Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?
It seems to me there are some people (my experience is with SWEs but probably not limited to that) that:
- don't directly address the point of your question / provide a much complex answer (or even worse, a non-answer) to a simple question
- don't stay focused to the point of the discussion
- don't have some level of clarity in their train of thought and speech
- generally over-complicate matters by wandering off to other related subjects and extending the scope of the discussion
In such cases I find it hard to have technical discussions at the point where I'm frustrated thinking of all the pointlessly-spent energy required to have those discussions the first place.
Anyone else feeling like this at work? Why do you think this happens? Is it an intentional choice to communicate like this, is it lack of some skill (on theirs or on my part) or something else?
P.S. Apologies for this rant (that probably lacks clarity as well)
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EDIT: Fixed title and some missing words (oh the irony).
371 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 400 ms ] threadFor the train of thought, this one sometimes happens to me, specially when brain-storming ideas or when I'm thinking about second or third order consequences to the "thing" we are discussing.
Also, I think may be cultural? In some countries people prefer to give more context when talking while in others they want to go to the point as soon as possible.
The other thing I run into is outright not having the wherewithal to communicate clearly - either I am tired, distracted, or just can't recall the right words - aka a communication issue. And that's not to mention people who have outright communication problems - shyness, speech impediments, psychological issues, etc.
In short, speaking clearly and concisely is a luxury of precise knowledge and excellent communication skills, as well as an absence of ulterior motives - to vent, to make yourself seem smarter than you are, just to have a conversation partner, etc. To be honest, this thread is a great reminder to stay on topic.
Have you considered that people at work may not want to stay rigidly on target 100% of the time, and may find your hidebound need to do so bothering as well?
Especially in a large remote meeting, mindless dialogue is incredibly annoying, and often very costly.
I don't log in to work for small talk or personal enrichment. I'm there to accomplish work.
Meandering, unconstrained conversation and boring personal annecdotes belong at Sunday brunch, or on hackernews.
Takes about 15-30 seconds to figure out if the person you are talking to understands or is being evasive. In which case you need to adjust and put on kiddy gloves, slow down, and coax information out.
Personally I don't find this approach very helpful. It's not always clear to me whether the person Im talking to does not understand the topic thoroughly enough, or whether they actually understand it much more deeply than I do and it's actually more complicated than I currently appreciate. Going in with an open mind is important imo.
I find this to be particularly true with software engineering questions, where a lot of the time you're making a series of compromises based on some assumptions about the use case. Maybe they don't understand a particular piece of code, or maybe it's that they've just spoken to a user who's doing something weird and they're trying to work out how that use case will interact with this code.
Ah, now I see why certain communications go awry. One party is jumping to conclusions in under a minute.
“If a man writes and speaks "neatly" it is because his thinking is orderly; if his expression is forceful, the thought back of it must be forceful. But if he blunders for words, and uses phrases which express his meaning clumsily, I believe his mind is cluttered and ill-disciplined.”
[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_I_Never_Hire_Brilliant_Me...
Sometimes the audience can make you bashful.
The opposite is often (but not always) true. If a person does not communicate clearly, it is usually because they cannot think clearly (at least about that particular topic).
Often it's way more valuable to know that, and safer in many cases too!
Guessing the right answer in school was always acceptable. Just sitting silently always made the teacher upset. People are trained for ~10 years to just guess/make stuff up when they don't know.
Yes. This was problematic. I remember my first semester in grad school taking a (for me) tough course. On a midterm, I didn't know how to answer a question, and I thought it was disrespectful to pretend to solve the problem (random relevant equations I could think of) and waste the grader's time with it.
The professor called me into his office and said "Look, I can't give you points if you write nothing. Next time, write something and you'll probably get some partial credit."
Certainly any time where the work output could potentially harm someone if it's incorrect. Arguably also any time where producing incorrect output or wasting a bunch of time could adversely impact your or a colleague's career. All in all, rather often.
My university CS intro course labs always had an extra "and see if you can do it in O(log n) instead" or such bonus question. The bonus part always "impossible" if you didn't get that a-ha moment.
I think you had bad teachers.. (which is unfortunately much too common)
Some people seem to think that spewing a stream of nonsense is superior to admitting that they aren't omniscient.
I respect people more when they can confidently say "I don't know".
I've had to train myself to actually respond in this situations "let me think about that for a second". Because although the silence is awkward it is way better than rambling off and getting something wrong or having someone interrupt your train of thought by trying to ask again or saying something else before I've actually had time to think about it. For that last part, I've also found it helps if you make really exaggerated "thinking gestures" (look up with a very quizzical expression on your face, tap your had, stroke your chin, etc.).
A human loading indicator.
It's pretty damn uncommon for me to have been the only one in the room who didn't understand, and surprisingly often it turns out some of the others thought they understood, but a little digging prompted by my question or chain of questions reveals they in fact did not, so speaking up helps avoid problems later.
It's worth noting that if you're the only one who spots some problem (or potential/opportunity) with an idea or plan or approach, that can feel a lot like being the only one who's not following ("why is everyone else nodding along? What am I not getting?"), but in fact it means you understand it better than anyone else present and really, really need to say something.
This is what filler words like "so..", "um", "ah.." are for. They mean "I'm thinking and will respond in a moment". I'll also often start the answer sentence even if I'm still thinking, but very slowly to stretch out the thinking time. "Soo.. if.. the... thing does.. that.. then we have to foobar."
I don't know why that is. I suspect it may be partly being uncomfortable with uncertainty and racing to build an internal map, or having been trained to do so by (real or perceived) unhelpfulness in increasingly automated and disembodied tools.
There is also the phenomenon of perceiving a different purpose for gestures and the act of speaking: does it serve them, or does it serve the audience? Preference or even awareness of this latter issue may be due to old age, life experience, I dunno; seems like people who used to be in the "serves the speaker" camp used to more generally talk about "art" or "expression", and now they talk about "internal truth" and "narrative"; dunno if that means anything or helps.
I can swing either way.
Sigh.
> don't some level of clarity in their train of thought and speech
This “rant” literally provides evidence the poster is a crappy communicator. Are we sure they’re not blaming everyone else out of frustration with their own shortcomings?
I suggest they read some Camus and consider in a relative world not everyone is composed of the same statefulness they are.
Many people seem to totally lack the capability of understanding simple questions. I often have to ask yes/no questions, and even then I have to say "please answer yes or no". Then I have to go beating 1 bit information at the time... really frustrating, specially with people with master or even PhD degrees! Ok, where I'm now it seems a PhD can be bought around the corner for 2 cents.
In my experience this also happens when they try to explain something. Right now I'm relatively new in my position, and it was a real torture to understand the system, because nobody seems to be able to explain it in a linear way. They start "there is this function, and this function, which depends on that, btw, there is also this here... did I mention this other module?!... ahh ok... no no.. sorry, I forgot this interface..." It was really exasperating!
I think this may correlate strongly with the lack of ability for text comprehension, that is often reported in school tests.
EDIT: I see some answers referring to learning disorders, disabilities, anxiety, not knowing the issue at hand. I'm talking about people which do know the topic (explain the code they have written, for example); in a situation where I'm not the boss, and is no interview, just a coffee talk between equals; witout any diagnosed problem oder disability. As said, even with PhD titles, which imply they had to defend a Thesis in front of a panel with complex topics...
- We are building an embedded system, which has a data interface, which is not working properly (nothing is being received). We have to take care of the emitter, other team the receiver.
- My question: after lunch you are going to see with the oscilloscope of there is activity in the interfaces lines?
- Answer: No need, the registers in the ASIC indicate transmission is ok.
- 2nd question: but maybe there is a malfunction in the ASIC, and still there is no transmission, so we should test.
- Reply: The other team will check if there is reception or no.
- 3rd question: but the other team confirmed there is no reception, even with oscilloscope... could you test?
- Reply: what test do you want me to do?
- Me: measure with oscilloscope
- Reply: what for?
- Me: To confirm the transmission
- Reply: I dont follow...
- Me: here I start to ask, step by step:
Yes, that guy has a PhD. Is my problem that I'm asking yes/no questions?Unless this is your subordinate and you are convinced of a plan of action. In that case don't ask, just be direct and tell them what you want to test.
Btw: at the end the test confirmed the suspicion.
"OK, we both agree there appears to be a problem with the transmission. How do you propose we investigate?"
From the dialog it appears you were two steps ahead of the person and what he really needed was time to think it through. Asking the open ended question gives him space to think.
You propose I use an open ended question, where the discussion could easily go sideways, when I clearly stated:
"In this case is my subordinate."
"I already had asked him to do the measurement. My question started more to be sure he actually is going to do it."
I do not see how an open question would help here.
Nice example of communication going wrong here...
It makes sense to give a subordinate a directive. That he is a subordinate, however, doesn't mean a direct question will lead to effective communication.
I've worked with both types of managers - the ones that ask direct, pointed questions and the ones that ask open ended ones. I think the latter are more effective, but it really depends on the role (you don't want open ended discussions in emergencies).
For me, though, "We have problem X. What are the options for resolving it?" has a better chance at success than "We have a problem X. Can you look into Y?"
In my experience of sometimes being on the other side of these conversations, the problem is that the person asking for ‘yes/no’ answers is exhibiting a lack of understanding of the subject being discussed. They are asking questions that are not relevant or perhaps even misleading. I’m struggling to get them to stop focusing on irrelevant or wrong things, and listen to more background information that’s required to reach a base level of shared understanding.
To the point you're saying without the seeming antagonism - yes, you're right, a quick "wait, I think we need to talk about the background here because we're both making different assumptions" can and does work in most conversations with most people.
In the worst cases, though, some people take it as "ugh, why can't they just provide a yes/no answer to my simple question!?" and the conversation can become increasingly difficult.
If someone's thinking this a lot - like, they think most people are doing this to them to the extent that they wonder why "many people seem to totally lack the capability of understanding simple questions" - it would be wise for them to re-examine their assumptions.
It is often good to provide additional context to identify common ground and from there guide the discussion.
A system that can be described in a linear and continuous fashion without drilling down is either too simple, or too broadly described, neither of which is particularly useful when complexity is high.
This is... not surprising at all? Are you new to industry? Have you only worked at greenfield startups?
Particularly true for products with significant R&D components, btw.
> Ok, where I'm now it seems a PhD can be bought around the corner for 2 cents.
Some advice for hiring people with advanced degrees:
1. The masters degree itself is not a good signal. Especially in CS, MS programs are viewed as pure revenue streams and explicitly treated differently from other programs in terms of rigor and signalling value.
2. The PhD degree itself is not a good signal. For example, the University of Phoenix awards PhDs.
3. Some CS subfields are worse than others in terms of PhD signal:noise. Machine learning is a big abuser -- faculty at lower ranked programs can often get away with using PhD students as super cheap entry-level SWEs/SREs ("graduate student descent"). There are some subfields of CS where a PhD is a better signal. Actually, this can happen at higher-ranked universities as well.
So, what to do?
1. For masters degrees without a thesis component, I'm not really sure. Treat it as a new grad who took some extra coursework.
2. The great thing about a PhD (or Masters with thesis) is that the output is a 100+ page document. You can read usually about 10 pages of that document (intro, conclusion, fist page or so of each chapter) and have an immediate sense for how well the person communicates.
I discovered this recently. Working in the CS department at a large state school, the masters students are not respected. I have had professors tell me they don't care if they cheat (they mostly do) or share solutions, they are just there to pay their tutition and get their degree. Working directly with some of these students, I have found that they lack understanding of basic computing concepts, even fundamentally how computers work. It's breathtaking. Maybe some schools are exceptions, but I've come to interpret a masters degree in any computer-related subject to only mean that the person had the funds to pay for it.
Sadly, immigration is a major pull into MS programs, and it's not always the case that the student can actually afford the program... especially if the immigration plan doesn't work out.
The other side of this, trying to insist on yes/no answers to questions that are not yes/no questions is also a bit of a recipe for disaster.
> EDIT: I see some answers referring to learning disorders, disabilities, anxiety, not knowing the issue at hand. I'm talking about people which do know the topic
Some learning disorders do exhibit really good math and logic skills but poor conversational skills. Or just requiring a lot of time to put thoughts together and being really bad at on the spot real time conversation. Casual conversation and being academically talented are really pretty distinct skills that dont neccesarily come together.
"will you have the project complete by Friday?" -> you may be able to state "no," but there are certainly caveats to any "yes" answer.
"will you try to have the project complete by Friday?" - in this case, "yes" is most likely an acceptable answer, but you still probably want to pull in additional context, e.g. "but I am prioritizing x, y, and z."
Good, correct conversation is rarely binary.
"Well I started with this module and Bob is still doing stuff, but it seems like some work still. Ah, also have this meeting tomorrow - btw do you know if Alice is joining? Did we say you prepare the slides or does she do it?" leaves me hanging not knowing whether they'll manage or not and we're off to a side discussion.
"Yes, unless Bob can't get this merged until tomorrow." or "No, this became way bigger than expected. Do you need to communicate this to someone, or is it blocking you and we might be able to split it up to unblock you?" are way better answers. It shows that the person understands the scope of their task, they can estimate roughly the amount of work, but also stay open to prioritize or compromise.
Even "I don't know yet, as I first have to read through this document to get a grasp of the scope. I'll come back to you in the afternoon" is a way better answer that's neither yes or no, but you take the responsibility to find out.
IMHO you can pretty much always provide clear answers, but it requires for you to understand the scope, the shared context and some social intelligence to realize, that the other person probably has a reason for asking and that the questions or anecdote that just came to mind should probably be of lower priority.
I think what i was reacting to was more the types of questions like "can the site scale to 50,000 users? Yes or no" where the real answer is, well it depends on how active they are, what they do on the site, are they are logging in at 9am monday, or a million different factors and there is no reasonable yes or no answer.
PM: Are we good to go live on Wednesday? (it's Monday)
Me: Feature X isn't fully ready yet. Data science needs to address a bug that I found 2 weeks ago. If they fix the bug, I'll prepare a release for Wednesday. Alternatively, we can go live without feature X.
PM: Feature X is required. Data science says they'll have the bug fix ready. So are we good to go live Wednesday?
Me: If data science implements the bug fix, I'll release on Wednesday. (I don't trust data science to be ready, but I'm not going to say that)
PM: Okay, so we're good to go live?
<two or three more cycles>
Context is very relevant. Yes/no questions often aren't yes/no. I didn't even include the full conversation where I tried to clarify what he means "go live" or whether the customer had signed off. In the end, customers hadn't signed off and he hadn't coordinated with other teams. The release has been put off for at least a month.
I think this is somewhat different than a yes/no informational question. In this case, it wasn't even a yes/no question, it was a yes/yes question, he wanted me to take responsibility.
Me: maybe, I'm not sure. ( your answer is incorrect, let the manager probe you further)
Most systems discussion devolve to describing a few key structures that are better represented graphically. Think protocol sequence diagram, flowchart, logic table, state machine, stacked graph.
It's actually your fault for demanding a verbal answer to a graphical question, and rejecting the feedback you receive.
Additionally, highly-educated folks are trained to do this because it is a popular way educators verify comprehension, since asking a verbal question about a graphical fact simplifies the process of "hiding" part of the solution, and verifying that it's been comprehended rather than regurgitated.
* They don't know how to politely communicate that they don't understand the question or disagree with the premise. The mental transformation from "that makes no sense, I don't understand what you're asking about" -> "I may be missing context here, but..." isn't something that comes naturally to everyone.
* They don't know precisely how focused they should stay. Sometimes the discussion really is too narrowly scoped and needs to be broadened, and it can be hard to calibrate.
* They don't know how to prompt other people, who may have a very different sense of which angles are relevant or how wide the scope of a conversation should be, to focus back down on what they need to talk about.
1) People don't receive formal training in logic and argument formation.
2) People don't properly calibrate their own emotion or take into account the listener's emotions when deciding how to make their argument.
Lots of people keep asking: "what do I need it for, I just want to study X". They just don't realise how important that is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...
The rambling could be a way to communicate some context, emotions, while you are expecting a yes/no answer, typically from a low context culture.
[0] https://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-bet...
You could find another profession where the common communication problems have to do with getting upset and crying about interpersonal conflicts.
The useful insight is this…most people think they’re being clear even when they’re not. Their brain is making sense of the world in a way which may not make sense to you.
One quick hack, especially for engineers, is “I heard you say X…but I’m not sure that’s what you mean. Is that right?”
Most of the time, reasonable people will notice the communication gap and help close it.
* lack of practice; of reinforcing feedback in the form of pushback when not making sense and approval when making sense; perhaps because etiquette makes us too nice to respond in a tight feedback loop
* or a failure to learn from that feedback when provided, because distracted or not viewing it as important, or something to do with excessive dopamine-stimuli that makes longer-term learning difficult, or by nature.
* or, because communication is not so much about precisely expressing things as it is about saying enough to allow your counterparty to produce a mirror of your own mental model, a poorly calibrated sense of what other people know, due to mostly being around people who think very similarly to them
* an overactive mind that has a lot of different things to say—whatever comes to mind—and no particular training in how to organize all those things
I benefitted immensely from a presentation a coworker once gave on the "consulting pyramid" style of writing. In short, your thinking is constructed of "data > arguments > conclusion", and you actually come by those data and arguments in a somewhat random order; if you present an idea exactly as you came up with it it will be a complete mess. Instead, always lead with the conclusion, then a few top-level arguments; then build on the arguments in more detail; then supply data.
This is amazingly general. In writing you can create your argument exactly like this, with increasing detail / volume at each level. In verbal communication, supply the lower, larger levels only if asked.
It seems that having somebody tell you this stuff one time is enough to shake a person out of the mode of "say whatever they're thinking as soon as they think it."
It also helps to recognize rambling and incoherence as confusion, and take that as a cue to go write the whole thing down and organize it.
> - don't directly address the point of your question / provide a much complex answer (or even worse, a non-answer) to a simple question
> - don't stay focused to the point of the discussion
I often dive deeper if the question itself raises suspicions that the question asker might not fully understand the topic. For example, if someone asked: "can you unbatch those 1k RPCs?", I might go into more detail than a "yes" or "no". I do it to spare the question asker from making a bad decision, without wanting to embarrassing them by saying that the question is too simplistic, or makes no sense.
> - don't some level of clarity in their train of thought and speech
You yourself are missing words in your communication like the word "have" in the quote above. Also, I don't know enough linguistic rules to correct you, but colloquially at least your title is better understood if you write it as "Why do some people not communicate clearly?" So some compassion when others misspeak might be good. Often it's possible to read between the lines.
> - generally over-complicate matters by wandering off to other related subjects and extending the scope of the discussion
Creativity is often the expansion of a topic, or the merger of multiple topics. Maybe your question sparked their creativity and they're taking the opportunity to show you some of their creative thought process.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that the way we interface with each other (the API of language) is purely stylistic and of little consequence. Every little aspect of language shapes our thoughts and impacts our ability to think clearly... Let alone our ability to transmit thoughts to each other through speech or text (conversion to and from which is very lossy).
Thanks, corrected the mistakes.
However, I wasn't referring to missing words (which can be inferred) or bad grammar. Actually I wasn't referring to written speech in particular. I was referring mostly to the way one structures their thought and expresses it to someone else.
Also, the question was referring to native speakers (I'm not an English native speaker myself).
1. it's still relevant in spoken language. Perhaps more so -- inflection, intonation, volume, and speed add a lot of subtlety to vocal communication that is even more difficult to pick up on than written communication. Pauses indicate punctuation. Tone can indicate something is less important. Volume and speed can be used in place of parentheses or even footnotes. Those are just the obvious things. There is so much information that is very difficult for non-native speakers to pick up on. Or at least is very difficult for me to pick up on.
2. They might be speaking in a way that parses well to a native ear but is deeply confusing to a non-native speaker.
> Also, the question was referring to native speakers (I'm not an English native speaker myself).
Here's a really important question: do other native speakers in your group express the same frustration about these SWEs?
Communication is a two-way street.
If they are 3/5 on communicating ideas and you are 3/5 on understanding ideas, then you may have issues that a person who is 5/5 on understanding ideas does not have.
I want to stress that even if you were a 1/5 (you're not!!!), the onus would still on BOTH you and your team mates to communicate well. It's not just your job to get better at understanding their mediocre communication; it's also their job to be empathetic and learn how to communicate better with you.
Example: I communicate a bit differently with non-native speakers in spoken communication. I slow my speech just a bit (not excessively -- I talk very fast naturally, so my slow is others' normal). I avoid complex wandering sentences with clauses that resolve on different sides of the sentence. I try to add more roadmaps and use more explicit communication. I rely less on intonation, inflection, and pauses to convey meaning when speaking. I made these changes after I worked in a country with a different language and realized how damn hard it was to understand that last 20% of information that everyone else seemed to be catching.
It's the people who never think about other people's mental models (or even their own!) that are frequently hard to communicate with.
It would appear that your initial post failed to communicate that clearly to awb.
OP never claimed perfection, nor was it ever implied.
Also, efficient communication requires knowing what your audience already knows.
So your posts don't really give this away to me, except for the dropped "have"/"has" that GP pointed out (I've seen this a lot from people who learned English as a second language, though I'm not confident enough to guess what your first language is). But it does give me two additional ideas that from a quick scroll downwards I don't think others have suggested: Language or culture.
Language is unlikely but I do want to mention it as a possibility because I have a concrete example in English speakers learning Japanese: Implied subject. It's a common point of confusion with beginners that usually doesn't get a whole lot of explanation, other than "you have to infer it from the context" [0]. Maybe something similar is going on here, a piece of context that would be made more explicit in your first language that we usually skip or just imply in English?
Culture is a possibility because I've seen it mentioned on here many times in the past, and I'm guessing if English isn't your first language and English speakers are confusing, you probably grew up in a (slightly?) different culture than you work in now, in addition to the language difference. I don't have good examples here, but what I remember is people talking about how people from some countries are very direct and in other countries that comes off as rude, and in the opposite direction the people trying to be polite sound like they're trying to avoid direct answers and it's hard to get them to say what they mean. That second one kind-of sounds like what you're describing here.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/japanese/comments/b8bae7/questions_...
Edit: Some people are posting links to culture-style differences further down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33657314
We live and learn.
People have to plan how to break subjects down before and during speaking. Not everyone has adequate practice.
Some people have trouble with eye contact and might be fighting subconscious social anxiety while simultaneously scrambling to put their thoughts into words. If an audience wasn't present, it would be easier for them.
Some truly brilliant engineers struggle with this.
Edit: If you don't intuit this or perhaps struggle, I strongly recommend taking an improv class. It should be a fun and safe environment where you'll experience your brain lighting up all the communication pathways at once. If you want to go more subtle and read people's body language and tone, take a Meisner class. These both help tremendously for people that don't get in the daily "exercise" as a part of their normal day to day. I've also heard good things about Toastmasters.
While it's possible the fault is with the OP, I think what the OP is complaining about is probably not that.
If you ask me "how do I foo the bars?" 2 days ago, "how do I foo the bazs?" yesterday and now are asking "How do I foo the foobars?", it is easier for me to explain the information you need to handle that question rather than handle each time you need it incidentally.
"Can we do _________?" is the worst question to ask me as an engineer. Like, yes, we probably _can_ do literally almost anything, with enough hours and money. But what's the budget? What really is _______?
Eg: If it's "analytics to a page", what do we want to track? Where does the data go? How do people view the data? I need to know the answer to those questions, plus the "budget", before even entertaining a yes or no answer. Which I think sounds like I'm beating around the bush by asking, but I'm not! :)
Helps so much getting to the root of the issue.
ive learned to ask that as my first follow up question for random requests for help: is this the real problem or are you trying to solve a different higher level problem
Some friendly individual put up a site to explain the issue to newbies: https://xyproblem.info
My response to that type of question tends to be along the lines of "what are you hoping to achieve?"
The fact that context is communication seems to be lost on most people and in an effort to be efficient assume every one else is using and understands their definition.
The examples you give could all be caused by this. They could be trying to establish context or gain understanding of definitions. As in they are talking in an attempt to understand you rather than answer the question.
Is clear communication answering in the least words possible or covering all possible interpretations of understanding? Annoyingly its both.