ABC is always wrong" or "I did UV to someone who says they like UV and they took offence".
It shows me:
- there are many communication styles and people tend to think their preferred one is obviously right
- people are often unclear on what they actually value in communication (and might like the opposite of what they say they value)
- people seem also to, at times, confuse other people's different communication style for rudeness, indecisiveness or small-mindedness.
So I guess the reasonable policy is to adopt a hybrid approach. Be tolerant of other people's comms style, try to be concise with enough politeness added in that you don't offend people, even if they say they want you to be ruthlessly direct. When you need to, try to steer the conversation towards your preferred style. Maybe "ok, I understand the background, let's try to distill the facts now", or equally "I feel I need more context before we continue, let's slow down and...".
For example, I have worked in a number of medium sized (50-200) companies that were so proud of being flat structured meritocracies, where anyone can say anything directly to their superiors. Every single time it turned out to be BS, higher ups wanted deference and following chains of command. But that sounds less catchy.
> If the payment service went down because a config value was wrong, the incident report should say: the payment service went down because config value X was set to Y when it needed to be set to Z.
The number of junior engineers I have had to coach out of this way of thinking to get the smallest fragment of value out of a postmortem process... dear Lord. I wonder if this person is similarly new to professional collaboration.
The larger personal site is very aesthetically cool, though – make sure you click around if you haven't!
Yeah, I wonder if the author has been in a situation where a brief explanation was taken by a higher up (or a cc'd higher-up x2, or x3) as "It was entirely my fault and I'm withholding details that would further implicate me and giving only the facts that don't."
I've had to work to balance emails like this between "they don't want the nitty gritty, they just want to be satisfied the issue is solved" and "They will definitely want the nitty gritty and think something is up if the details seems suspiciously sparse". Especially if the recipients are technical, and they know that you know that they're technical. what are you hiding, Qaadika? you're usually more verbose than this.
What's the mistake here? Shouldn't an incident report start with this and then continue with an analysis of the process, without too much "internal perspective"?
In my mind, the internal perspective might be useful to jot down when doing the analysis, but is too noisy to be useful to disseminate.
If we accept that any one person can take responsibility for their feelings then it follows that everyone is responsible for their own mind. Otherwise what exactly are we saying? And emotions are complex, especially offence, it is practically impossible to say that something will reliably offend a specific person without trying it and seeing how they react. Even for the reactee. Someone can easily say "whatever happens I won't get offended". But they might get offended anyway and then we're rolling the dice on whether they are vindictive enough to hold a grudge.
People learn that lesson then don't stir the pot without reason. Rather than saying "I don't get offended" it is generally better to prove it and push people for feedback from time to time.
There is also a subtle point here in things like "if the design is wrong, say it is wrong" - how is someone supposed to know if the design is "wrong"? Philosophically it isn't possible for a design to be wrong, the idea is nonsense. Designs have trade-offs and people might or might not like the trade offs. But a design can't be wrong because that implies there was already a right solution that people could deploy. If someone is going to be direct that is also a problem they run in to constantly - they're going to be directly saying things that are harsh and garbled. A lot of humans aren't comfortable being that person, there is a more comfortable style of being clear about observations, guarded about making value judgements from them and associating with like-minded people from the get-go rather than pushing to resolve differences. And spending a lot of time playing social games to work out how to organise all that.
> If we accept that any one person can take responsibility for their feelings then it follows that everyone is responsible for their own mind.
I don't think this follows! People are very different, so something can be genuinely true of a subset without generalising to everyone.
Crocker's Rules definitely wouldn't work for me, but it's explicit in them that they can only be self-invoked. Some people seem genuinely to be very thick-skinned (but easily annoyed by indirection and politeness) and able to 'take responsibility for their own feelings' in this sense. I doubt (m)any of them are truly unoffendable... and one could argue that they should be taking responsibility for their own feelings of frustration triggered by normal politeness... but I assume they know themselves well enough to know that they are better off when people try to be as direct as possible when interacting with them.
Where it breaks down is if/when they treat this as an objectively superior state of being and mode of interaction, and use it as an excuse to be rude to others.
Of course everyone can take responsibility for their emotions. It's simply that many don't. And some that want you to care for their emotions. More to the divide, there are many who won't consent to doing so it letting you not do so. It is also the case that everyone can decide about this.
Everyone says that they value directness, and from what I can tell the vast majority of people actually don't.
For example, I had a job interview a couple years ago where the interviewer showed up fifteen minutes late for a thirty minute interview. Eventually he did show up, and the interview proceeds more or less fine, and near the end he asks if I have any questions. I said "is it common to show up fifteen minutes late for interviews that you schedule? Because it comes off as unprofessional to me".
He started giving me a bunch of excuses about how busy he was and eventually I interject and say "Listen, I don't really care. I'm sure your reasons are valid to you but from my perspective it just looks like you were happy enough to let me waste half the interview just sitting around staring at my watch."
A day later the recruiter tells me that they don't want to move forward. I asked if they gave a reason why and apparently they thought I wasn't a good "culture fit".
I wish I could say I'm above it and that I'm some hyper-stoic who always wants the most direct version of everything, but I'm certainly not immune to wanting some niceties instead of complete blunt directness all the time. I try and be above it, but I'm not.
Mm they didn't really mean /any/ question, and weren't inviting directness. Just like "hi how are you" from a stranger isn't an invitation to respond that your cat just died and your transmission needs replacing
Of course they didn't want to move forward. That's what you had decided/wanted though right? I can't imagine you hoping for any other outcome with that kind of question and follow up?
I'm not going to pretend I'm great at reading social situations, but I think your approach in this story would have annoyed 99% of interviewers, even if they genuinely valued directness. If they'd asked for feedback on the interview process, then sure, they'd be a hypocrite if they claimed to value directness but got mad when you told them honestly that you were bothered by their lateness. But when they ask for questions, they're not inviting criticism, and framing the criticism as a question is always going to come across as passive aggressive. (edit: Or maybe 'snarky' is a better word here, as you did follow it up with a direct criticism, so 'passive aggressive' might not be quite right.)
Fair enough. I wasn't there and this probably depends a lot on your tone and general vibe, the dynamic between you and the interviewer up until then, and so on. I do think it's almost always a risky move, but I think I assumed too much and I apologise for that.
Are you saying that instead of directly pointing out something that really bothered me, I should instead of reported him to someone higher up? Should I have bitched on Glassdoor? Oh, I guess I could have complained to the to recruiter where there is a zero percent chance that my complaint actually gets sent to them.
It’s “rude” in that I embarrassed the person for a minute, but it’s not like I went and tattled to their higher-up, or was out for blood or anything. If they’re going to waste half the interview then they can fucking deal with being embarrassed for a few minutes.
I think it is inappropriate in an interview situation 100%. If you can’t hold your tongue on some slight discomfort or perhaps talk about in a more diplomatic way (eg not singling out the specific person but rather just stating your upset at the interview being delayed) how are you going to react if clients/customers make you uncomfortable on conference calls? Are you going to be tactful and polite, or are you going to be direct and rude to them?
Obviously I don’t know the role you were going for etc. this is just an example, but I think doing this gives a bad impression that goes beyond just whether that specific person was irritated for you calling them on their lateness
No, it really isn’t inappropriate. The listing that the recruiter sent me said that they “value directness”.
If I had shown up fifteen minutes late for the interview they would likely not make an offer, and if they had called me out for being late then no one would call them an asshole.
There is "pointing out something that bothers you" which was the first part of the story. But, the reaction to interviewer who tries to explain himself "Listen, I don't really care. I'm sure your reasons are valid to you but from my perspective it just looks like you were happy enough to let me waste half the interview just sitting around staring at my watch." is an asshole reaction.
And yes, if roles were reverts, the manager saying the same "I dont really care" thing after you are trying to explain yourself would also be an asshole.
Why should him being busy matter to me? For all he knows I am equally or more busy than he is. For all he knows I am skipping my mother’s funeral, or taking the entire day off of work, or turned down a dozen other potential interviews just to make this interview.
I will admit it’s a bit douchey, but why should I just nod my head happily and pretend that his excuses actually matter? Especially when all of them boiled down to “I was really busy”. We’re all busy.
Would you want to work with you? Maybe yes. But if I am making a choice about who to work with, I would prefer someone who has enough empathy and awareness to realize that it's possible that the interviewer might be running behind through no fault of their own. I would extend that to the my team members, and I hope they would in-turn, extend that to me.
You sound to me like someone who sees "please be direct and straight forward" as a free pass to nit-pick every little thing. Like maybe it's your duty to criticize even when it has little to no bearing on future success.
If I showed up late halfway through the interview, I would almost certainly not get an offer, and if the hiring manager called me out on that fact then no one would call that manager an asshole.
I am not “nitpicking every little thing” and I feel like there’s a lot of extrapolation going on there. I do think it’s extremely disrespectful to schedule a meeting and show up very late so that the interviewee doesn’t have time do do the full interview. In fact I think it is categorically more disrespectful than a snarky comment about lateness.
One of the best people I have ever worked with was somebody I interviewed and recommended be hired. She missed her first interview entirely. I was waiting for her to show up, annoyed that she was late, and she called me and said she needed to reschedule. At the time, she was hiking in the greenbelt on a beautiful day. I said, sure, we rescheduled, and she was a huge asset to the team. I kept the details of having to reschedule her interview quiet - because they had no bearing at all on her ability to do a good job.
Have I not established quite thoroughly that I am an outlier in many ways? Also, outliers exist. Also, being an outlier does not automatically equal "incorrect".
I have had hiring managers tell me that, almost verbatim actually, when I forgot about the interview and showed up significantly late.
I was embarrassed and yeah I admit that it wasn’t exactly fun to be called out like that, but I would much rather they say that than for them to pretend everything is fine, let me leave the interview thinking I didn’t annoy them, and then have it be a mystery as to why I am declined.
I felt embarrassed in the moment, and I should feel embarrassed. It is very rude and inconsiderate to not show up to meetings that you agreed to show up for and it signals that you don’t take the other person’s time very seriously.
To be clear, it wasn’t like I was being pedantic to the second; I know Zoom and Google Meet can be finicky so I understand being a minute or two late for a meeting and I generally don’t say anything if they are within the “my fucking microphone isn’t connecting gotta fix it” threshold.
"Culture fit" is an euphemism for "did the interviewer like you?"
If most interviewers don't like you, that's something for you to think about. It's not necessarily bad, if you have a very specific personality that most people find disagreeable, then it's a good idea to look out for companies that cater to your personality, and where you will fit in. But it is something to think about.
"Everyone says that they value directness, and from what I can tell the vast majority of people actually don't."
Well sure, of course we do. We (or at least, a lot of the readers of this who live in a US and similar economic and social system) have learned that it is virtuous and correct to say we value directness. But that's where it stops; it's just a thing that is right to say. Part of the current social interaction protocol. It's then widely understood that many interactions should not be hyper-direct.
What you have observed - people saying they value directness and then not exhibiting it - is the expected behaviour. This isn't a bug.
Because it was. Was probably this person's 10th interview of the day. They probably only need the simplest of infractions to weed someone out given the absurd volume of applications they receive.
> Because [arriving 15 minutes late to a 30-minute interview] was [nothing].
I'd expect over 95% of both interviewers and interviewees to say that arriving 15 minutes late to a 30-minute interview is very much not nothing; it's a serious breach of what is expected – on both sides of the interview.
If you show up late for an interview, no matter which side of the table you're on, you ought to apologize and, if you're more than a few minutes late, have a good explanation. To do anything less signals that you are an unreliable person. And, when you are representing a company, it makes the company look like it's run by people who don't even understand how to do something as simple as show up on time. It suggests that one of the company's unspoken core values is Dysfunction.
If I had shown up fifteen minutes late for the interview then they likely wouldn’t make an offer and they likely would have called it out during the interview. No one seems to call out companies when they do this shit.
They wouldn’t care if I had a really bad day beforehand, and they certainly wouldn’t assume that I had a good excuse for it.
Probably. I would argue that showing up extremely late for an interview that you scheduled is considerably more jerk-ish.
It also wasn’t passive aggressive, or at least it wasn’t intended to be. I actually wanted to know if that was just a thing that was common in the company so I could plan accordingly.
Saying something like "Actually, I felt it was unprofessional and disrespectful to not have the interview start at the agreed-upon time" would also be direct, no? The way it's written sounds way more inflammatory.
Pointing out something that was objectively douchy isn’t “wrong”. Yes I was a little snarky, and maybe I am a “jerk”, but considering that this person was happy to just waste my time like it was nothing I do think he was entitled to a little embarrassment.
“Tit for tat” and “spite” feel like they are very strong words for what amounted to a justified smartass comment.
If I had shown up fifteen minutes late for the interview I wouldn’t have gotten an offer and the interviewer might have made a comment about it during the interview and people generally wouldn’t call them an asshole for it.
The fact that you only want to hire workers who won’t call you out when they feel like they have been disrespected is a great way to breed a team of people who resent you.
Regardless, you kind of proved what I was trying to say. Most people don’t actually want directness. The fact that when I was direct with someone you’re treating it like some mafioso retribution is telling.
This is pretty autistic. I kind of agree, being somewhat on the spectrum myself. But I think the world would be a considerably worse place if everyone abided by such rules.
Some people have an attitude to work resembling “I spend most of my day here, so having enjoyable professional relationships with my coworkers is a major determinant of my quality of life.” And there are other people who have an attitude closer to “it’s my goal to deliver value efficiently and get paid. I’m not here to make friends. Any meaningful human interactions happen outside of work.”
I don’t know enough about autism to know if that’s the right label for the second category. (I’ve had coworkers who identified as autistic who seemed to deeply care about whether I enjoyed working with them.) I think these two types of people can work together productively, but I don’t think they’ll ever totally understand each other.
Reading the article, I also feel that all of his examples are poor communication, both the "courteous" and the "direct" ones. You can communicate clearly and succinctly and also be considerate of the person you're talking to.
The problem is that too many people couch pettiness and personal attacks in the philosophy of "being direct" or "telling it like it is". OP specifically mentions that criticism must be made on technical merits. The people that hand-wave this distinction away are absolutely insufferable.
That's the theory, but there's absolutely normative statements in this piece. For example:
> When you spend the first third of your message establishing that you are a nice person who means well, you are not being considerate but you are making the recipient wade through noise to get to signal. You are training them to skim your messages, which means that when you actually need them to read carefully, they might not. You are demonstrating that you do not trust the relationship enough to just say the thing and you are signaling a level of insecurity that undermines the technical credibility you are trying to establish. Nobody reads "hope you had a great weekend" and thinks better of the person who wrote it, they probably just being trained to take you less seriously in the future, or at worse, if they're evil loving of Crocker's [sic?] like myself, they just think about the couple of seconds of their life they will never get back.
This very much sounds like the author believes that everyone who doesn't abide by these rules - not just him, not just people who've agreed to them, everyone - is deficient in some way. And it's not just a slip - this attitude is pervasive throughout the post.
I love this point as much as I hate it in practice. We all have different preferences and it is more helpful to be clear about ours rather than declare them "correct". The way we expect these differences to be navigated can become oppressive.
… I don't know what your incident reports look like, but if there's anywhere it's normal to optimise for communicative clarity rather than social wheel-greasing, it's an incident report!
How do you figure that the author is “developmentally challenged”? It sounds to me like they are able to handle their insecurities in a more mature and emotionally balanced way than most others.
I agree with the sentiment that gratuitous happy-talk adds noise to what ought to be clear, bottom-line-up-front engineering communications. But the recipients of those communications are people, and most people have feelings. So a good engineer ought to optimize those communications for overall success, and that means treating the intended recipients as if they matter. Some human-level communication is usually beneficial.
So, to use an example from the original post:
> "I hope this is okay to bring up and sorry for the long message, I just wanted to flag that I've been looking at the latency numbers and I'm not totally sure but it seems like there might be an issue with the caching layer?
There’s a lot of noise in this message. It’s noise because it doesn’t communicate useful engineering information, nor does it show you actually care about the recipients.
Here’s the original post’s suggested rewrite:
> The caching layer is causing a 400ms overhead on cold requests. Here's the trace.
This version communicates some of the essential engineering information, but it loses the important information about uncertainty in the diagnosis. It also lacks any useful human-to-human information.
I’d suggest something like this:
> Heads up: It looks like the caching layer is causing a 400ms overhead on cold requests. Here's the trace. Let me know how I can help. Thanks!
My changes are in italics. Breaking them down:
“Heads up” provides engineering context and human-to-human information: You are trying to help the recipients by alerting them to something they care about.
“It looks like” concisely signals that you have a good faith belief in your diagnosis but are not certain.
“Let me know how I can help” makes clear that you share the recipients’ interest in solving the problem and are not just dumping it at their feet and turning your back on them. You and they are on the same team.
“Thanks!” shows your sincere appreciation to the recipients for looking into the issue. It’s a tiny contribution of emotional fuel from you to them to give them a boost after receiving what might be disappointing news.
In sum, strip the noise and concisely communicate what is important, both engineering information and human information.
I agree with your point about human level communication and treating the recipients like they matter. I generally tend to prefer communication that is more on the blunt/direct side, but if there's one thing about communication that I've learned throughout my career, it is that the people who do best are adept at communicating well with a wide variety of people with different communication styles and preferences.
The people who try to force everyone else to fit into a specific bucket of communication style, or who refuse to deviate from their own strict communication preferences no matter the audience, those are the people I see struggle to find success relative to their peers.
I agree it makes sense to specify that it is not certain, by adding "it looks like" (or "it seems like", or other wording that would not be too long; as another comment mentions, "looks" can sometimes be wrong). The other stuff might be unnecessary, although it might depend if it is implied or expected according to the context (in many contexts I would expect it to be unnecessary; another comment mentions how it can even be wrong sometimes).
(Your message is better than the one with a lot of noise, though.)
> “It looks like” concisely signals that you have a good faith belief in your diagnosis but are not certain.
A lot of people never get past this level of sureness, so the signal is lost (or at least compressed). You can ask them for a number from a digital display and they’ll say it “looks like 54”.
One way to rectify the idea that these messages have signal (which I agree with) and what the article says is that it’s declaring bankruptcy on additional context. The extra text has so little value it’s worth removing as a rule.
"seems to be causing" is also an excellent alternative to "it looks like" that doesn't hinge on visual-sensory primacy, and tends to translate slightly less ambiguously across language-familiarity boundaries due to 'seems' having more precise meaning re: uncertainty than 'looks', 'feels', 'sounds'. Or you could abbreviate to "could be" / "may be" / "might be" (non-high certainty), "is probably" (high certainty) if that sort of nuance is your thing. Noteworthy point: it is neurotypical to treat "is" as 100% certain rather than 99.9% certain when someone says it confidently, but as 80% certain rather than 99.9% certain when someone says it uncertainly, based solely on non-verbal nuance; this can be infuriating and I tend to recommend saying "I am certain" at 99.9% in combination with courteous handling of the slight but eternal possibility of being wrong.
"Let me know how I can help" should not be taken for granted as a thing to be offered, though. Some teams have very strict divisions of labor. Some workers (especially anyone whose duties are 'monitor and report' rather than 'creatively solve') are not overtime-exempt and cannot volunteer their time. Some workers (especially anyone who's reached a high-capability tech position from the ground up) are flooded with opportunities to do less of their own job and more of everyone else's and must not preemptively offer their time to an open-ended offer of 'help'. A more focused phrase such as "Let me know if you have questions, need more evidence, etc." provides a layer of defense against that without implicitly denying assistance for help if requested.
"Thanks!" is one of the most mocked request-terminators I've seen in twenty years of business. It is widely abused as "have fun storming the castle, i'm out micdrop" rather than as a sincere expression of gratitude that contains any actual statement of why you're grateful. "Thank you for doing the job the company paid you to do" sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud, even to neurotypicals. Tell people thank you with more than one word if you mean it, and tell them what you're thanking them for, and consider thanking them for what they did rather than lobbing it like a grenade strapped to a problem. If you hand them a problem and they say "got it, I'll look into it", saying "Thanks." to that is completely fine; it serves the exact purpose of courtesy described, and also doubles as a positive-handoff "your plane" reply concluding the problem handoff, so that you can safely mark it as delegated, they can safely assume you didn't miss their message and are continuing to work it, etc.
I feel like this is why the communication medium matters so much to how things are perceived. There is like this extra layer nuance and detail that is critical in email/chat and must be accounted for. Like the "Thanks!" thing. It's darn near impossible to hear the tone of someone's voice in email. So for me, the "Thanks!" ending kinda defaults to sounding like "Ha ha! It's your problem now!" in my head. Which may, or may not be completely wrong.
I'd say I generally agree with this sentiment, but it's important to first build the proper rapport with the recipient. If you show them kindness and respect outside the bounds of technical conversations, they'll be much more likely to assume the best of you when you communicate straight-forwardly over technical matters.
You also should take care to avoid crossing the line into just being a jerk. This type of thinking is also often used by people who are simply arrogant and rude and are patting themselves on the back for being that way in the name of "directness" or "efficiency".
Look man, people are going to talk they way they talk. Just let them do it and deal with it for God's sake.
This reminds me of a front-page post a little while ago where someone wrote how much it stressed them out when people routinely apologized for delayed responses. Get over it.
I also sometimes wonder if folks writing these articles have had to work closely with people from culturally different places. I've had coworkers that literally could not be direct if their life depended on it for that reason, and I learned to deal with it.
I find it funny that the post promotes stripping useless information and yet a ton of the most useful information in those examples is placed in the skippable part.
Your coworkers are under too high a load, documentation is faulty, chain of communication is breaking down, your coworker lacks expertise in something.
All of those are calls to action!!
And no, you can’t tell the other person to “just communicate if it’s actionable” because they might not realise it. There’s lack of seniority, there’s tunnel vision…
As with everything, I think there is an appropriate middle ground here. There is definitely too much beating around the bush in a lot of professional work, but some of that is actually useful and even good. Context doesn't always matter, but sometimes it does. Manners aren't always important, but sometimes they are.
A proper balance of direct and indirect is the appropriate tack to take.
I personally vastly prefer directness when I’m spoken to - but it’s important to recognize that most people do not have the emotional conditioning to handle that.
This is not something that will change within our lifetimes. Learn soft skills, learn how to be indirect. You don’t have to be as verbose with it as some of the examples in this article.
“Gassing them up”, “Letting them down gently”, “Little white lies”, etc - these are all examples of how benign emotional manipulation is essentially the crux of pleasant social interaction in most of the Western world.
It’s not my personal preference but it works because most people have unhandled insecurities.
Coming from a former production manager, communication takes style and you have to meet people where they are at. If they're at "Crocker's Rules," awesome! That takes 25 to 50% of the work out of the writing. They could be at "my best work was just trashed and I'm ready to quit," to which you could slow your roll and work through the crisis. Keep adding to your comm tools and you won't need one-size-fits-all theories.
When I worked a Radboud University in the Netherlands for a summer, they were definitely more direct than I was used to, and kept work more work-focused. But they also combined that with a culture of quitting on time, and going out to socialize a bit before dinner, which I think was vital to sustain interpersonal connections.
I liked that style a lot, but Americans are very bad about quitting on time, which necessitates more socialization at work itself.
Probably. I'm from the US, and I know a few Dutch people, and I find their approach to direct negative feedback off-putting to the point of feeling rude, even when knowing what to expect from them. (I'm sure they find my communication style long-winded, frustrating, and a waste of their time.)
It's a cultural thing, to be sure, and what you grew up with and are used to tends to dominate how you feel about things.
IMHO the Dutch are more direct for the same reason they are less sensitive to authority and approach their superiors as equals.
Netherlands effectively being a River Delta, there always was the threat of water, a force greater than anyone. IOW if a flood comes, both the king and the peasant start digging.
This is completely different from neighboring countries UK and Germany, which both traditionally had strong sense of hierarchy and not contradicting the master.
> IOW if a flood comes, both the king and the peasant start digging.
By the same reasoning, India, Bangladesh and China — all ancient civilizations threatened by great rivers — should have developed similar egalitarian cultures but the reality is the polar opposite.
Maybe something as complex as human civilizations can't be the result of just one geographical feature.
India and China are huge countries with very small percentage river deltas. Not comparable by any means. Bangladesh in a very young country that inherited it’s culture from India. I’m not an anthropologist, but sorry, I don’t agree there is any likeness with these countries.
If you have an other theory about the Dutch culture and why it is so different from it’s neighbors, I happy to hear.
You are violating the rule of the principle in saying this. :-)
(Yes, I am aware it does not apply here.)
It is EXTREMELY US-centric and frankly as a Brit who lived and worked in Central Europe and was previously engaged to a Norwegian, I find Crocker's rules laughable.
How it looks to me is:
"Use European manners with me. Don't waste your words or my time. Shut up and get on with it."
Asking (begging?) people to communicate with you in a certain way because you think it is depriving you of your attention(time?) is _much_ more selfish because you are depriving people of the opportunity to control how they are perceived.
How and what people think of me is extremely important to me. I want to be perceived as someone who is effective _and_ pleasant to work with. Changing my voice to suit your inability to summarize and interpret the ideas being communicated is selfish and antisocial behavior.
You are not a being of pure logic. The way I say something to you _will_ effect your perception of me AND the topic at hand.
> Politeness has a place, but I beg you put clarity first.
Having conversations with little-to-no noise as possible has a place, but I beg you to consider that the person conversing with you has a baseline level of empathy and ego and is not a p-zombie.
Wanting to be seen a certain way is just as (if not more) important than the extremely minor distress you feel by having to read some extra words.
"I want to be perceived as someone who is effective _and_ pleasant to work with."
That seems like a good reason to adapt your communication to your audience. If x finds preamble unpleasant, but you use unnecessary preamble when communicating with x, that won't help you be perceived as pleasant to work with.
> If x finds preamble unpleasant, but you use unnecessary preamble when communicating with x, that won't help you be perceived as pleasant to work with.
Absolutely! But OP isn't suggesting preamble is unpleasant, they are saying there is little or even no value and to remove it altogether.
Even if OP did in fact mean to suggest this when speaking to them directly, it is unbelievably selfish to ask (let alone _beg_) someone to eschew their voice just so you don't have to read a few more words and "waste calories" to gather the information they believe is important.
The pleasantries and preambles and hollow words _are_ important. People might be adding them without having deep thoughts on them to the point where they explicitly include them, but they want to signal to you that they consider your humanity. That signal isn't noise, it's a very minute sign of camaraderie. If OP doesn't value that signal, that's fine, but pretending it's noise is antisocial.
Oooh this is good! So - I agree with part of this.
When a conversational partner chooses to communicate a certain way because of how they want to be perceived, they are living out their values. And I admire that, and I think it is an important component of a healthy organization.
But, if you would, allow me to describe the distress I feel when I have to take in "extra words". Because I personally do not feel it as extremely minor.
My mind operates almost exclusively on language, mostly in text form. I do not absorb input in paragraphs with overarching or underlying emotional content. I don't even absorb it in sentences. I process language word by word - and when reading code it's character by character. Each chunk I take as input explodes into hundreds of possibilities of meaning that each must be thought about in turn, and then dismissed as probably not what the person meant. Some of these are quite funny, and if you are one of the dozen or so people close to me, I might even share them out loud hoping for a laugh. In a real-time conversation, this has to happen in milliseconds. It never turns off - the language parser/analyzer occupies a large chunk of my brain's processing continuously, even when I wish it didn't. If I am under some stress - even normal everyday work stress, and I feel like I need to force myself to process even more words, when they are not hyper-relevant to the stressful situation at-hand, I often find that I have not enough capacity left for managing my emotional state. Fear, uncertainty, risk evaluation all get heightened. Fight-or-flight can kick in too. What if the time I just spent socializing with this person and managing their emotional needs too puts the project over-budget? What if I loose my place on this team because of that? Depending on lots of things, this can either spiral into questioning my very existence and place in the universe, or it can fizzle out and you'd never even notice it.
So just be careful when you evaluate how distressing something is to another person. Unless you know them quite well, you might not have the clearest picture.
Given that you literally started your response with a pleasant agreement and affirmation on my point makes feel like you are arguing this in bad faith, but if statements like, "how was your weekend" included in an ask cause you distress then you are so maladapt to society to the point that you should have close to zero expectations for others to accommodate your needs in public spaces such as a work environment. You almost exclusively have the responsibility to regulate your emotions or not expose yourself to situations where people might include a hollow inquiry into your weekend in their written communications.
Asking people not to include minor pleasantries in their written communication isn't a "reasonable" request for anything larger than a small group of people.
There's nothing wrong in being nice and some chit-chat.
Any kind of work, well most kinds of work, are about people and relationships.
Building something with people when people can't relate to one another is quite hard.
I've been wrong enough times to make me want to preface anything I think is wrong at work by something along the lines of "Am I misunderstanding this or are you doing x, because I think that will clash with y". let them decide if it's worth looking at or not - I've been right enough times that they will want to.
> you are making the recipient wade through noise to get to signal
Because we all know that human beings are actually computers in disguise, or radio receivers, and everything that matters is "perfect", "unpolluted" transmission of messages. :shrug:
Seems very vulcan. Works with vulcans and to some extent vulcan wannabees. Words have meaning, and how we express ourselves through our words is how we lead and share knowledge. There is nothing wrong with being honest, but honesty without love and care is brutality.
I see your point, and think one of the merits in OP's argument is precisely what you're saying: words have meaning, and saying something like "I think that X is probably the case" when you're virtually certain that X is the case dilutes the meaning of words.
That said, I think throughout the post OP is mixing different dimensions of communicatiom together in a way that confuses the conversation - namely conciseness, directness, and explicitness - which while often overlapping aren't exactly the same.
I'm a big fan of nohello.club but this is way too far, if nothing else statements like "I'm not sure if I'm missing something here and sorry if this is a dumb question but" communicate something of actual value, a confidence level. Yeah the long rambly hellos can be annoying but surely the time you've spent skimming though them for your entire life can't be more than the time spent writing and posting this blog?
> Anyone is allowed to call you a moron and claim to be doing you a favor. (Which, in point of fact, they would be. One of the big problems with this culture is that everyone's afraid to tell you you're wrong
Absurd. You can point out how and why someone is wrong without insulting them by calling them a moron. Telling someone they're a moron is only stating your personal opinion in an offensive way, without any useful proof.
It bothers me that the article seems imply there is only minimal truth and wasting a ton of time.
> What it means in practice is that your colleague can write "this approach is wrong, here's why" instead of "hey, hope you're doing well, I had some time to look at your PR and I just wanted to shared a few small thoughts, please take these as just one perspective, and of course you know the codebase better than I do, but I was wondering if maybe we could potentially consider [useful thing here]" and then bury the actual point six paragraphs deep. Both messages contain the same information, however one of them respects time.
There's a LARGE grey area between those two. It's entirely possible to value someone's emotions _and_ not waste a bunch of time.
And yes, other people's emotional reactions to what you say _should_ matter to you. Because 1) empathy matters and 2) you need to continue working with those people. It's a pretty widely held belief that the people are say "I'm not being mean, I'm just stating the truth; I'm a straight shooter" and, in fact, just jerks.
I feel like the author is either embellishing the examples of frivolous communication they give or they work with some absolute headcases.
On my team we all trust each other to be fairly direct. On the flip side, “softening” a remark can signal to the recipient that you’re open minded to other solutions. “We should do X.” and “how would you feel about doing X?” accomplish the same thing but the second one fosters more psychologically safe discussion in my opinion.
While I agree with the sentiment for the effect its adherents want to have, but...
Why not just
"Communicate clearly"?
- Don't add fluff
- write as plainly as possible
- write as precisely as is reasonable
- Only make reasonable assumptions about the reader
- Do your best to anticipate ambiguity and proactively disambiguate. (Because your readers may assume that if they don't understand you, what you wrote isn't for them.)
- Don't be selfish or self-centered; pay attention to the other humans because a significant amount of communication happens in nuance no matter how hard we try to minimize it.
This is a false dichotomy between spending the first third of your message on niceties and being maximally blunt. I don't agree that you do not owe other people a modicum of consideration about their emotional state.
I advocate a middle ground and also empathy and curiosity. I think you can keep in mind that you might be wrong and treat people with respect without wasting their time. Something like "please check these lines/this function/whatever again. I think it will have such and such an effect. I did this test, here's the output". Seems fine to me.
>So a person receiving a message bears responsibility for their own emotional reaction to its content. If someone tells you your code is wrong, your emotional response to that is your problem to manage, not theirs to preemptively defuse.
Our emotions are ultimately our own problem, but you are sorely mistaken if you think the emotions of others can't cause you major problems. There is some merit to keeping social chatter to a minimum in important communication channels, and not being personal. But if you're just gonna try to steam roll everyone else with your opinion, and insult them and their work directly under the pretense of being "objective" then you are going to have a hard time. It usually doesn't even work if you are in a management position, because subordinates will tend to undermine such a manager (if they even stay).
> Last week I had an argument with my Mother of which I was righteous and she was in error. In the end, I managed to convince her of my points. She accepted them. But then she said, “Okay, what about mercy?”. She told me then about a man from town who once had a serious argument with his distant brother. Time passed. And when he finally saw him, he chose to forgive everything. That story stayed with me. After the discussion was over and the house grew quiet, I began thinking about moments in my life, times when I insisted on being right, when I held onto pride, when I could have been softer but wasn’t. And I cried.
You can communicate like this and have it be effective if you have an established good relationship with the recipient. That’s why team cohesiveness is important.
Context of whom you are communicating with is also important. That’s the trade off of approaches like these rules. In some situations they are fine. In others not so much.
I don’t agree - the type of communication between certain members makes a team harder for everyone to join. You end up with tribal knowledge to the extreme if you communicate like this. It’s why it is unbelievably bad advice - it claims it respects a listener’s time yet creates an environment where the majority won’t listen.
> You end up with tribal knowledge to the extreme if you communicate like this.
Wait, what? How does a team habit of bluntly stating facts result in "tribal knowledge"? If anything it should be the opposite. The approach in the article has problems but I don't believe that's one of them.
Yes, in particular emotional trust is key. Maybe a few people can just declare their own emotional reactions away and have that stick, but you can't ask that of other people. We're still just apes. So if you want brief, clear communication, you need people to actually believe in their guts that when you tell them something they did is broken, it's not a personal attack.
There is also a middle ground. You don’t have to prepend your message with several sentences of fluff, but asking a question instead of stating your message can be much better receives. Just stating facts may sound like an accusation and especially if your analysis is not correct it makes your message poorly received.
> I personally value directness, so when someone communicates with me in that way, it does influence how I perceive them, even subconsciously. I would also argue that this effect happens to most people, including those who aren’t aware of Crocker’s Rules or don’t particularly care about them.
When someone is overly direct with me I take it as them being upset or confrontational. So I suppose it does influence how I perceive them.
Honestly this is just indicative of a lack of social skills. The "social cushioning" actually has a purpose in that it provides context around the discussion so that neither party gets the wrong idea about the state of mind of the other person. The choice to either engage or not in social niceties is a way of communicating intent. The author complains about a lack of signal, but being completely direct excludes far more.
> Nobody reads "hope you had a great weekend" and thinks better of the person who wrote it, they probably just being trained to take you less seriously in the future, or at worse, if they're evil loving of Crocker's like myself, they just think about the couple of seconds of their life they will never get back.
Wtf? Some people do actually appreciate that if it's genuine. And it often is. I wish the cashier a good day, should I just stay silent and shove my money in their face in order to reduce the signal to noise ratio? Do these people socialise with others on a regular basis?
Like it or not, in many places amongst many peoples, beginning a conversation with zero social niceties or couching carries a negative message that makes people simply avoid interacting with that self-styled hyper-efficient colleague.
Something I noticed when working for a company that claimed to "value honesty over fear of offending someone else" is that they are still very selective of what you are allowed to say. Can't make fun of the giant American flag right as you walk in the door, that's unpatriotic. And don't mention any of the misdealings of past or current investors.
If you're running your open source project or other hobby endeavor, you can do it however you want. People will either adapt to your style or leave. The same, with some caveats, applies to running your own company (the caveats being lawsuits and needless drama if you take it too far).
But if you're a line employee for a corporation, this is the wrong approach, for two reasons. First, you will encounter many people who misinterpret directness as hostility, simply because your feelings toward another person are hard to convey in a chat message unless you include all that social-glue small talk. And if people on average think you're a jerk, they will either avoid you or reflexively push back.
But second... you're not that brilliant. Every now and then, the thing you think is wrong isn't actually wrong, you just don't understand why your solution was rejected beforehand. Maybe there are business requirements you don't know about, maybe things break in a different way if you make the change. Asking "hey, help me understand why this thing is the way it is" is often a better opener than "yo dude, your thing is broken, here's what you need to do, fix it now".
“You are demonstrating that you do not trust the relationship enough”
This is entirely rational when a relationship is not strong, and a misstep could cause it to sour in a way not easily remedied. If I have to work with you, and can’t fire you, then I don’t want to foul the nest.
As my coworkers get to know me, they will drop the unnecessary politeness automatically, according to Zipf’s law. They will find I react well to straightforward communication once we have established trust.
I agree to a certain point, but I think about it in different terms – some people want to avoid any form of disagreement in order to maintain a kind of politeness, but I want to work on a team where people care enough to disagree with each other if something is wrong: https://joshduff.com/2024-07-18-communication-culture.html
It's easy to win an argument when you get to construct both sides. You can easily be direct and to the point without being brash.
You could, also, be wrong or misinformed, so I don't see the big deal about "Hey -- the latency numbers look pretty heavy. Should they be in the 400s?" or "I don't believe this is the best approach, we'll get issues with XYZ".
I'm English and have been living in Finland for decades. This is a very Finnish thing in the workplace and I love it. Now and again we will get some new "foreign guy" and it reminds me that some cultures (not all) are following these over polite, social formatting rules. It's a bit annoying, but they eventually assimilate :P
Author has a point that some people take it too far but he's losing forest for trees.
People are responsible for their emotional responses. But you also will be impacted by their reaction. It's unrealistic to assume that people will always act unemotional - they are not Spocks. It makes sense to do some padding / emotional prework. If you don't you will end up actually spending MORE time getting what you want.
Example: you are giving feedback to a peer
Direct: this is a poor user experience. Our customers tell us they want xyz, but this experience is doing the opposite. Can you change it?
Padded: hey can I share some feedback on this experience? (Yes) ok our customers tell us they want xyz, but the experience seems to be doing the opposite. Can you help me understand?
Most people would feel more defensive and closed with the first approach than the second, which will make it less likely they will want to help, listen to you, or take you seriously. They'll just be focused on defending themselves. Whereas with the second, you can start to have an actual discussion.
And it's not just the opener, it's throughout.
Words have power. Two sentences can mean the same thing but can lead to different reactions from people.
Or you might not mention something that significantly influences how something is interpreted.
I just gave this feedback yesterday to a team member. The problem was in a presentation she presented a strong conclusion based on a shaky methodology and people tore into it. She basically was attributing an effect to a change pre/post, not with a holdout.
Her underlying data was sound, she had diligently collected the timing of events and such, but she didn't realize how pre/post methodology could be perceived as shaky.
The whole thing could have been avoided had she said something like "we didn't have a hold out, and all of this effect likely isn't from the cause, but directionally there's smoke - our campaigns performed x before, and y after. So this is worth testing to help validate this hypothesis"
Now their message goes from
"This big bad thing happened so I'm going to fix it" to "I don't know exactly what happened, but there's one factor that directionally had an impact so I'm going to test it to validate and can scale from there".
Both essentially say the same thing: there's an opportunity for upside and that's why this is worth testing. But the reaction will be different, so it behooves all of us to be mindful of that.
I actually thought this was going to be an article about talking with an AI, i.e., something with no feelings, not about interacting with other human beings. Treating all social cushioning as useless noise is simplistic. Communication between humans is not the same as communication with a compiler. The problem is verbosity, and lack of clarity, not politness. Those are different things
I'd love to say that I value directness, but I frankly just kinda don't, for the most part. I don't want people to overly obfuscate what they are saying or beat around the bush, but... I have feelings. Often my feelings aren't rational. Often I have feelings about things when I should be more detached. But that's just how I am.
I don't want someone to come up to me and say, "Your code is wrong; you should have done ABC". I want them to say "Hey, I ran into a problem with your code. I think here on line 123 you meant to do ABC but you did XYZ by accident. What do you think?"
I'm not a dispassionate, disinterested observer. I do have some attachment to the code I write. I know -- and admire -- people who don't, but I'm just not one of them. I like it when someone is polite when they point out my mistakes.
> I don't want someone to come up to me and say, "Your code is wrong; you should have done ABC". I want them to say "Hey, I ran into a problem with your code. I think here on line 123 you meant to do ABC but you did XYZ by accident. What do you think?"
It's also a sign of good faith and tentative analysis since while that example sounds cut and dry sometimes context/details can be overlooked even those familiar with something.
Even in the article while the headline and main text suggest they'd be happy with bluntness to the point of rudeness the actual full examples at the end show the language used is merely succinct while still being helpful, with the second example also substituting the more direct 'you' for the diffused 'we'.
This isn't how humans communicate. We're not robots (or LLMs, for that matter). Embrace the small talk. And when things are serious, trust that we'll naturally skip the small talk and speak urgently.
"Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best." - Robert Heinlein
There's also the opposite end, where people who randomly shout explicitives or argue in bad faith seek refuge in arguing that it's just Crocker's Rules.
I hate hello-how-are-you-then-wait-before-asking messages as much as the next autistic programmer, but both examples in the "more examples" section still kinda read like an asshole, because they present as fact things that often either aren't, or you couldn't be absolutely sure of it.
For instance:
> "The caching layer is causing a 400ms overhead on cold requests. Here's the trace."
Cool, but how do you know that? Are you sure you're interpreting the trace correctly? How many measurements have you done? Sure that there isn't a historic reason why the caching layer behaves in this way, or a conflicting requirement that lead to choosing this latency over some other, worse consequence?
In the same way:
> "The current error handling swallows exceptions silently, which is making debugging hell. We should propagate errors to the caller"
Agree in principle, but did you check git blame to see if there was a rationale? Or asked someone else? How much change would this require? Could it break consumers of our code?
Granted, the "polite" messages didn't care any of this information either, but at least they didn't almost preemptively shut down the conversation by laying down what is at best an well informed guess and at worse purely personal opinion as if it's irrefutable truth.
Perhaps instead of debating whether to be (too?) polite or direct, it's better to focus on providing as much information as you can, anticipate follow up questions, and close with clear actionable next steps, something which is also missing from both versions of the messages.
"Well, those are hypothetical examples" cool, another evidence that we're all talking out of our asses about the sex of the angels, here. Maybe if the author didn't try so much to characterize themselves as perfectly infallible information delivery machine, then I wouldn't have nit-picked so much their half-assed hypotheticals.
There are better and worse societies in this matter.
I'm glad I live in a society where it is acceptable for a bartender to just bluntly ask "what do you want?" without all the pointless chitchat. Or for me to go to my boss and tell him "there is a problem with X, we should do Y, even if you earlier said Y is bad.".
In these times of heavy LLM use and the characteristic verboseness of their output, someone following Crocker's Rules might also be perceived as more human.
My best professional relationships are between people who are confident enough to take direct feedback and appreciate it rather than resent it.
However, my worst professional relationships are with people who will rebuke your feedback whether you Crocker it or not. If you're direct, they'll say you should have been more diplomatic about it, but if you're diplomatic, they'll say you're being dishonest and should have been direct. There is no right way to approach it, these people will always find a way to criticize the delivery, and to delegitimize the feedback because of it.
This is why I love Boston: everyone here, at least in public, operates by Crocker’s Rules.
Blocking the whole escalator at rush hour? “ONE SIDE, ASSHOLE” while someone pushes them aside and moves up.
Shoving past exiting riders on the T rather than letting them off first? “LET US EXIT, ASSHOLE” as they’re shoulder-checked.
SUV or Monster Truck in the compact car spaces? “CAN’T YOU READ, ASSHOLE” as the tiny car beside them deliberately flings their door open into their bodywork.
I love it. Fastest I’ve ever adapted to a new city thanks to the glut of direct feedback. Haven’t been called an asshole in a decade.
—-
Humor aside, yeah hi I am one of those people who thrive on the sort of direct feedback Crocker’s Rules permit, because context switching sucks and the “wind up” of flowery communication ratchets my OCD into outright anxiety as it tries to pick out every possible level of nuance, tone, intent, and outcome.
If I fucked up, man, just tell me how and show me how I can do better next time. That’s all I need. I don’t need a weighted blanket and hot tea’s worth of communication coziness, I just need actionable feedback so I can apologize, fix it, and get back to work.
I find that context has a strong affect on how I decide to communicate. How I respond to communication in a professional setting, both emotionally as well as practically, depends on whether the message is an asynchronous medium like email, or a fully synchronous medium like a face to face meeting in person. It depends on what I'm doing in the moment, what I have been doing recently, and what I will be doing in the near future. It depends on who is communicating to me, their role within the organization, how their role relates to mine, whether it is one-to-one, or one-to-many, or many-to-many. And a whole host of other contextual things, some even subconscious.
There are times when I become very tilted if I feel like someone else is not respecting my time. There are other times when I become similarly frustrated if I feel like someone else is not allowing enough time to discuss something important, or if they seem like they are being dismissive of a topic I care about.
My own emotional response to communication is another input I can use to evaluate reality. My emotions are indicators of certain things, but they are not straightforward, flashing neon signs that explain exactly what's going on in clear and simple terms. The gut thoughts need to be combined with the brain thoughts for a more complete picture, and that increases uncertainty.
The situation also matters. If I am debugging a problem in production that is costing the organization, and therefore me, a lot of money, most of my focus is going to be dedicated to finding and fixing the problem. If you interrupt that with "how was your weekend?" you can probably expect me to be like, "what is wrong with you? can't you see this plane is on fire?". This is my emotional reaction. My rational reaction is - if you aren't helping, you are in the way. This reaction is due 100% to the way I was brought up - when I wasn't helping I WAS in the way, and I would be asked by my parents step aside, watch and learn. And that was the right thing to do because it improved safety and lowered risk.
My point is, there is an infinite pool of influences that contribute to the way people choose to communicate. And the way someone chooses to communicate is not always 100% under their conscious control - some of it is instinct, more like a reflex.
I very much value clear and straight-forward communication that respects everyone's time - in the right context. And my own expectations of this kind of communication has damaged my relationships on numerous occasions as well.
I also very much value the creative process of talking things through - in the right context. I also tend to find this draining. If there is too much of it all at once, I have to recharge somehow.
Your comment declares your opinion without explanation, and so lacks substance and is unpersuasive as written. More information would help HN readers evaluate your claims fairly rather than dismiss you. In specific, I’d love to hear your views on these questions so I can give you serious consideration:
> This is a recipe for disaster.
What about Crocker’s Rules, and/or this post’s advice to follow them, do you consider a recipe for disaster?
> Please don’t follow Crocker’s Rules;
What outcome are you hoping will result from granting your request? Do you have personal experiences with Crocker’s Rules underpinning this advice? Do you tend to experience social discomfort typically, atypically, or infrequently / never?
> just get better at communicating than the person who wrote this
Other than the presumed adherence to Crocker’s Rules in writing this, which is addressed by the questions above, do you have other criticisms of their writing to present? What communication ideals do you consider as better models than Crocker’s Rules? Do you consider there to exist appropriate circumstances for Crocker’s Rules?
This post, and the pithier original, is absolutely astonishing to me as a Brit who has lived and worked in Europe all my adult life.
Now I think I see why some American-dominated FOSS communities object to my writing, and why I get hatemail, blogs and comments attacking me online, and entire threads of abuse here on HN. A light has dawned. I am not planning to change, though. Deal with it.
What it is saying in pointlessly flowery language is: "Please just be direct."
Spelled out: "cut the crap, don't waste my time and your words. Say what you mean."
In England, where there is a strong north/south cultural divide, being very direct is seen as a stereotypically Northern attribute. In the south, especially the south-east (around the capital), people are more flowery.
I'm from Lancashire, although I left young. Half my family is Irish.
In my culture, speaking directly is seen as a virtue. It's a good thing. Burying your message in pointless verbiage is not polite: it's wasting time. We'd call it a "load of hot air".
The expression is embedded in the title of this book:
The author was from Newcastle, in the heard of the north-east.
I regard being blunt and direct as respectful. It implies: "I think you are an adult. I appreciate that your time is valuable, so I will not waste it."
I think this is the default cultural position of where I'm from.
Blather, hot air, floweriness, excess verbiage: this is the stuff of professional liars, like salespeople and politicians. If someone wraps how they speak in layers of pointless drivel it means they are trying to hide what they have to say, and if they fell the need to do that, you should not trust what they say, and indeed, trust them.
I am shocked and amazed that there needs to be a phrase for this in American discourse. I am nearly 60 and I never knew.
I spent 3 a lot of time for 2 years in Norway, where this is normal: Norwegians are even more blunt than Northern Brits. I liked it a lot.
(I recently did a very brief interview with a Norwegian senior civil servant for work and he was full of praise for my Norwegian.) I like the people, I like the place, I like the manners.
What a strange post... The linked sl4 source (http://sl4.org/crocker.html) is short enough it could have been quoted in full. It's Yudkowsky's version, I think this is the first I'm hearing via jandrog's comment that it's not exactly faithful to the original (which I presume originated on an extropian mailing list). On the SL4 mailing list, people would sometimes join and note that they operated under the rules. Stuart Armstrong had an aside to such a declaration once:
"I'm not convinced that Crocker's rules are particularly useful
(rephrasing the same idea to make it more polite doesn't lose
anything, can be more convincing to the target, and will often
generate more insights in yourself than a curt dismissal), but it's up
to everyone to choose their approach."
I think that aside is part of the same strangeness and confusion as this post. Operating under the rules is something you do for yourself -- the "begging" that you're doing to other people is asking them to communicate to you in a manner that is optimized for information, not for being nice. The problem isn't necessarily that people dance around the issues (though that can and often is a problem), the problem is that they simply won't communicate the issues or other information in the first place, and so leave such out, especially if they can't figure out a nice way to say it. Also, if you are writing for someone who is operating under the rules, for you to respect their wishes that doesn't mean you have to be rude or omit politeness or be blunt, it just means you should include all the information you want to say, and not worry about it not being phrased nicely, though of course you can phrase things how you please.
To beg others to follow Crocker's rules is basically saying "I am tired of having to use delicate language and sometimes having to avoid talking about things for you, can't you just grow up and let me be lazy and direct and sometimes rude as I tell you everything I have to say?" There are more sensitive ways to make such requests (and ruder ones too), it's probably better to use such methods if you want people to adopt your preferences in receiving information. It's also important to ask if people want certain information in the first place -- I asked a departing intern once (who sadly ended up not being very strong, at least compared to most interns our team had) if they would like some more candid feedback from me before they left, and they declined. That's fine. I think it's usually better to lead by example and just ask people to be direct if you notice them communicating to you in overly sensitive ways and perhaps leaving important things out, and link them to Crocker's rules if you want. Often the rules aren't needed and you can just create a direct and information-rich culture to begin with, or in specific circumstances (e.g. code reviews) use short hand symbols like "Nit: " or "Blocker: " that compress all the niceties you'd otherwise be encouraged to say. When someone new joins, they can read the room, but pay attention if some people express things like "I wish people were nicer here". Maybe they're a snowflake who needs to grow up, or maybe your environment is just toxic and so unpleasant and full of assholes that it gets in the way of productive work. Again, Crocker's rules is about receiving information independent of nice/rude presentation, it doesn't require rudeness or even directness or bluntness since none of those are automatically implied by efficient communication. (Efficient communication optimized for information is not just a character count.)
A personal example from 12 years ago: after I was rejected after an onsite job interview, with such rejections notoriously (and for sound legal reasons) omitting many details about the precise whys for the rejection, I invoked Crocker's rules in my request for further feedback and actually received some more useful information than the initial rejection. "The particular role ... required more experience ... There was also the sense that the manner in which you had answered questions came off a bit rough around the edges ... We tend to look for engineers who are very curious, passionate, and large drive/motivation to learn more - it seemed we didn't get those senses from you." The last bit especially was kind of an oof, but it was certainly useful feedback that going forward I, believing myself to actually be curious and wanting to learn more (passion has always been a problem though), would need to make more efforts to show those traits.
“My quirky autism excuses me being an asshole” is how most of this reads. “Maximally direct” people need to learn how to mask better, and if it costs them too much then they’re not suited for professional work anyway.
Being direct isn’t being an asshole. Sprinkling random compliments and self-deprecating comments into useful feedback in a professional environment is disrespectful of time.
I’m convinced that the root cause is people are afraid to be wrong. Either they’re fearful of being fired, or think people will respect them less if they admit not knowing; the result is that everyone dances around objectivity.
I don’t care if you make an honest mistake. Hell, I don’t even care if you make a careless mistake, as long as you fix yourself. Everyone messes up - it’s how you act afterwards that matters.
> I don’t care if you make an honest mistake. Hell, I don’t even care if you make a careless mistake, as long as you fix yourself. Everyone messes up - it’s how you act afterwards that matters.
You're not the one in control of their employment status and workplace reputation.
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!
> the subject is the code/system/product/organisation, which has no feelings and hence can't be offended
This is like saying that telling someone their artwork sucks is not offensive because "the artwork has no feelings."
Someone's artwork _should_ be possible to (negatively) criticise. Of course, just saying "it sucks" is not constructive or helpful.
You can definitely hurt someone's feeling with unconstructive criticism of thier art. However, pointing out areas to improve should not be too painful to the artist, as they can make newer, better works.
I suppose a difficuly can arise if people get too attached to things they make (art, code, writing, whatever) and don't see any one thing as just a step on the road to even better things.
I think my roundabout point is that companies, code, policies, etc aren't just "things without emotions that can't be offended" because they're all made (or maintained) by people (like art).
I agree with all your points.
Then they are not creating arts, they are looking for affirmation. Lots of people do that, me included. That is fine to admit.
This is a weird "no true Scotsman" take.
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There's a difference between constructive directness and immature ad hominem remarks. Kinda illustrates the problem with the authors take. Not everyone can handle it like an adult
> The meaning has changed over time. Also: "I could care less", etc.
That meaning has not changed. Anyone who says "I could care less" to indicate maximal lack of caring is using the language incorrectly.
> "I could care less"
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!
People really say this ("I could care less") to express that they do not care at all. I've seen it happen here on this site. Calling out the sheer absurdity of it, even in a respectful way, is not universally well-received. Unfortunately, I could care less about this, as it sounds very grating to me.
I try to remember that I ain't got no problem with other "illogical" uses of negation and could this one in a similar light, but it's more easily said than done.
People really do say this, among other curious expressions that have fallen into common use.
You're being down voted for nit picking language.
I assumed it was an American thing. I've never heard anyone on this side of the Atlantic say it – even though Americanisms are being adopted more by the younger generations who are more influenced by online culture.
I hear this expression said with the incorrect "could" more often than than with the correct "couldn't." I attribute this to one of the following:
- the speaker is using wry sarcasm, although the inflection is usually wrong.
- the speaker actually does care a bit.
- it's easier to say "could" or it's habit.
I try not to be a pedant about this, but often fall. Yeah, I'm fun at parties.
> Do people really say this? Is it exclusive? I've only heard the inverse: "I couldn't care less".
"I could" is American. "I couldn't" is British.
As AmEn is now more widespread, the former is widespread, but as a native speaker of BrEn I absolutely detest it and never ever use it.
No, people who properly speak American English say "I couldn't care less" as well. It's just that there are a lot of people who don't speak the language correctly, and no social will to try to get them to learn to speak it correctly.
Um.
ISTM that you're saying "this is a common mistake but some people don't make it."
Is that fair?
If so: no argument, but the error is now more common than the correct form, in my experience.
A BrEn example: a mistake has propagated and is now common...
"could have" [is shortened to] "could've" [is misheard as] "could of"... and the mistake gets repeated by people who don't know any better.
No, it's just propagated mistakes. Same for lose and loose.
They don’t explain the downvotes, but here are some discussions of the expression:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/could-couldnt-care-l...
https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/eb/qa/I-COULDN-T-care-...
https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/pardon-the-expression/i-...
> But if you are the kind of person who cries out against this abomination we must warn you that people who go through life expecting informal variant idioms in English to behave logically are setting themselves up for a lifetime of hurt.
Downvotes are likely coming from the fact that this comment is quite off topic / doesn't reply to the substance of the comment you are replying to.
While it's often not helpful for folks to point out that something is a quick internet search away, performing one is usually best before going off topic. Doing so would have resulted in the answer to your question pretty quick.
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.
Not should, can't. The assertion I'm referring to is that once something can be rationally discussed it's no longer a taboo, and once a culture has no taboos it has no real vitality or potential for growth left.
Nothing there about causing cultural decline, just evidence of it, and thereby limits on the kind of culture that can host the attitude you describe.
> once something can be rationally discussed it's no longer a taboo
This appears to be an entirely impractical definition, to the point that it would not allow a taboo to ever exist in a group of people capable of any sort of rational discussion. Any two moderately curious and independently-minded people could simply destroy any taboo by talking about it. They could even do it on purpose, using this fatal weakness.
Taboos, as in: the actual attitudes and behaviors of people, do not simply disappear the moment they are named or even questioned. I think we have to allow for taboos to be more nuanced, or we will struggle to describe the actual, interesting phenomenon, let alone do anything useful with it.
> once a culture has no taboos it has no real vitality or potential for growth left
That's an extraordinary claim on multiple levels, even when allowing for different ideas of what taboos are and how they work. I already mentioned some questions this raises, which makes it surprising to find the naked claim simply restated, in an even stronger form.
It's the kind of sentence that can sound really deep and powerful in passing, but when you look at it, is really only a huge, gaping question mark in a fancy dress.
Would you also say that no Overton window could ever exist in a group of people capable of any sort of rational discussion?
I would not. But I don't see how that's relevant here.
I'm also not going to guess what point you're trying to make. I'd ask you to explain how exactly you think Overton windows relate to our argument about taboos, because, despite a superficial similarity, taboos and Overton windows deal with different things and are very much not the same; but I'm not interested in this style of discussion, sorry. Have a nice day!
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.
Try to start up a conversation about the relative merits of marrying your siblings and I bet everybody else in the room will suddenly get very uncomfortable. They'll be thinking "Of all possible things we could talk about, why this??"
You're right that taboos also concern actions, not just discussion, but in this case it's probably both.
I see a problem here with your example: "everyone else". If you're going to have a sensitive discussion it should involve the minimum number of people.
That it's a sensitive topic is the point, no?
> They'll be thinking "Of all possible things we could talk about, why this??"
Sure, but the point is that they should just say that, and the person who raised the issue must then explain why it's worth their time. Maybe there's an important point they're trying to make, maybe not.
Is the critique any more substantial than "the vibes are off?"
The critique is "Taboos probably have a use." I think it's a good faith point. It's not as strong of a critique as "Taboos have purpose {x}" [Maintain ethical standards, promote public safety] or to say "Taboos probably have a use because {y}" [They are in almost every society, some rules should be rules but not laws].
The problem I see is taboos assume the act is always wrong, and preclude consideration for edge cases where it might be the lesser wrong. Consider the incest taboo--yeah, there are very good reasons for this. Should you enter a sexual relationship with a relative? I think society is better off prohibiting this. But what about "What, my wife is actually my sister????" Is forcing them to divorce actually the best answer? (And, yes, it happens. Bump into an unknown sibling, there's a substantial chance you'll fall for them.)
The only thing wrong with incest is the child. We put a lot of focus on this but not other kinds of ‘bad’ genes like hereditary diseases.
To me taboos is just society taking shortcuts. This is fine, but lets admit that we are taking shortcuts.
In reality there's often issues of manipulation into "consent".
And if the relationship goes bad you lose a family member, not just a lover.
Is it always wrong? To me, unquestionably no (consider my example.) Is it risky? Yes.
I'd agree- I think the analysis I was referring to believed that analyzing a taboo makes it no longer useful as a shortcut. Guess that didn't come across enough for anyone to offer a refutation.
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.
Did the enlightenment not have a taboo around questioning e.g. the fundamental equality of all human beings?
My impression was that that taboo first got a firm foothold a couple of hundred years later, after the second world war showed what industrialised genocide looks like. How could the fundamental equality of all humans otherwise have been accepted as true and taboo to talk about at the same time as women being denied suffrage until the early 19-hundreds, or eugenics being openly discussed well into the 1930ies?
Precisely by being protected from this kind of rigorous practical analysis!
> 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.
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Anyone have a preferred resource?
I do appreciate the OP as it stands!
With nothing off the table, that includes bans on Crocker's Rules, right?
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.
Right. Nohello isn't about not saying hello. It's about not sending a message with nothing but a greeting and leaving the recipient waiting to find out what you want. It's about being efficient and respectful of the recipient's time.
If you're so pathologically "efficient" that you are bothered by reading the word "Hello" in "Hello. Please join the bridge. The site is down.", that's a you problem, not a hello problem.
> 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.
Look at the actual examples they give of what you should say. Everything but the bald assertion is stripped away.
If you're saying the actual proper behavior is a middle ground: I agree! But that's not what the article is saying. (At least, not clearly, which would be its own irony.)
> Look at the actual examples they give of what you should say. Everything but the bald assertion is stripped away.
Right, I think the examples aren't the best. But, around the examples, look at what the author is advocating for:
> to skip social cushioning
> "your feelings about how I might receive this..."
> bears responsibility for their own emotional reaction to its content
> When you spend the first third of your message establishing that you are a nice person who means well
...etc. They're pretty clearly emphasizing the emotional content of messages, rather than informational content.
Then they explicitly say that the intent is to provide relevant information:
> 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.
...and then separate that from emotions:
> But confessing your emotional state and your reasoning process and your extenuating circumstances is not documentation, it is self-absolution
Yes, I agree that the author probably should have been a bit more clear, because people can get upset when it comes to workplace politics/communication, and clarity never hurts. But I'm pretty sure that the intent is what you'd want it to be.
> 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.
You read far too much into my word choice. I think you could substitute any technical profession (I would include everything you mentioned explicitly) for "engineer" and what I wrote would be equivalently true. I just happen to have the most direct experience with engineers, and the original article was about engineers.
It's true of the technical aspects of art too: professional musicians rehearsing, for example. It's less true when you get into the ingantible parts of art, though... taste is inherently personal.
That’s fair! There were a couple comments that used similar language; I didn’t mean to call you out. Yours was the first I saw with it, so I hit reply. Thanks for clarifying.
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.
[1]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...
> 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.
Totally agree with this! Being "kindly honest" is way better than being "brutally honest". Being honest and direct is important of course. I have often found that delivering constructive criticism in the so-called sandwich manner often obfuscates the message, so delivering it directly is much better. However, being kind to the receiver of the feedback by having empathy for them and supporting them as they process that feedback will help land that message far more effectively than being "brutal" about it.
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.
Unless you are as open to having your mental state altered by the other person as you expect the other person to be to having theirs altered by you, I don't think you're really communicating.
I don’t understand the point of this reply. Of course I’m open to it. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t expose myself to their side of the conversation.
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.
Context matters.
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
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.
> 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
If you take 'direct' vs. 'indirect' literally, you are right. Everything is somehow indirect, because language tries to represent reality, but isn't identical to reality.
But you are missing the point. The real issue is information density. Indirect communication generally has lower information density: You give examples of various possible interpretations of one phrase, and the more possible interpretations there are, the lower the information density is. The longer the phrase is, the lower the information density. One can come up with a few counter-examples, where for example a very long and very indirect phrase might just have one very unique and direct interpretation, but those are rare. In general, direct communication conveys more information with less words.
Sure, if we want to shift topic from directness to density, but that's not a cultural difference either: all (spoken) languages famously transmit at about 39 bits per second [1]. Specific idioms, especially newer ones, might be a bit more or less information-dense, but there will always be others that make up for it. And if an idiom falls too far below the 39 B/s rate it'll get worn down over time to something shorter.
If you are shortening your communication you are doing it by reducing the information content. In some cultures it's acceptable to spend longer buying bread than in others, so you might take the time to exchange more information with the baker. But that is a (to them, if not to you) valuable interaction that they have chosen to have, filled with information whose exchange is (to them) just as important as the price of bread.
[1]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594
>There are indirect cultures, where communication is primarily intended to convey social status, manipulate social bonds, or perform culturally necessary rituals
Very strange way to say being polite.
You say you are being blunt, but then 5 paragraphs of exegesis follows.
TL;DR.
Talking takes time and effort. So does listening. Be brief. Get to the point.
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.
They said that they were going to be blunt, not terse.
Fair, but they do often go together.
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.
Not the GP, but I'm an avid reader. One of the books I read (Strunk & White's Elements of Style) had this to say to aspiring writers: "Omit needles words."
I think the point is that some of the extra words OP is complaining about aren't needless. It's on the writer to know their audience, but it's also asking a lot to tune a message in a PR review to the one particular person who demands bluntness, especially if they don't know that person well. If the majority of people in the organization respond positively to a certain style (which may involve some amount of phatic speech), then the person who is "over-writing" here is probably making a good decision.
Once I build rapport with someone, I tend to be more blunt, but still balance that with the fact that other people may be reading the interaction, and I don't want to model a rude communication style.
An organization can choose to promote a very direct approach to feedback (Bridgewater is famous for this), but it requires top-down work to get everyone on the same page, not just expecting one developer to mind-read another.
Nobody is advocating for a rude communication style; the disagreement is over what constitutes rudeness.
Some people/cultures see being blunt or to the point as rude.
Others see beating around the bush, wasting time and hogging the listener's brain space with fill material that serves no purpose other than delaying the actual closure/completion of the thought (including insisting on various rituals, either verbal or, in some cases, physical, such as drinking a cup of tea (or coffee) and not broaching the actual subject until both parties have finished drinking), or perhaps (though I suspect this is less common as an actual motivation than generally supposed) taking pains to respect the imagined feeling of the listener, and possibly most importantly, to reaffirm the social hierarchy, as rude.
It's just a difference of perspective.
Nicely put. I like the worked example in para 2. :-)
Tell me, did you ever watch Yes, Minister or Yes, Prime Minister?
If not, I think you might enjoy them.
"Needless." :-D But you're right.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/brevity_is_the_soul_of_wit
Dang! A typo, a typo; I do confess't.
One will note that the book, while short, contained more than that one sentence.
Indeed. And all of them, iirc, to the point.
> Out of curiosity, are you a reader?
Very much so. I started reading adult novels at 7 years old, and by the time I was 12 or so, I could if I was hurrying read 5 or 6 novels a day. I read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time in 5 days at that age. I've reread it again another 4 times or so.
My personal library is somewhere in the region of 5,000 to 7,500 of my favourite books. I estimate that I have read at least twice as many books as I own, and probably more: in the tens of thousands, I'd think.
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6730645-liam-proven
I only started using Goodreads in my 40s though.
I am also a professional writer and have been for 30 years. I've had 2 short books published, many hundreds of articles for about 15 different print magazines and professional paid articles on 3 commercial websites.
Currently, I am the Linux and FOSS reporter for the Register:
https://www.theregister.com/Author/Liam-Proven
This was one of the hardest pieces to write for me:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/23/david_mills_obit/
I knew little of the man. I had to read at least 30,000 words about him in a single morning in order to learn enough about the man to write his obituary. It was hard work.
> When was the last time you read a full length chapter book for fun?
I have about 25 on the go currently. Most recent start was Polostan by Neal Stephenson. I also have 1 print magazine subscription on top of that, but mostly, I read online now, several tens of thousands of words a day every day.
I think it is far to say I am a big and voracious reader.
Why? Do you think I object to excessive verbiage because I struggle through it? No. I can at a push read about 3000 words a minute but I normally cruise along at 1,500 or so. When I see "estimated reading times" on things online, I typically find they are approaching 10x longer than I take.
FWIW I can also read 5 or 6 other languages than English, but I am painfully slow in all of those. Currently I'm reading a copy of Charlie Hebdo I bought at FOSDEM and the new Astérix album. :-)
> Do you think I object to excessive verbiage because I struggle through it?
That was the heart of my question, yes. The only way I could fathom it was to think that maybe some people just found reading generally difficult. The hypothesis being that those few extra words hurt, because reading in general was high effort.
It seems I was very far off the mark, at least in your case. For what it's worth, I've enjoyed several of your recent pieces and found both the Mills and Hoare obituaries to be both informative and empathetic.
Now I wonder if it is sometimes the opposite problem: A skilled writer losing patience when someone less skilled is at the wheel. Others in his thread explored that theory, and it seems they may be onto something.
> Now I wonder if it is sometimes the opposite problem: A skilled writer losing patience when someone less skilled is at the wheel. Others in his thread explored that theory, and it seems they may be onto something.
Could be.
The KISS principle applies in communication as in the rest of life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle
Of course, but it takes skill and intelligence to speak plainly. Meanwhile, half the people you meet every day are of below average intelligence.
It's best not to expect more from people than they have to give.
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.
> 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).”
> 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.
> Don't malicious ascribe false motives to others because you're offended at the idea that they're proposing.
Literally doing what you accuse me of in the same sentence.
> That's not even what Crocker's Rules are. If you had read the article, you would know that.
This article isn’t really about Crocker’s rules. It links to them but rather misunderstands the point.
> Literally doing what you accuse me of in the same sentence.
Factually incorrect. Did you forget what you wrote in your own comment?
>> Also the undertone of this topic is always “I want you to be blunt to the point of rudeness (so I can be too).”
You are claiming to speak for everyone who supports Crocker's Rules. You are asserting that you can read the minds and motives of the few people you've met who've talked about this and hundreds or thousands of others that you've never met and will never meet. You are engaging in a blatantly bad-faith and indefensible mindset on a mass scale.
I, am not. I merely read your comment and what you wrote, and pointed it out. That's not ascribing false motives, that's just reading comprehension, which is something you appear to lack, given your failure to read the original article, Crocker's Rules, or my comments.
> This article isn’t really about Crocker’s rules. It links to them but rather misunderstands the point.
You failed to correctly characterize (or argue against) either the author's points or Crocker's Rules, so this isn't really relevant.
> Factually incorrect.
Factually you ascribed false motives to me because you're offended at the idea that I proposed. You are upset because I said that this is topic is generally broached by people who wish they could be blunt and rude, so you're mischaracterizing both my words and intent.
> You are engaging in a blatantly bad-faith and indefensible mindset on a mass scale.
You could just disagree and say I'm wrong instead of pretending like I'm committing a war crime with a comment on HN. "Mass scale" is some over the top dramatic nonsense.
> You are claiming to speak for everyone who supports Crocker's Rules.
You think I was making a claim that literally, 100% of cases fit into this?
It's poor taste to insult others' reading comprehension. Just in general it's a childish ad hominem. But also if you can't understand nuance and you read basic statements as "literally this applies in 100% of situations", you live in a glass house. (I don't think your house is literally made of glass.)
See also: "BOCTAOE"
> You failed to correctly characterize (or argue against) either the author's points or Crocker's Rules
The very fact that the author is "begging" others to "follow Crocker's rules" in their communication says the author doesn't understand Crocker's rules.
Crockers rules are specifically an obligation to the person operating under Crocker's rules. NOT an obligation to anyone else. No one else is obligated to forgo politeness because the author says the follow Crocker's rules.
"Please follow Crocker's rules when you send me messages!"
"I am dumbass, and I hope you had a great weekend."
> so this isn't really relevant.
Disingenuous nonsense on a discussion forum. "I don't agree with your perspective so it's not relevant."
> Factually you ascribed false motives to me
To be fair, while the motives for falsely claiming that you can read thousands of peoples' minds are pretty limited, there are other motives than just because you're offended. Do you think that you're a psychic, instead?
> because you're offended at the idea that I proposed. You are upset because I said that this is topic is generally broached by people who wish they could be blunt and rude, so you're mischaracterizing both my words and intent.
Still incorrect. I described the words that you wrote in your comments. No amount of (now blatant and intentional) lies will change that. You claim here that you said it is "generally" broached - no, you didn't, you said always, and you know that very well.
> You could just disagree and say I'm wrong instead of pretending like I'm committing a war crime with a comment on HN. "Mass scale" is some over the top dramatic nonsense.
Still lying. You know I'm not pretending you're committing a war crime, and that I used "mass scale" to point out that, as egregious as it is to claim that you can read others' minds and intents, it's even worse to pretend that you can do that for hundreds or thousands of people.
> You think I was making a claim that literally, 100% of cases fit into this?
You literally said "always", so yes, that was your claim, as seen above in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47378710 :
>> Also the undertone of this topic is always “I want you to be blunt to the point of rudeness (so I can be too).”
Even if you meant 90% of the time (which you very clearly did not say), you're still making the clinically insane claim that you are able to read the minds and intentions of a huge number of people.
> It's poor taste to insult others' reading comprehension.
It's far worse taste to respond to comments without actually reading them first, as you have repeatedly now.
> But also if you can't understand nuance and you read basic statements as "literally this applies in 100% of situations"
Again, let me quote you your own words:
> Also the undertone of this topic is always “I want you to be blunt to the point of rudeness (so I can be too).”
Note the "always". Admit it - you said something insane because you thought you wouldn't get called out on it.
> The very fact that the author is "begging" others to "follow Crocker's rules" in their communication says the author doesn't understand Crocker's rules.
>> so this isn't really relevant.
> Disingenuous nonsense on a discussion forum.
No, it's factually true. If you make an irrelevant response because you're not responding to someone's points, your response is not relevant. This is tautologically true.
> "I don't agree with your perspective so it's not relevant."
Are you one of those people that can't tell the different between opinion and fact/reason? Because it sure seems like it - it doesn't look like you're capable of understanding that, because you badly misunderstood the author's points and argued against a strawman, your response is not relevant. It's not an opinion - it's just fact.
At this point, because it's clear you cannot tell the difference between perspective/opinion and fact/logic, and because you've lied about your own words that are written above, there isn't much of a point to continuing the conversation - if you write more lies, I'll point them out so that future HN readers browsing this thread about Crocker's Rules won't be misled, but I know that I cannot convince someone who is operating emotionally, not intellectually, and is willing to lie about their own words despite them being less than a page above in the same thread.
If I described someone as always smiling, would you suppose this is an assertion that they literally never make a non-smiling facial expression? If I said "The phone calls I receive are always SPAM", would this mean I've literally never received a non-spam call? Do you truly not understand the phrasing here or are you just pretending not to?
> If you make an irrelevant response because you're not responding to someone's points
I have responded thoroughly to your weird nitpicking and I responded directly to your claim that I mischaracterized the author's point by showing how they misunderstand Crocker's rules. You even quoted it but you apparently didn't read it.
You're very self righteous in your indignation, so much so that you would rather repeat the same thing over and over rather than actually converse.
For the future HN reader:
> If I described someone as always smiling...
Even if we pretend, for the sake of argument, that "always" doesn't mean "always", and that they didn't mean it like that in the first place and then changed the goalposts when they were called out on it, they're still making an insane claim - either out of malice, or clinical insanity (e.g. you think that you can read others' minds).
> I have responded thoroughly to your weird nitpicking
They very clearly have not. They still haven't admitted to either insanity or malice in their statement
>>> Also the undertone of this topic is always “I want you to be blunt to the point of rudeness (so I can be too).”
Note also the repeated attempts to distract from this wild claim with fallacies, misdirection, and emotional manipulation:
> You're very self righteous in your indignation, so much so that you would rather repeat the same thing over and over rather than actually converse.
...and then, of course, the root of the whole argument was their failure to read and understand either Crocker's Rules or the author's point:
>> 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.
...which is, of course, factually an incorrect understanding or response to either the author or Crocker.
> I responded directly to your claim that I mischaracterized the author's point by showing how they misunderstand Crocker's rules.
And yet again we see that they're incapable of using logic, and are just operating emotionally, because...
> You even quoted it but you apparently didn't read it.
Failure of reading comprehension strikes again - I already responded to this point, and they completely missed it:
> You failed to correctly characterize (or argue against) either the author's points or Crocker's Rules, so this isn't really relevant.
This is factually true. Their comment "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." is wrong and irrelevant regardless of whether they're responding to the author or Crocker.
It does not matter whether the author got Crocker right or not. The objective truth is that this user's arguments are irrelevant to both.
We've already gone over each of these points at least once above, so if we keep looping, this is probably a bot, and I'll just stop responding after another marker for future readers.
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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.
> 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.
> The Slack message that starts with "Hey! Hope you had a great weekend :)"before asking a technical question
This has absolutely no relevance to Crocker’s rules. This is just normal human pleasantries.
It absolutely does have relevance to Crocker's Rules. People exchange pleasantries because there's a cultural tendency to treat a direct, to-the-point message/request out of nowhere without the phatic rituals as off-putting and mildly offensive/insensitive.
This is pretty universally understood in most software engineering cultures in the West, which the author (and certainly the vast majority of HN) appear to reside in. It seems like you probably just don't exist in the same culture - but there's nothing wrong with that, you just have to be aware that that's how we do it.
Crocker's rules are about not burying honesty beneath politeness.
Someone can maybe squint real hard and see the word "Hey", in "Hey, the site is down" as politeness obstructing communication. But at that point, I hope the person seeing it this way operates under Crocker's Rules, because I would say they are a moron. There is a world of difference between basic human pleasantries and niceness that actually obscures communication.
Crocker's rules also explicitly state that others are allowed to disregard niceness, not that they are obligated to. Indeed, if you are offended or bothered by someone being polite, then under Crocker's rules, that would be your problem.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> Ignoring others emotions is not a sign of emotional maturity.
I completely agree.
> The inability to empathize with others and make meaningful predictions about how their emotions will affect communications is specifically a lack of emotional maturity.
I completely agree.
> 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.
Yes I did. I am still curious how OP expects that to be received.
> 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.
I think I agree here too. What do you mean?
> Yes I did. I am still curious how OP expects that to be received.
I’m curious why you perceive their statement to be made as if it’s a pronouncement from God and not a simply a statement of their view on the issue.
> I think I agree here too. What do you mean?
I mean that you both responded emotionally and communicated with an emotional appeal. You exaggerated what OP actually said and called it a mandate from God. This isn’t factual engagement. It’s emotional.
> I’m curious why you perceive their statement to be made as if it’s a pronouncement from God and not a simply a statement of their view on the issue.
To me it's basic grammar.
The sentence structure is approximately:
X is Y.
I consider this a statement of fact, or perhaps en equivalence relation. This is what was labeling a pronouncement from God.
(The idea that how your audience receives the communication is their problem and not yours) < X
is
(entirely why
some engineers are shit communicators and seem lost when facing the realities of human culture and politics.) < Y
Parsing it more carefully, the word "some" is leaving a hole for a lot of ambiguity that I did not see earlier.
So more careful reading reveals it as
X entirely explains property (are shit communicators) for a subset of the entities designated as engineers.
Even with these qualifies it is stating X is Y, rather than "In my experience X is Y."
I know in school I was taught to write this way. I find it confusing, and reveals something interesting about the person saying these words.
However maybe the real problem is I don't actually know what the words mean.
Perhaps I need to interpret it as the following:
In OPs view of the world, X is Y is true.
Perhaps that is what you're calling a "communication style", with a lot not being said explicitly.
Thank you for your comments, I am going to contemplate.
Edit: I just read my original comment and it is full of X is Y statements. I guess I'm full of shit. I'll try harder next time!
It’s not a case of “try harder”. My only point was that emotions run through all human interactions. That’s how it actually is. People very, very frequently make decisions based entirely on emotion and then produce a logical argument post hoc for the decision.
It’s valuable to be aware of how humans actually act.
I also completely agree.
My "try harder" was with regard to doing exactly what I had just had an emotional reaction to and criticized.
> 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.
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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.
Absolutely ridiculous. My EGO IS NOT FRAGILE. Your ego is fragile... pfft.
:D
> 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 expect it's a bit of both.
I can't speak for other parts of the world, but in the US, it's not uncommon for people to walk on eggshells while reporting information to coworkers (and especially managers) because there's absolutely a large cohort who will shoot the messenger. Crocker's Rules are undoubtedly a reaction to the extreme whereby managers in particular fail to receive receive crucial information because their reports are too afraid to pass it along.
In other words, people fail to communicate out of fear born from an assumption on how the person they're communicating with will react. The original quote would have you ignore your own fear and hand over the information, while your modified version would indirectly address your fear by refusing to take responsibility for how the recipient might feel. Whichever way you go with it, you're largely accomplishing the same thing.
FWIW, I based my version on the source of Crocker's Rules linked in the article itself.
Yes, but it's also both. Everyone should manage their own feelings and exchange information both efficiently and respectfully.
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.
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That's your worldview. Crocker's rules is that you don't have to take receiver feelings into account you just communicate efficently.
No, abiding by Crocker's rules isn't that you don't take into account other people's feelings. It's that other people don't have to take into account your feelings.
Applying them to only one side of the conversation doesn't seem practical.
It perfectly is.
From https://www.lesswrong.com/w/crockers-rules:
> Note that Crocker's Rules does not mean one is authorized to insult people; it means that other people don't have to worry about whether they are insulting you. Crocker's Rules are a discipline, not a privilege. Furthermore, taking advantage of Crocker's Rules does not imply reciprocity. How could it? Crocker's Rules are something you do for yourself, to maximize information received - not something you grit your teeth over and do as a favor.
Alright, my original comment was wrong (as was the parent). I still stand by my opinion that it is not practical though.
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.
> I believe the author's intent was (or should have been) to describe how THEY wanted to receive communication, not how EVERYONE should
I thought that would be too obvious to state.
Interesting, perhaps the message was too narrowly, directly-focused and was missing necessary social context?
This feels like a koan about the subjectivity of which details are important to include.
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.
> At one point you say, “Nobody reads ‘hope you had a great weekend’ and thinks better of the person who wrote it.” Who is going to read that and think that “nobody” only applies to you?
I argued why I believe this does not a good way of communication in business or professional-focused environment, because as explained, habitual padding tends to train readers to skim, because they learn that the lines often contain little of substance. For people who value directness (which, in my experience, includes many in serious professional settings) this kind of attitude is not appreciated. That said, it is simply my own rationale for preferring a more direct style of communication.
>Maybe you’d benefit from some of the mindset that leads people to write and appreciate useless greetings.
I come from a culture where elaborate politeness and social niceties are not only common but often expected, and I do practice them in the appropriate contexts. However, when the goal is to build something, solve a problem, or exchange ideas efficiently, I prefer a norm I explained, that is, directness and the substance of the message to take over.
As you said yourself, this is very culture dependent.
In my culture, elaborate politeness is NOT expected, and when I first started working with foreigners I had some funnily awkward (awkwardly funny) social interactions where they greeted me with customary "How are you? How was your day" and I started politely but awkwardly going over my day thinking "this is not your damn business".
My point being, if you work in a culture that expects some behaviour, it is necessary to follow it. Breaking the protocol (even by omission) is a signal in itself, and if the signal is understood as "I don't like you" or "I am rude" or "I am better than you" then it's counterproductive. Especially important if you're not close with the person communicating with, so misunderstandings are likely.
How does this jibe with describing how you want to receive communication, not how everyone should?
The discussion shows just how many different communication styles there are. So many comments about "XYZ is the right way", "ABC is always wrong" or "I did UV to someone who says they like UV and they took offence".
It shows me:
- there are many communication styles and people tend to think their preferred one is obviously right
- people are often unclear on what they actually value in communication (and might like the opposite of what they say they value)
- people seem also to, at times, confuse other people's different communication style for rudeness, indecisiveness or small-mindedness.
So I guess the reasonable policy is to adopt a hybrid approach. Be tolerant of other people's comms style, try to be concise with enough politeness added in that you don't offend people, even if they say they want you to be ruthlessly direct. When you need to, try to steer the conversation towards your preferred style. Maybe "ok, I understand the background, let's try to distill the facts now", or equally "I feel I need more context before we continue, let's slow down and...".
For example, I have worked in a number of medium sized (50-200) companies that were so proud of being flat structured meritocracies, where anyone can say anything directly to their superiors. Every single time it turned out to be BS, higher ups wanted deference and following chains of command. But that sounds less catchy.
> If the payment service went down because a config value was wrong, the incident report should say: the payment service went down because config value X was set to Y when it needed to be set to Z.
The number of junior engineers I have had to coach out of this way of thinking to get the smallest fragment of value out of a postmortem process... dear Lord. I wonder if this person is similarly new to professional collaboration.
The larger personal site is very aesthetically cool, though – make sure you click around if you haven't!
Yeah, I wonder if the author has been in a situation where a brief explanation was taken by a higher up (or a cc'd higher-up x2, or x3) as "It was entirely my fault and I'm withholding details that would further implicate me and giving only the facts that don't."
I've had to work to balance emails like this between "they don't want the nitty gritty, they just want to be satisfied the issue is solved" and "They will definitely want the nitty gritty and think something is up if the details seems suspiciously sparse". Especially if the recipients are technical, and they know that you know that they're technical. what are you hiding, Qaadika? you're usually more verbose than this.
What's the mistake here? Shouldn't an incident report start with this and then continue with an analysis of the process, without too much "internal perspective"?
In my mind, the internal perspective might be useful to jot down when doing the analysis, but is too noisy to be useful to disseminate.
If we accept that any one person can take responsibility for their feelings then it follows that everyone is responsible for their own mind. Otherwise what exactly are we saying? And emotions are complex, especially offence, it is practically impossible to say that something will reliably offend a specific person without trying it and seeing how they react. Even for the reactee. Someone can easily say "whatever happens I won't get offended". But they might get offended anyway and then we're rolling the dice on whether they are vindictive enough to hold a grudge.
People learn that lesson then don't stir the pot without reason. Rather than saying "I don't get offended" it is generally better to prove it and push people for feedback from time to time.
There is also a subtle point here in things like "if the design is wrong, say it is wrong" - how is someone supposed to know if the design is "wrong"? Philosophically it isn't possible for a design to be wrong, the idea is nonsense. Designs have trade-offs and people might or might not like the trade offs. But a design can't be wrong because that implies there was already a right solution that people could deploy. If someone is going to be direct that is also a problem they run in to constantly - they're going to be directly saying things that are harsh and garbled. A lot of humans aren't comfortable being that person, there is a more comfortable style of being clear about observations, guarded about making value judgements from them and associating with like-minded people from the get-go rather than pushing to resolve differences. And spending a lot of time playing social games to work out how to organise all that.
> If we accept that any one person can take responsibility for their feelings then it follows that everyone is responsible for their own mind.
I don't think this follows! People are very different, so something can be genuinely true of a subset without generalising to everyone.
Crocker's Rules definitely wouldn't work for me, but it's explicit in them that they can only be self-invoked. Some people seem genuinely to be very thick-skinned (but easily annoyed by indirection and politeness) and able to 'take responsibility for their own feelings' in this sense. I doubt (m)any of them are truly unoffendable... and one could argue that they should be taking responsibility for their own feelings of frustration triggered by normal politeness... but I assume they know themselves well enough to know that they are better off when people try to be as direct as possible when interacting with them.
Where it breaks down is if/when they treat this as an objectively superior state of being and mode of interaction, and use it as an excuse to be rude to others.
Of course everyone can take responsibility for their emotions. It's simply that many don't. And some that want you to care for their emotions. More to the divide, there are many who won't consent to doing so it letting you not do so. It is also the case that everyone can decide about this.
I think the point was that directionally, on average, we might need to swing the pendulum the other way.
Incidentally, this reply.
Everyone says that they value directness, and from what I can tell the vast majority of people actually don't.
For example, I had a job interview a couple years ago where the interviewer showed up fifteen minutes late for a thirty minute interview. Eventually he did show up, and the interview proceeds more or less fine, and near the end he asks if I have any questions. I said "is it common to show up fifteen minutes late for interviews that you schedule? Because it comes off as unprofessional to me".
He started giving me a bunch of excuses about how busy he was and eventually I interject and say "Listen, I don't really care. I'm sure your reasons are valid to you but from my perspective it just looks like you were happy enough to let me waste half the interview just sitting around staring at my watch."
A day later the recruiter tells me that they don't want to move forward. I asked if they gave a reason why and apparently they thought I wasn't a good "culture fit".
I wish I could say I'm above it and that I'm some hyper-stoic who always wants the most direct version of everything, but I'm certainly not immune to wanting some niceties instead of complete blunt directness all the time. I try and be above it, but I'm not.
Mm they didn't really mean /any/ question, and weren't inviting directness. Just like "hi how are you" from a stranger isn't an invitation to respond that your cat just died and your transmission needs replacing
Of course they didn't want to move forward. That's what you had decided/wanted though right? I can't imagine you hoping for any other outcome with that kind of question and follow up?
> That's what you had decided/wanted though right? I can't imagine you hoping for any other outcome with that kind of question and follow up?
The job paid really well so a small part of me still wanted to move forward, but I will admit I was pretty annoyed.
I should provide a bit of context; the recruiter that the company “valued directness” on their copypasted job description.
Regardless, if you show up late halfway through an interview that you scheduled, you shouldn’t be surprised when people are irritated with you.
I'm not going to pretend I'm great at reading social situations, but I think your approach in this story would have annoyed 99% of interviewers, even if they genuinely valued directness. If they'd asked for feedback on the interview process, then sure, they'd be a hypocrite if they claimed to value directness but got mad when you told them honestly that you were bothered by their lateness. But when they ask for questions, they're not inviting criticism, and framing the criticism as a question is always going to come across as passive aggressive. (edit: Or maybe 'snarky' is a better word here, as you did follow it up with a direct criticism, so 'passive aggressive' might not be quite right.)
Being annoyed is fine but I would argue that they should deal with it if they’re going to make me waste half the interview time sitting around.
I’ll admit to a bit of douchiness on my end but I think they should have understood the snarkiness in this situation if they value directness.
Fair enough. I wasn't there and this probably depends a lot on your tone and general vibe, the dynamic between you and the interviewer up until then, and so on. I do think it's almost always a risky move, but I think I assumed too much and I apologise for that.
Calling that out to that persons face, in that moment, is also inappropriate and rude. You can give that feedback some other time.
It’s actually not “inappropriate”.
Are you saying that instead of directly pointing out something that really bothered me, I should instead of reported him to someone higher up? Should I have bitched on Glassdoor? Oh, I guess I could have complained to the to recruiter where there is a zero percent chance that my complaint actually gets sent to them.
It’s “rude” in that I embarrassed the person for a minute, but it’s not like I went and tattled to their higher-up, or was out for blood or anything. If they’re going to waste half the interview then they can fucking deal with being embarrassed for a few minutes.
I think it is inappropriate in an interview situation 100%. If you can’t hold your tongue on some slight discomfort or perhaps talk about in a more diplomatic way (eg not singling out the specific person but rather just stating your upset at the interview being delayed) how are you going to react if clients/customers make you uncomfortable on conference calls? Are you going to be tactful and polite, or are you going to be direct and rude to them?
Obviously I don’t know the role you were going for etc. this is just an example, but I think doing this gives a bad impression that goes beyond just whether that specific person was irritated for you calling them on their lateness
No, it really isn’t inappropriate. The listing that the recruiter sent me said that they “value directness”.
If I had shown up fifteen minutes late for the interview they would likely not make an offer, and if they had called me out for being late then no one would call them an asshole.
There is "pointing out something that bothers you" which was the first part of the story. But, the reaction to interviewer who tries to explain himself "Listen, I don't really care. I'm sure your reasons are valid to you but from my perspective it just looks like you were happy enough to let me waste half the interview just sitting around staring at my watch." is an asshole reaction.
And yes, if roles were reverts, the manager saying the same "I dont really care" thing after you are trying to explain yourself would also be an asshole.
I mean, sure, but I didn’t really care.
Why should him being busy matter to me? For all he knows I am equally or more busy than he is. For all he knows I am skipping my mother’s funeral, or taking the entire day off of work, or turned down a dozen other potential interviews just to make this interview.
I will admit it’s a bit douchey, but why should I just nod my head happily and pretend that his excuses actually matter? Especially when all of them boiled down to “I was really busy”. We’re all busy.
Because it demonstrates flexibility. But I can imagine contexts in which impeccable punctuation is far, far more important.
Would you want to work with you? Maybe yes. But if I am making a choice about who to work with, I would prefer someone who has enough empathy and awareness to realize that it's possible that the interviewer might be running behind through no fault of their own. I would extend that to the my team members, and I hope they would in-turn, extend that to me.
You sound to me like someone who sees "please be direct and straight forward" as a free pass to nit-pick every little thing. Like maybe it's your duty to criticize even when it has little to no bearing on future success.
If I showed up late halfway through the interview, I would almost certainly not get an offer, and if the hiring manager called me out on that fact then no one would call that manager an asshole.
I am not “nitpicking every little thing” and I feel like there’s a lot of extrapolation going on there. I do think it’s extremely disrespectful to schedule a meeting and show up very late so that the interviewee doesn’t have time do do the full interview. In fact I think it is categorically more disrespectful than a snarky comment about lateness.
One of the best people I have ever worked with was somebody I interviewed and recommended be hired. She missed her first interview entirely. I was waiting for her to show up, annoyed that she was late, and she called me and said she needed to reschedule. At the time, she was hiking in the greenbelt on a beautiful day. I said, sure, we rescheduled, and she was a huge asset to the team. I kept the details of having to reschedule her interview quiet - because they had no bearing at all on her ability to do a good job.
I dare say that you are an outlier. When I have shown up significantly late for interviews they often cut it short before it even really starts.
Have I not established quite thoroughly that I am an outlier in many ways? Also, outliers exist. Also, being an outlier does not automatically equal "incorrect".
If the manager told you
"You don't value our time, you show up late, how do you expect us to value your time?"
Or something to that extent, that would be extremely rude. It's like a line out of Wolf of wall street or those trump movies - "You're fired!".
I have had hiring managers tell me that, almost verbatim actually, when I forgot about the interview and showed up significantly late.
I was embarrassed and yeah I admit that it wasn’t exactly fun to be called out like that, but I would much rather they say that than for them to pretend everything is fine, let me leave the interview thinking I didn’t annoy them, and then have it be a mystery as to why I am declined.
I felt embarrassed in the moment, and I should feel embarrassed. It is very rude and inconsiderate to not show up to meetings that you agreed to show up for and it signals that you don’t take the other person’s time very seriously.
To be clear, it wasn’t like I was being pedantic to the second; I know Zoom and Google Meet can be finicky so I understand being a minute or two late for a meeting and I generally don’t say anything if they are within the “my fucking microphone isn’t connecting gotta fix it” threshold.
Presumably the rest of the company operates like that too, so you were indeed not a good culture fit.
I'm not sure that I'm a "culture fit" for most companies. I should probably start buying lottery tickets instead.
"Culture fit" is an euphemism for "did the interviewer like you?"
If most interviewers don't like you, that's something for you to think about. It's not necessarily bad, if you have a very specific personality that most people find disagreeable, then it's a good idea to look out for companies that cater to your personality, and where you will fit in. But it is something to think about.
I think most people generally like me well enough, I just have a low tolerance for certain bits of corporate hypocrisy.
FWIW if I were the interviewer, I would have green-flagged you as a must hire.
"Everyone says that they value directness, and from what I can tell the vast majority of people actually don't."
Well sure, of course we do. We (or at least, a lot of the readers of this who live in a US and similar economic and social system) have learned that it is virtuous and correct to say we value directness. But that's where it stops; it's just a thing that is right to say. Part of the current social interaction protocol. It's then widely understood that many interactions should not be hyper-direct.
What you have observed - people saying they value directness and then not exhibiting it - is the expected behaviour. This isn't a bug.
Quick question: When the interviewer arrived late, did he start by apologizing?
He actually did not! He just proceeded like it was nothing.
Because it was. Was probably this person's 10th interview of the day. They probably only need the simplest of infractions to weed someone out given the absurd volume of applications they receive.
> Because [arriving 15 minutes late to a 30-minute interview] was [nothing].
I'd expect over 95% of both interviewers and interviewees to say that arriving 15 minutes late to a 30-minute interview is very much not nothing; it's a serious breach of what is expected – on both sides of the interview.
If you show up late for an interview, no matter which side of the table you're on, you ought to apologize and, if you're more than a few minutes late, have a good explanation. To do anything less signals that you are an unreliable person. And, when you are representing a company, it makes the company look like it's run by people who don't even understand how to do something as simple as show up on time. It suggests that one of the company's unspoken core values is Dysfunction.
If I had shown up fifteen minutes late for the interview then they likely wouldn’t make an offer and they likely would have called it out during the interview. No one seems to call out companies when they do this shit.
They wouldn’t care if I had a really bad day beforehand, and they certainly wouldn’t assume that I had a good excuse for it.
A passive-aggressive interview "question" is a hilariously bad example of "directness". Nah dude, you were just a jerk.
Probably. I would argue that showing up extremely late for an interview that you scheduled is considerably more jerk-ish.
It also wasn’t passive aggressive, or at least it wasn’t intended to be. I actually wanted to know if that was just a thing that was common in the company so I could plan accordingly.
Saying something like "Actually, I felt it was unprofessional and disrespectful to not have the interview start at the agreed-upon time" would also be direct, no? The way it's written sounds way more inflammatory.
I am afraid I don’t see how that is significantly different than what I said.
Didn’t your momma teach you that two wrongs don’t make a right??
If someone is a jerk to you, and then you’re a jerk to them… you’re still a jerk.
I do not concede that what I did was “wrong”.
Pointing out something that was objectively douchy isn’t “wrong”. Yes I was a little snarky, and maybe I am a “jerk”, but considering that this person was happy to just waste my time like it was nothing I do think he was entitled to a little embarrassment.
> I do think he was entitled to a little embarrassment
This is exactly the kind of signal that would make me not want to hire someone.
Tit-for-tat? Spite? No thanks.
“Tit for tat” and “spite” feel like they are very strong words for what amounted to a justified smartass comment.
If I had shown up fifteen minutes late for the interview I wouldn’t have gotten an offer and the interviewer might have made a comment about it during the interview and people generally wouldn’t call them an asshole for it.
Yes, the fact that you don't see a problem with saying "he deserved it" as justification is the signal not to hire.
The fact that you only want to hire workers who won’t call you out when they feel like they have been disrespected is a great way to breed a team of people who resent you.
Regardless, you kind of proved what I was trying to say. Most people don’t actually want directness. The fact that when I was direct with someone you’re treating it like some mafioso retribution is telling.
You know what they say about walking a mile in someone else's shoes? By the time they realize it, you'll be a mile away. And you'll have their shoes!
Asking that question just signals that you don't obey social cues.
Most hiring managers won't like this, as they don't want to be responsible for hiring someone volatile like this.
I think the only place you could get away with this is if you're interviewing with a C-Suite member who has nobody to answer to.
This is pretty autistic. I kind of agree, being somewhat on the spectrum myself. But I think the world would be a considerably worse place if everyone abided by such rules.
Some people have an attitude to work resembling “I spend most of my day here, so having enjoyable professional relationships with my coworkers is a major determinant of my quality of life.” And there are other people who have an attitude closer to “it’s my goal to deliver value efficiently and get paid. I’m not here to make friends. Any meaningful human interactions happen outside of work.”
I don’t know enough about autism to know if that’s the right label for the second category. (I’ve had coworkers who identified as autistic who seemed to deeply care about whether I enjoyed working with them.) I think these two types of people can work together productively, but I don’t think they’ll ever totally understand each other.
Reading the article, I also feel that all of his examples are poor communication, both the "courteous" and the "direct" ones. You can communicate clearly and succinctly and also be considerate of the person you're talking to.
That's the point; you're supposed to agree on this level of directness beforehand, expressly and explicitly.
The problem is that too many people couch pettiness and personal attacks in the philosophy of "being direct" or "telling it like it is". OP specifically mentions that criticism must be made on technical merits. The people that hand-wave this distinction away are absolutely insufferable.
>considerably worse place if everyone abided by such rules
Those rules are not meant for everyone.
That's the theory, but there's absolutely normative statements in this piece. For example:
> When you spend the first third of your message establishing that you are a nice person who means well, you are not being considerate but you are making the recipient wade through noise to get to signal. You are training them to skim your messages, which means that when you actually need them to read carefully, they might not. You are demonstrating that you do not trust the relationship enough to just say the thing and you are signaling a level of insecurity that undermines the technical credibility you are trying to establish. Nobody reads "hope you had a great weekend" and thinks better of the person who wrote it, they probably just being trained to take you less seriously in the future, or at worse, if they're evil loving of Crocker's [sic?] like myself, they just think about the couple of seconds of their life they will never get back.
This very much sounds like the author believes that everyone who doesn't abide by these rules - not just him, not just people who've agreed to them, everyone - is deficient in some way. And it's not just a slip - this attitude is pervasive throughout the post.
Yes, exactly.
I strongly prefer directness in technical communication at work.
But the way the article author phrases his preferences as absolute truth rubs me the wrong way.
Also if I worked with that person then after reading the article I would have perhaps the opposite reaction to the author's intentions.
You still have to walk on eggshells to not offend him by including any bit of information that he might consider not relevant enough.
I love this point as much as I hate it in practice. We all have different preferences and it is more helpful to be clear about ours rather than declare them "correct". The way we expect these differences to be navigated can become oppressive.
The blog post is an open letter: the author wants everyone reading to follow the those rules.
No. Crocker's rules are a request for people to act a certain way with respect to you, not wrt anyone else.
Crocker's rules themselves might be, but the essay is plainly contemptuous of people who aren't naturally disposed to follow them.
Should every incident report be written twice, once for normal people and once for the developmentally challenged then?
… I don't know what your incident reports look like, but if there's anywhere it's normal to optimise for communicative clarity rather than social wheel-greasing, it's an incident report!
How do you figure that the author is “developmentally challenged”? It sounds to me like they are able to handle their insecurities in a more mature and emotionally balanced way than most others.
They wrote an entire article about how they hate when someone says they hope they had a nice weekend...
If that is what you took from the article I think you might have some language development issues yourself, friend.
Be more direct with me. Don't say things like "If that is what you took" or "I think", you're just wasting my time.
I agree with the sentiment that gratuitous happy-talk adds noise to what ought to be clear, bottom-line-up-front engineering communications. But the recipients of those communications are people, and most people have feelings. So a good engineer ought to optimize those communications for overall success, and that means treating the intended recipients as if they matter. Some human-level communication is usually beneficial.
So, to use an example from the original post:
> "I hope this is okay to bring up and sorry for the long message, I just wanted to flag that I've been looking at the latency numbers and I'm not totally sure but it seems like there might be an issue with the caching layer?
There’s a lot of noise in this message. It’s noise because it doesn’t communicate useful engineering information, nor does it show you actually care about the recipients.
Here’s the original post’s suggested rewrite:
> The caching layer is causing a 400ms overhead on cold requests. Here's the trace.
This version communicates some of the essential engineering information, but it loses the important information about uncertainty in the diagnosis. It also lacks any useful human-to-human information.
I’d suggest something like this:
> Heads up: It looks like the caching layer is causing a 400ms overhead on cold requests. Here's the trace. Let me know how I can help. Thanks!
My changes are in italics. Breaking them down:
“Heads up” provides engineering context and human-to-human information: You are trying to help the recipients by alerting them to something they care about.
“It looks like” concisely signals that you have a good faith belief in your diagnosis but are not certain.
“Let me know how I can help” makes clear that you share the recipients’ interest in solving the problem and are not just dumping it at their feet and turning your back on them. You and they are on the same team.
“Thanks!” shows your sincere appreciation to the recipients for looking into the issue. It’s a tiny contribution of emotional fuel from you to them to give them a boost after receiving what might be disappointing news.
In sum, strip the noise and concisely communicate what is important, both engineering information and human information.
I agree with your point about human level communication and treating the recipients like they matter. I generally tend to prefer communication that is more on the blunt/direct side, but if there's one thing about communication that I've learned throughout my career, it is that the people who do best are adept at communicating well with a wide variety of people with different communication styles and preferences.
The people who try to force everyone else to fit into a specific bucket of communication style, or who refuse to deviate from their own strict communication preferences no matter the audience, those are the people I see struggle to find success relative to their peers.
I agree it makes sense to specify that it is not certain, by adding "it looks like" (or "it seems like", or other wording that would not be too long; as another comment mentions, "looks" can sometimes be wrong). The other stuff might be unnecessary, although it might depend if it is implied or expected according to the context (in many contexts I would expect it to be unnecessary; another comment mentions how it can even be wrong sometimes).
(Your message is better than the one with a lot of noise, though.)
> “It looks like” concisely signals that you have a good faith belief in your diagnosis but are not certain.
A lot of people never get past this level of sureness, so the signal is lost (or at least compressed). You can ask them for a number from a digital display and they’ll say it “looks like 54”.
One way to rectify the idea that these messages have signal (which I agree with) and what the article says is that it’s declaring bankruptcy on additional context. The extra text has so little value it’s worth removing as a rule.
"seems to be causing" is also an excellent alternative to "it looks like" that doesn't hinge on visual-sensory primacy, and tends to translate slightly less ambiguously across language-familiarity boundaries due to 'seems' having more precise meaning re: uncertainty than 'looks', 'feels', 'sounds'. Or you could abbreviate to "could be" / "may be" / "might be" (non-high certainty), "is probably" (high certainty) if that sort of nuance is your thing. Noteworthy point: it is neurotypical to treat "is" as 100% certain rather than 99.9% certain when someone says it confidently, but as 80% certain rather than 99.9% certain when someone says it uncertainly, based solely on non-verbal nuance; this can be infuriating and I tend to recommend saying "I am certain" at 99.9% in combination with courteous handling of the slight but eternal possibility of being wrong.
"Let me know how I can help" should not be taken for granted as a thing to be offered, though. Some teams have very strict divisions of labor. Some workers (especially anyone whose duties are 'monitor and report' rather than 'creatively solve') are not overtime-exempt and cannot volunteer their time. Some workers (especially anyone who's reached a high-capability tech position from the ground up) are flooded with opportunities to do less of their own job and more of everyone else's and must not preemptively offer their time to an open-ended offer of 'help'. A more focused phrase such as "Let me know if you have questions, need more evidence, etc." provides a layer of defense against that without implicitly denying assistance for help if requested.
"Thanks!" is one of the most mocked request-terminators I've seen in twenty years of business. It is widely abused as "have fun storming the castle, i'm out micdrop" rather than as a sincere expression of gratitude that contains any actual statement of why you're grateful. "Thank you for doing the job the company paid you to do" sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud, even to neurotypicals. Tell people thank you with more than one word if you mean it, and tell them what you're thanking them for, and consider thanking them for what they did rather than lobbing it like a grenade strapped to a problem. If you hand them a problem and they say "got it, I'll look into it", saying "Thanks." to that is completely fine; it serves the exact purpose of courtesy described, and also doubles as a positive-handoff "your plane" reply concluding the problem handoff, so that you can safely mark it as delegated, they can safely assume you didn't miss their message and are continuing to work it, etc.
I feel like this is why the communication medium matters so much to how things are perceived. There is like this extra layer nuance and detail that is critical in email/chat and must be accounted for. Like the "Thanks!" thing. It's darn near impossible to hear the tone of someone's voice in email. So for me, the "Thanks!" ending kinda defaults to sounding like "Ha ha! It's your problem now!" in my head. Which may, or may not be completely wrong.
I'd say I generally agree with this sentiment, but it's important to first build the proper rapport with the recipient. If you show them kindness and respect outside the bounds of technical conversations, they'll be much more likely to assume the best of you when you communicate straight-forwardly over technical matters.
You also should take care to avoid crossing the line into just being a jerk. This type of thinking is also often used by people who are simply arrogant and rude and are patting themselves on the back for being that way in the name of "directness" or "efficiency".
Look man, people are going to talk they way they talk. Just let them do it and deal with it for God's sake.
This reminds me of a front-page post a little while ago where someone wrote how much it stressed them out when people routinely apologized for delayed responses. Get over it.
I also sometimes wonder if folks writing these articles have had to work closely with people from culturally different places. I've had coworkers that literally could not be direct if their life depended on it for that reason, and I learned to deal with it.
I find it funny that the post promotes stripping useless information and yet a ton of the most useful information in those examples is placed in the skippable part.
Your coworkers are under too high a load, documentation is faulty, chain of communication is breaking down, your coworker lacks expertise in something.
All of those are calls to action!!
And no, you can’t tell the other person to “just communicate if it’s actionable” because they might not realise it. There’s lack of seniority, there’s tunnel vision…
As with everything, I think there is an appropriate middle ground here. There is definitely too much beating around the bush in a lot of professional work, but some of that is actually useful and even good. Context doesn't always matter, but sometimes it does. Manners aren't always important, but sometimes they are.
A proper balance of direct and indirect is the appropriate tack to take.
I personally vastly prefer directness when I’m spoken to - but it’s important to recognize that most people do not have the emotional conditioning to handle that.
This is not something that will change within our lifetimes. Learn soft skills, learn how to be indirect. You don’t have to be as verbose with it as some of the examples in this article.
“Gassing them up”, “Letting them down gently”, “Little white lies”, etc - these are all examples of how benign emotional manipulation is essentially the crux of pleasant social interaction in most of the Western world.
It’s not my personal preference but it works because most people have unhandled insecurities.
Coming from a former production manager, communication takes style and you have to meet people where they are at. If they're at "Crocker's Rules," awesome! That takes 25 to 50% of the work out of the writing. They could be at "my best work was just trashed and I'm ready to quit," to which you could slow your roll and work through the crisis. Keep adding to your comm tools and you won't need one-size-fits-all theories.
Maybe this is a bit US-centric, direct negative feedback is very common in many cultures, e.g. Dutch
Definitely sounds like the US.
When I worked a Radboud University in the Netherlands for a summer, they were definitely more direct than I was used to, and kept work more work-focused. But they also combined that with a culture of quitting on time, and going out to socialize a bit before dinner, which I think was vital to sustain interpersonal connections.
I liked that style a lot, but Americans are very bad about quitting on time, which necessitates more socialization at work itself.
Probably. I'm from the US, and I know a few Dutch people, and I find their approach to direct negative feedback off-putting to the point of feeling rude, even when knowing what to expect from them. (I'm sure they find my communication style long-winded, frustrating, and a waste of their time.)
It's a cultural thing, to be sure, and what you grew up with and are used to tends to dominate how you feel about things.
IMHO the Dutch are more direct for the same reason they are less sensitive to authority and approach their superiors as equals.
Netherlands effectively being a River Delta, there always was the threat of water, a force greater than anyone. IOW if a flood comes, both the king and the peasant start digging.
This is completely different from neighboring countries UK and Germany, which both traditionally had strong sense of hierarchy and not contradicting the master.
> IOW if a flood comes, both the king and the peasant start digging.
By the same reasoning, India, Bangladesh and China — all ancient civilizations threatened by great rivers — should have developed similar egalitarian cultures but the reality is the polar opposite.
Maybe something as complex as human civilizations can't be the result of just one geographical feature.
India and China are huge countries with very small percentage river deltas. Not comparable by any means. Bangladesh in a very young country that inherited it’s culture from India. I’m not an anthropologist, but sorry, I don’t agree there is any likeness with these countries.
If you have an other theory about the Dutch culture and why it is so different from it’s neighbors, I happy to hear.
> Maybe this is a bit US-centric,
You are violating the rule of the principle in saying this. :-)
(Yes, I am aware it does not apply here.)
It is EXTREMELY US-centric and frankly as a Brit who lived and worked in Central Europe and was previously engaged to a Norwegian, I find Crocker's rules laughable.
How it looks to me is:
"Use European manners with me. Don't waste your words or my time. Shut up and get on with it."
Asking (begging?) people to communicate with you in a certain way because you think it is depriving you of your attention(time?) is _much_ more selfish because you are depriving people of the opportunity to control how they are perceived.
How and what people think of me is extremely important to me. I want to be perceived as someone who is effective _and_ pleasant to work with. Changing my voice to suit your inability to summarize and interpret the ideas being communicated is selfish and antisocial behavior.
You are not a being of pure logic. The way I say something to you _will_ effect your perception of me AND the topic at hand.
> Politeness has a place, but I beg you put clarity first.
Having conversations with little-to-no noise as possible has a place, but I beg you to consider that the person conversing with you has a baseline level of empathy and ego and is not a p-zombie.
Wanting to be seen a certain way is just as (if not more) important than the extremely minor distress you feel by having to read some extra words.
"I want to be perceived as someone who is effective _and_ pleasant to work with."
That seems like a good reason to adapt your communication to your audience. If x finds preamble unpleasant, but you use unnecessary preamble when communicating with x, that won't help you be perceived as pleasant to work with.
> If x finds preamble unpleasant, but you use unnecessary preamble when communicating with x, that won't help you be perceived as pleasant to work with.
Absolutely! But OP isn't suggesting preamble is unpleasant, they are saying there is little or even no value and to remove it altogether.
Even if OP did in fact mean to suggest this when speaking to them directly, it is unbelievably selfish to ask (let alone _beg_) someone to eschew their voice just so you don't have to read a few more words and "waste calories" to gather the information they believe is important.
The pleasantries and preambles and hollow words _are_ important. People might be adding them without having deep thoughts on them to the point where they explicitly include them, but they want to signal to you that they consider your humanity. That signal isn't noise, it's a very minute sign of camaraderie. If OP doesn't value that signal, that's fine, but pretending it's noise is antisocial.
"But OP isn't suggesting preamble is unpleasant, they are saying there is little or even no value and to remove it altogether."
I'm not sure about this. OP said:
"When you ... [SNIP] ... you are making the recipient wade through noise to get to signal."
So it seems like OP wants other people to:
- not waste their time and energy, but
- is happy to take any emotional cost that comes with that.
Oooh this is good! So - I agree with part of this.
When a conversational partner chooses to communicate a certain way because of how they want to be perceived, they are living out their values. And I admire that, and I think it is an important component of a healthy organization.
But, if you would, allow me to describe the distress I feel when I have to take in "extra words". Because I personally do not feel it as extremely minor.
My mind operates almost exclusively on language, mostly in text form. I do not absorb input in paragraphs with overarching or underlying emotional content. I don't even absorb it in sentences. I process language word by word - and when reading code it's character by character. Each chunk I take as input explodes into hundreds of possibilities of meaning that each must be thought about in turn, and then dismissed as probably not what the person meant. Some of these are quite funny, and if you are one of the dozen or so people close to me, I might even share them out loud hoping for a laugh. In a real-time conversation, this has to happen in milliseconds. It never turns off - the language parser/analyzer occupies a large chunk of my brain's processing continuously, even when I wish it didn't. If I am under some stress - even normal everyday work stress, and I feel like I need to force myself to process even more words, when they are not hyper-relevant to the stressful situation at-hand, I often find that I have not enough capacity left for managing my emotional state. Fear, uncertainty, risk evaluation all get heightened. Fight-or-flight can kick in too. What if the time I just spent socializing with this person and managing their emotional needs too puts the project over-budget? What if I loose my place on this team because of that? Depending on lots of things, this can either spiral into questioning my very existence and place in the universe, or it can fizzle out and you'd never even notice it.
So just be careful when you evaluate how distressing something is to another person. Unless you know them quite well, you might not have the clearest picture.
Given that you literally started your response with a pleasant agreement and affirmation on my point makes feel like you are arguing this in bad faith, but if statements like, "how was your weekend" included in an ask cause you distress then you are so maladapt to society to the point that you should have close to zero expectations for others to accommodate your needs in public spaces such as a work environment. You almost exclusively have the responsibility to regulate your emotions or not expose yourself to situations where people might include a hollow inquiry into your weekend in their written communications.
Asking people not to include minor pleasantries in their written communication isn't a "reasonable" request for anything larger than a small group of people.
Indeed. I am quite maladapted to society. That's my point - thanks for making it more obvious!
There's nothing wrong in being nice and some chit-chat. Any kind of work, well most kinds of work, are about people and relationships. Building something with people when people can't relate to one another is quite hard.
I've been wrong enough times to make me want to preface anything I think is wrong at work by something along the lines of "Am I misunderstanding this or are you doing x, because I think that will clash with y". let them decide if it's worth looking at or not - I've been right enough times that they will want to.
> you are making the recipient wade through noise to get to signal
Because we all know that human beings are actually computers in disguise, or radio receivers, and everything that matters is "perfect", "unpolluted" transmission of messages. :shrug:
Seems very vulcan. Works with vulcans and to some extent vulcan wannabees. Words have meaning, and how we express ourselves through our words is how we lead and share knowledge. There is nothing wrong with being honest, but honesty without love and care is brutality.
I see your point, and think one of the merits in OP's argument is precisely what you're saying: words have meaning, and saying something like "I think that X is probably the case" when you're virtually certain that X is the case dilutes the meaning of words.
That said, I think throughout the post OP is mixing different dimensions of communicatiom together in a way that confuses the conversation - namely conciseness, directness, and explicitness - which while often overlapping aren't exactly the same.
I'm a big fan of nohello.club but this is way too far, if nothing else statements like "I'm not sure if I'm missing something here and sorry if this is a dumb question but" communicate something of actual value, a confidence level. Yeah the long rambly hellos can be annoying but surely the time you've spent skimming though them for your entire life can't be more than the time spent writing and posting this blog?
I love that site.
The most ridiculous thing about the "hello" senders is that they end up sitting there waiting for you to reply.
> Anyone is allowed to call you a moron and claim to be doing you a favor. (Which, in point of fact, they would be. One of the big problems with this culture is that everyone's afraid to tell you you're wrong
Absurd. You can point out how and why someone is wrong without insulting them by calling them a moron. Telling someone they're a moron is only stating your personal opinion in an offensive way, without any useful proof.
It bothers me that the article seems imply there is only minimal truth and wasting a ton of time.
> What it means in practice is that your colleague can write "this approach is wrong, here's why" instead of "hey, hope you're doing well, I had some time to look at your PR and I just wanted to shared a few small thoughts, please take these as just one perspective, and of course you know the codebase better than I do, but I was wondering if maybe we could potentially consider [useful thing here]" and then bury the actual point six paragraphs deep. Both messages contain the same information, however one of them respects time.
There's a LARGE grey area between those two. It's entirely possible to value someone's emotions _and_ not waste a bunch of time.
And yes, other people's emotional reactions to what you say _should_ matter to you. Because 1) empathy matters and 2) you need to continue working with those people. It's a pretty widely held belief that the people are say "I'm not being mean, I'm just stating the truth; I'm a straight shooter" and, in fact, just jerks.
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I feel like the author is either embellishing the examples of frivolous communication they give or they work with some absolute headcases.
On my team we all trust each other to be fairly direct. On the flip side, “softening” a remark can signal to the recipient that you’re open minded to other solutions. “We should do X.” and “how would you feel about doing X?” accomplish the same thing but the second one fosters more psychologically safe discussion in my opinion.
While I agree with the sentiment for the effect its adherents want to have, but...
Why not just
"Communicate clearly"?
- Don't add fluff
- write as plainly as possible
- write as precisely as is reasonable
- Only make reasonable assumptions about the reader
- Do your best to anticipate ambiguity and proactively disambiguate. (Because your readers may assume that if they don't understand you, what you wrote isn't for them.)
- Don't be selfish or self-centered; pay attention to the other humans because a significant amount of communication happens in nuance no matter how hard we try to minimize it.
Because those are far more general than what he is asking for, and what he is asking for will usually not be seen as covered by your generalization.
This is a false dichotomy between spending the first third of your message on niceties and being maximally blunt. I don't agree that you do not owe other people a modicum of consideration about their emotional state.
I advocate a middle ground and also empathy and curiosity. I think you can keep in mind that you might be wrong and treat people with respect without wasting their time. Something like "please check these lines/this function/whatever again. I think it will have such and such an effect. I did this test, here's the output". Seems fine to me.
This article spends a lot of words to tell us that we should be more succinct in our communication.
I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time
>So a person receiving a message bears responsibility for their own emotional reaction to its content. If someone tells you your code is wrong, your emotional response to that is your problem to manage, not theirs to preemptively defuse.
Our emotions are ultimately our own problem, but you are sorely mistaken if you think the emotions of others can't cause you major problems. There is some merit to keeping social chatter to a minimum in important communication channels, and not being personal. But if you're just gonna try to steam roll everyone else with your opinion, and insult them and their work directly under the pretense of being "objective" then you are going to have a hard time. It usually doesn't even work if you are in a management position, because subordinates will tend to undermine such a manager (if they even stay).
I read this passage on the blog's diary page and I found it beautiful and poignant.
https://lr0.org/diary/
> Last week I had an argument with my Mother of which I was righteous and she was in error. In the end, I managed to convince her of my points. She accepted them. But then she said, “Okay, what about mercy?”. She told me then about a man from town who once had a serious argument with his distant brother. Time passed. And when he finally saw him, he chose to forgive everything. That story stayed with me. After the discussion was over and the house grew quiet, I began thinking about moments in my life, times when I insisted on being right, when I held onto pride, when I could have been softer but wasn’t. And I cried.
Big difference between being 'right', and 'correct'.
usually the people who ask for the most direct advice are also the ones who so vehemently disagree with it when it's something they don't like
You can communicate like this and have it be effective if you have an established good relationship with the recipient. That’s why team cohesiveness is important.
Context of whom you are communicating with is also important. That’s the trade off of approaches like these rules. In some situations they are fine. In others not so much.
I don’t agree - the type of communication between certain members makes a team harder for everyone to join. You end up with tribal knowledge to the extreme if you communicate like this. It’s why it is unbelievably bad advice - it claims it respects a listener’s time yet creates an environment where the majority won’t listen.
> You end up with tribal knowledge to the extreme if you communicate like this.
Wait, what? How does a team habit of bluntly stating facts result in "tribal knowledge"? If anything it should be the opposite. The approach in the article has problems but I don't believe that's one of them.
Yes, in particular emotional trust is key. Maybe a few people can just declare their own emotional reactions away and have that stick, but you can't ask that of other people. We're still just apes. So if you want brief, clear communication, you need people to actually believe in their guts that when you tell them something they did is broken, it's not a personal attack.
There is also a middle ground. You don’t have to prepend your message with several sentences of fluff, but asking a question instead of stating your message can be much better receives. Just stating facts may sound like an accusation and especially if your analysis is not correct it makes your message poorly received.
> I personally value directness, so when someone communicates with me in that way, it does influence how I perceive them, even subconsciously. I would also argue that this effect happens to most people, including those who aren’t aware of Crocker’s Rules or don’t particularly care about them.
When someone is overly direct with me I take it as them being upset or confrontational. So I suppose it does influence how I perceive them.
Honestly this is just indicative of a lack of social skills. The "social cushioning" actually has a purpose in that it provides context around the discussion so that neither party gets the wrong idea about the state of mind of the other person. The choice to either engage or not in social niceties is a way of communicating intent. The author complains about a lack of signal, but being completely direct excludes far more.
> Nobody reads "hope you had a great weekend" and thinks better of the person who wrote it, they probably just being trained to take you less seriously in the future, or at worse, if they're evil loving of Crocker's like myself, they just think about the couple of seconds of their life they will never get back.
Wtf? Some people do actually appreciate that if it's genuine. And it often is. I wish the cashier a good day, should I just stay silent and shove my money in their face in order to reduce the signal to noise ratio? Do these people socialise with others on a regular basis?
Like it or not, in many places amongst many peoples, beginning a conversation with zero social niceties or couching carries a negative message that makes people simply avoid interacting with that self-styled hyper-efficient colleague.
I used to value this sort of communication. Sometimes I still do. Some feedback I got once that seems relevant to anyone who prefers this style:
----
Key takeways:
1. People are more important than code.
2. People have a right to work in an environment free of perceived hostility.
3. There is a legitimate reason for the perception and hard work may be necessary to understand why this is.
Ask yourself these questions periodically during a conversation:
1. Am I listening to the other person?
2. Is there an equal amount of give and take or is my primary objective to make someone understand my point of view?
3. Does the person want to understand what I am saying?
Something I noticed when working for a company that claimed to "value honesty over fear of offending someone else" is that they are still very selective of what you are allowed to say. Can't make fun of the giant American flag right as you walk in the door, that's unpatriotic. And don't mention any of the misdealings of past or current investors.
If you're running your open source project or other hobby endeavor, you can do it however you want. People will either adapt to your style or leave. The same, with some caveats, applies to running your own company (the caveats being lawsuits and needless drama if you take it too far).
But if you're a line employee for a corporation, this is the wrong approach, for two reasons. First, you will encounter many people who misinterpret directness as hostility, simply because your feelings toward another person are hard to convey in a chat message unless you include all that social-glue small talk. And if people on average think you're a jerk, they will either avoid you or reflexively push back.
But second... you're not that brilliant. Every now and then, the thing you think is wrong isn't actually wrong, you just don't understand why your solution was rejected beforehand. Maybe there are business requirements you don't know about, maybe things break in a different way if you make the change. Asking "hey, help me understand why this thing is the way it is" is often a better opener than "yo dude, your thing is broken, here's what you need to do, fix it now".
Given the subject, it is funny to me that this post is meandering and repetitive.
Related. Others?
Crocker's rules - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12881288 - Nov 2016 (54 comments)
“You are demonstrating that you do not trust the relationship enough”
This is entirely rational when a relationship is not strong, and a misstep could cause it to sour in a way not easily remedied. If I have to work with you, and can’t fire you, then I don’t want to foul the nest.
As my coworkers get to know me, they will drop the unnecessary politeness automatically, according to Zipf’s law. They will find I react well to straightforward communication once we have established trust.
I agree to a certain point, but I think about it in different terms – some people want to avoid any form of disagreement in order to maintain a kind of politeness, but I want to work on a team where people care enough to disagree with each other if something is wrong: https://joshduff.com/2024-07-18-communication-culture.html
It's easy to win an argument when you get to construct both sides. You can easily be direct and to the point without being brash.
You could, also, be wrong or misinformed, so I don't see the big deal about "Hey -- the latency numbers look pretty heavy. Should they be in the 400s?" or "I don't believe this is the best approach, we'll get issues with XYZ".
Sorry if that sounds inconsiderate, but I don't feel like changing my communication style just for you. I hope you have a great day.
I'm English and have been living in Finland for decades. This is a very Finnish thing in the workplace and I love it. Now and again we will get some new "foreign guy" and it reminds me that some cultures (not all) are following these over polite, social formatting rules. It's a bit annoying, but they eventually assimilate :P
Author has a point that some people take it too far but he's losing forest for trees.
People are responsible for their emotional responses. But you also will be impacted by their reaction. It's unrealistic to assume that people will always act unemotional - they are not Spocks. It makes sense to do some padding / emotional prework. If you don't you will end up actually spending MORE time getting what you want.
Example: you are giving feedback to a peer
Direct: this is a poor user experience. Our customers tell us they want xyz, but this experience is doing the opposite. Can you change it?
Padded: hey can I share some feedback on this experience? (Yes) ok our customers tell us they want xyz, but the experience seems to be doing the opposite. Can you help me understand?
Most people would feel more defensive and closed with the first approach than the second, which will make it less likely they will want to help, listen to you, or take you seriously. They'll just be focused on defending themselves. Whereas with the second, you can start to have an actual discussion.
And it's not just the opener, it's throughout.
Words have power. Two sentences can mean the same thing but can lead to different reactions from people.
Or you might not mention something that significantly influences how something is interpreted.
I just gave this feedback yesterday to a team member. The problem was in a presentation she presented a strong conclusion based on a shaky methodology and people tore into it. She basically was attributing an effect to a change pre/post, not with a holdout.
Her underlying data was sound, she had diligently collected the timing of events and such, but she didn't realize how pre/post methodology could be perceived as shaky.
The whole thing could have been avoided had she said something like "we didn't have a hold out, and all of this effect likely isn't from the cause, but directionally there's smoke - our campaigns performed x before, and y after. So this is worth testing to help validate this hypothesis"
Now their message goes from "This big bad thing happened so I'm going to fix it" to "I don't know exactly what happened, but there's one factor that directionally had an impact so I'm going to test it to validate and can scale from there".
Both essentially say the same thing: there's an opportunity for upside and that's why this is worth testing. But the reaction will be different, so it behooves all of us to be mindful of that.
I actually thought this was going to be an article about talking with an AI, i.e., something with no feelings, not about interacting with other human beings. Treating all social cushioning as useless noise is simplistic. Communication between humans is not the same as communication with a compiler. The problem is verbosity, and lack of clarity, not politness. Those are different things
I'd love to say that I value directness, but I frankly just kinda don't, for the most part. I don't want people to overly obfuscate what they are saying or beat around the bush, but... I have feelings. Often my feelings aren't rational. Often I have feelings about things when I should be more detached. But that's just how I am.
I don't want someone to come up to me and say, "Your code is wrong; you should have done ABC". I want them to say "Hey, I ran into a problem with your code. I think here on line 123 you meant to do ABC but you did XYZ by accident. What do you think?"
I'm not a dispassionate, disinterested observer. I do have some attachment to the code I write. I know -- and admire -- people who don't, but I'm just not one of them. I like it when someone is polite when they point out my mistakes.
> I don't want someone to come up to me and say, "Your code is wrong; you should have done ABC". I want them to say "Hey, I ran into a problem with your code. I think here on line 123 you meant to do ABC but you did XYZ by accident. What do you think?"
It's also a sign of good faith and tentative analysis since while that example sounds cut and dry sometimes context/details can be overlooked even those familiar with something.
Even in the article while the headline and main text suggest they'd be happy with bluntness to the point of rudeness the actual full examples at the end show the language used is merely succinct while still being helpful, with the second example also substituting the more direct 'you' for the diffused 'we'.
> This is the literal opposite of professionalism
I'm curious what definition the author is using of professionalism.
This isn't how humans communicate. We're not robots (or LLMs, for that matter). Embrace the small talk. And when things are serious, trust that we'll naturally skip the small talk and speak urgently.
This sounds absolutely perfect for interaction with an LLM. It should be a toggle switch in settings.
"Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best." - Robert Heinlein
This may be the most wrongheaded and intellectually lazy post I've seen on this site, and I'm glad to see folks responding accordingly.
This is just advocating being lazy in communication. Which is entirely expected and in harmony with our time starved work environments.
I find this happens naturally on high-trust teams highly motivated by their work, and I doubt just asking for it like this will be effective.
There's also the opposite end, where people who randomly shout explicitives or argue in bad faith seek refuge in arguing that it's just Crocker's Rules.
I hate hello-how-are-you-then-wait-before-asking messages as much as the next autistic programmer, but both examples in the "more examples" section still kinda read like an asshole, because they present as fact things that often either aren't, or you couldn't be absolutely sure of it.
For instance:
> "The caching layer is causing a 400ms overhead on cold requests. Here's the trace."
Cool, but how do you know that? Are you sure you're interpreting the trace correctly? How many measurements have you done? Sure that there isn't a historic reason why the caching layer behaves in this way, or a conflicting requirement that lead to choosing this latency over some other, worse consequence?
In the same way:
> "The current error handling swallows exceptions silently, which is making debugging hell. We should propagate errors to the caller"
Agree in principle, but did you check git blame to see if there was a rationale? Or asked someone else? How much change would this require? Could it break consumers of our code?
Granted, the "polite" messages didn't care any of this information either, but at least they didn't almost preemptively shut down the conversation by laying down what is at best an well informed guess and at worse purely personal opinion as if it's irrefutable truth.
Perhaps instead of debating whether to be (too?) polite or direct, it's better to focus on providing as much information as you can, anticipate follow up questions, and close with clear actionable next steps, something which is also missing from both versions of the messages.
"Well, those are hypothetical examples" cool, another evidence that we're all talking out of our asses about the sex of the angels, here. Maybe if the author didn't try so much to characterize themselves as perfectly infallible information delivery machine, then I wouldn't have nit-picked so much their half-assed hypotheticals.
I think the author's sentiments can be neatly summarized as follows: "I wish I didn't live in a society".
There are better and worse societies in this matter.
I'm glad I live in a society where it is acceptable for a bartender to just bluntly ask "what do you want?" without all the pointless chitchat. Or for me to go to my boss and tell him "there is a problem with X, we should do Y, even if you earlier said Y is bad.".
I'm glad fer you too.
In these times of heavy LLM use and the characteristic verboseness of their output, someone following Crocker's Rules might also be perceived as more human.
It's called tact. It's not mutually exclusive to effective communication.
Based on his more recent posts (e.g., on Facebook), I doubt Lee Daniel Crocker would approve of Crocker's Rules any longer.
Is this appropriate to apply to the managerial conversation closers like “let’s take this offline”?
My best professional relationships are between people who are confident enough to take direct feedback and appreciate it rather than resent it.
However, my worst professional relationships are with people who will rebuke your feedback whether you Crocker it or not. If you're direct, they'll say you should have been more diplomatic about it, but if you're diplomatic, they'll say you're being dishonest and should have been direct. There is no right way to approach it, these people will always find a way to criticize the delivery, and to delegitimize the feedback because of it.
There’s a typo in the article: “deos” -> “does”. How did I do?
This is why I love Boston: everyone here, at least in public, operates by Crocker’s Rules.
Blocking the whole escalator at rush hour? “ONE SIDE, ASSHOLE” while someone pushes them aside and moves up.
Shoving past exiting riders on the T rather than letting them off first? “LET US EXIT, ASSHOLE” as they’re shoulder-checked.
SUV or Monster Truck in the compact car spaces? “CAN’T YOU READ, ASSHOLE” as the tiny car beside them deliberately flings their door open into their bodywork.
I love it. Fastest I’ve ever adapted to a new city thanks to the glut of direct feedback. Haven’t been called an asshole in a decade.
—-
Humor aside, yeah hi I am one of those people who thrive on the sort of direct feedback Crocker’s Rules permit, because context switching sucks and the “wind up” of flowery communication ratchets my OCD into outright anxiety as it tries to pick out every possible level of nuance, tone, intent, and outcome.
If I fucked up, man, just tell me how and show me how I can do better next time. That’s all I need. I don’t need a weighted blanket and hot tea’s worth of communication coziness, I just need actionable feedback so I can apologize, fix it, and get back to work.
Am I the only one confused by the very first quote?
> "your feelings about how I might receive this are your problem to manage, not mine, just give me the information."
Followed immediately by
> a person receiving a message bears responsibility for their own emotional reaction to its content
So it's not "your feelings about how I might receive this" but rather "my feelings about how I might receive this are my problem to manage."
EDIT: Ooops I found a comment expressing this thought: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47372043
I'd prefer we instead all use Non-violent Communication. No need for permission. The world would be more beautiful place if we all had giraffe ears.
Agreed.
Eh pick your battles. This doesn’t bother me nearly as much as meetings that could be emails (or worse— a couple chat messages back and forth).
I find that context has a strong affect on how I decide to communicate. How I respond to communication in a professional setting, both emotionally as well as practically, depends on whether the message is an asynchronous medium like email, or a fully synchronous medium like a face to face meeting in person. It depends on what I'm doing in the moment, what I have been doing recently, and what I will be doing in the near future. It depends on who is communicating to me, their role within the organization, how their role relates to mine, whether it is one-to-one, or one-to-many, or many-to-many. And a whole host of other contextual things, some even subconscious.
There are times when I become very tilted if I feel like someone else is not respecting my time. There are other times when I become similarly frustrated if I feel like someone else is not allowing enough time to discuss something important, or if they seem like they are being dismissive of a topic I care about.
My own emotional response to communication is another input I can use to evaluate reality. My emotions are indicators of certain things, but they are not straightforward, flashing neon signs that explain exactly what's going on in clear and simple terms. The gut thoughts need to be combined with the brain thoughts for a more complete picture, and that increases uncertainty.
The situation also matters. If I am debugging a problem in production that is costing the organization, and therefore me, a lot of money, most of my focus is going to be dedicated to finding and fixing the problem. If you interrupt that with "how was your weekend?" you can probably expect me to be like, "what is wrong with you? can't you see this plane is on fire?". This is my emotional reaction. My rational reaction is - if you aren't helping, you are in the way. This reaction is due 100% to the way I was brought up - when I wasn't helping I WAS in the way, and I would be asked by my parents step aside, watch and learn. And that was the right thing to do because it improved safety and lowered risk.
My point is, there is an infinite pool of influences that contribute to the way people choose to communicate. And the way someone chooses to communicate is not always 100% under their conscious control - some of it is instinct, more like a reflex.
I very much value clear and straight-forward communication that respects everyone's time - in the right context. And my own expectations of this kind of communication has damaged my relationships on numerous occasions as well.
I also very much value the creative process of talking things through - in the right context. I also tend to find this draining. If there is too much of it all at once, I have to recharge somehow.
> "The caching layer is causing a 400ms overhead on cold requests. Here's the trace."
This reminds me of when my kids declare "I'M HUNGRY". Cool story bro, I'll record it in my journal.
This is a recipe for disaster. Please don’t follow Crocker’s Rules; just get better at communicating than the person who wrote this.
Your comment declares your opinion without explanation, and so lacks substance and is unpersuasive as written. More information would help HN readers evaluate your claims fairly rather than dismiss you. In specific, I’d love to hear your views on these questions so I can give you serious consideration:
> This is a recipe for disaster.
What about Crocker’s Rules, and/or this post’s advice to follow them, do you consider a recipe for disaster?
> Please don’t follow Crocker’s Rules;
What outcome are you hoping will result from granting your request? Do you have personal experiences with Crocker’s Rules underpinning this advice? Do you tend to experience social discomfort typically, atypically, or infrequently / never?
> just get better at communicating than the person who wrote this
Other than the presumed adherence to Crocker’s Rules in writing this, which is addressed by the questions above, do you have other criticisms of their writing to present? What communication ideals do you consider as better models than Crocker’s Rules? Do you consider there to exist appropriate circumstances for Crocker’s Rules?
This post, and the pithier original, is absolutely astonishing to me as a Brit who has lived and worked in Europe all my adult life.
Now I think I see why some American-dominated FOSS communities object to my writing, and why I get hatemail, blogs and comments attacking me online, and entire threads of abuse here on HN. A light has dawned. I am not planning to change, though. Deal with it.
What it is saying in pointlessly flowery language is: "Please just be direct."
Spelled out: "cut the crap, don't waste my time and your words. Say what you mean."
In England, where there is a strong north/south cultural divide, being very direct is seen as a stereotypically Northern attribute. In the south, especially the south-east (around the capital), people are more flowery.
I'm from Lancashire, although I left young. Half my family is Irish.
In my culture, speaking directly is seen as a virtue. It's a good thing. Burying your message in pointless verbiage is not polite: it's wasting time. We'd call it a "load of hot air".
The expression is embedded in the title of this book:
https://www.withouthotair.com/
The author was from Newcastle, in the heard of the north-east.
I regard being blunt and direct as respectful. It implies: "I think you are an adult. I appreciate that your time is valuable, so I will not waste it."
I think this is the default cultural position of where I'm from.
Blather, hot air, floweriness, excess verbiage: this is the stuff of professional liars, like salespeople and politicians. If someone wraps how they speak in layers of pointless drivel it means they are trying to hide what they have to say, and if they fell the need to do that, you should not trust what they say, and indeed, trust them.
I am shocked and amazed that there needs to be a phrase for this in American discourse. I am nearly 60 and I never knew.
I spent 3 a lot of time for 2 years in Norway, where this is normal: Norwegians are even more blunt than Northern Brits. I liked it a lot.
(I recently did a very brief interview with a Norwegian senior civil servant for work and he was full of praise for my Norwegian.) I like the people, I like the place, I like the manners.
Example here:
https://nlsnorwayrelocation.no/the-unwritten-rules-of-norweg...
Czechs are even more blunt. I like it. As a beginner in their formidably complex language, brevity is helpful. I walk into a bar and people to go:
"How many?"
"Just you?"
"For one?"
It's great. Gets to the point, easy to understand, easy to answer.
The Finns even more so.
There is a Finnish comic book about this:
https://yle.fi/a/3-8406344
It's also a recurrent theme of the excellent Scandinavia and the World. Apparently Chinese people admire Finnish brevity.
https://satwcomic.com/manners-are-important
So this is not just Europe.
It's just you, America.
If you need a polite way to say "cut the crap", this is a hint: you have a problem.
What a strange post... The linked sl4 source (http://sl4.org/crocker.html) is short enough it could have been quoted in full. It's Yudkowsky's version, I think this is the first I'm hearing via jandrog's comment that it's not exactly faithful to the original (which I presume originated on an extropian mailing list). On the SL4 mailing list, people would sometimes join and note that they operated under the rules. Stuart Armstrong had an aside to such a declaration once:
"I'm not convinced that Crocker's rules are particularly useful (rephrasing the same idea to make it more polite doesn't lose anything, can be more convincing to the target, and will often generate more insights in yourself than a curt dismissal), but it's up to everyone to choose their approach."
I think that aside is part of the same strangeness and confusion as this post. Operating under the rules is something you do for yourself -- the "begging" that you're doing to other people is asking them to communicate to you in a manner that is optimized for information, not for being nice. The problem isn't necessarily that people dance around the issues (though that can and often is a problem), the problem is that they simply won't communicate the issues or other information in the first place, and so leave such out, especially if they can't figure out a nice way to say it. Also, if you are writing for someone who is operating under the rules, for you to respect their wishes that doesn't mean you have to be rude or omit politeness or be blunt, it just means you should include all the information you want to say, and not worry about it not being phrased nicely, though of course you can phrase things how you please.
To beg others to follow Crocker's rules is basically saying "I am tired of having to use delicate language and sometimes having to avoid talking about things for you, can't you just grow up and let me be lazy and direct and sometimes rude as I tell you everything I have to say?" There are more sensitive ways to make such requests (and ruder ones too), it's probably better to use such methods if you want people to adopt your preferences in receiving information. It's also important to ask if people want certain information in the first place -- I asked a departing intern once (who sadly ended up not being very strong, at least compared to most interns our team had) if they would like some more candid feedback from me before they left, and they declined. That's fine. I think it's usually better to lead by example and just ask people to be direct if you notice them communicating to you in overly sensitive ways and perhaps leaving important things out, and link them to Crocker's rules if you want. Often the rules aren't needed and you can just create a direct and information-rich culture to begin with, or in specific circumstances (e.g. code reviews) use short hand symbols like "Nit: " or "Blocker: " that compress all the niceties you'd otherwise be encouraged to say. When someone new joins, they can read the room, but pay attention if some people express things like "I wish people were nicer here". Maybe they're a snowflake who needs to grow up, or maybe your environment is just toxic and so unpleasant and full of assholes that it gets in the way of productive work. Again, Crocker's rules is about receiving information independent of nice/rude presentation, it doesn't require rudeness or even directness or bluntness since none of those are automatically implied by efficient communication. (Efficient communication optimized for information is not just a character count.)
A personal example from 12 years ago: after I was rejected after an onsite job interview, with such rejections notoriously (and for sound legal reasons) omitting many details about the precise whys for the rejection, I invoked Crocker's rules in my request for further feedback and actually received some more useful information than the initial rejection. "The particular role ... required more experience ... There was also the sense that the manner in which you had answered questions came off a bit rough around the edges ... We tend to look for engineers who are very curious, passionate, and large drive/motivation to learn more - it seemed we didn't get those senses from you." The last bit especially was kind of an oof, but it was certainly useful feedback that going forward I, believing myself to actually be curious and wanting to learn more (passion has always been a problem though), would need to make more efforts to show those traits.
hoped it would be Steve Crocker; was disappointed.
[dead]
“My quirky autism excuses me being an asshole” is how most of this reads. “Maximally direct” people need to learn how to mask better, and if it costs them too much then they’re not suited for professional work anyway.
Being direct isn’t being an asshole. Sprinkling random compliments and self-deprecating comments into useful feedback in a professional environment is disrespectful of time.
I’m convinced that the root cause is people are afraid to be wrong. Either they’re fearful of being fired, or think people will respect them less if they admit not knowing; the result is that everyone dances around objectivity.
I don’t care if you make an honest mistake. Hell, I don’t even care if you make a careless mistake, as long as you fix yourself. Everyone messes up - it’s how you act afterwards that matters.
> I don’t care if you make an honest mistake. Hell, I don’t even care if you make a careless mistake, as long as you fix yourself. Everyone messes up - it’s how you act afterwards that matters.
You're not the one in control of their employment status and workplace reputation.
The irony of your comment's tone is overwhelming.
Thought I’d try maximally direct communication.