>> Tonnes of frameworks around this concept, so I won't repeat what others have done ...

> Totally understand, but I would love if the author included links to these other things for articles/etc they thought did a good enough job not to repeat them!

I believe the author identified the primary remedy in the article:

  The problem isn't that you need a better system. The 
  problem is you're avoiding doing the work.

You also need to force them to justify their requirements, since asking for something way beyond what you actually need is an easy way to hide the fact that they don't understand what they actually need.

In my experience, people like that asking for 10x the actual requirement is fairly usual. But, every once in a while you hear someone say "we should buy the best, so we don't have to worry about it in the future" (when I heard it, that was a 500x cost difference).

> This is why it's important to write things down in details and as-unambiguous-as-you-can forms.

While that might be a prerequisite for a deep shared understanding, I have made the experience in the last few years that the number of people really reading more than the starting sentence of any message/ticket/email is consistently decreasing. I often have to feed them the information in very small and easy to digest portions. I so dislike that.

What I say: This is not ready for production.

What management hears: We can sell this to the customer for acceptance testing.

> about the same thing

yes. I have to keep telling my colleagues "about what?" for about 4-5 times in a row, at least twice daily, until they finally realize they have to tell me which client, feature, product or whatever else they are referring to.

Even if i know exactly what yhey are talking about.

There is a very weird and a very awesome soviet-era movie Kin-dza-dza. At one point one of the characters tells this about the other: "he says things what he does not think, and he thinks things what he does not think."

> Listening often means not jumping to a solution; but absorbing and processing someone’s pain

> When in actuality, they should [...] finding a way to solve the pain points

Honest question, how do I 'absorb someones pain'? And how do I transition from that into eventually formulating the feature/ticket?

Presales discovery in a nutshell. It’s truly an art.

I don't worry about such things, because I have never been in error yet.

> You also need to force them to justify their requirements, since asking for something way beyond what you actually need is an easy way to hide the fact that they don't understand what they actually need.

I've had a lot of success by shortcutting the refinement/request sessions with clients by simply asking "What is it you need to do?".

Due to an esclation from a client, I joined a meeting with a dev and a client to try and figure out why a single report is taking over a month to deliver. Dev reported (privately) to me that the client keeps changing their mind about what needs to be in the final report.

When I finally asked the client my magic question, it turns out they may not even need that specific report anyway - they're just not sure what can be retrieved, so they wanted one single report for every single thing they may want to do, now and in the future, attempting to squish hierarchical data and tabular data from SQL queries into a single gigantic report.

There's no way the dev was ever going to have a finished report for them. I broke it down into several simpler reports, some of which already exist, which turned a very frustrated client into, well, not exactly happy, but at least they are less frustrated now. They have some of the data generated daily now, and we can do the other stuff as and when they see a need for those reports.

People often don't, but AI always does. As we rely on AI more and more, having strong docs will become even more important.

This is why I'm assuming so many people aren't averse to LLM-generated/filtered text. If you never really read or wrote what you were reading and writing anyway, the LLM can get something similar without much effort. Frustrating if you actually need something

What you say: I don’t want to take responsibility.

What management hears: I want someone else to take responsibility for me.

Mine is "What's the question?"

I basically have to ask that almost every other time someone starts a conversation.

They talked for 3 minutes and never actually articulated a problem or request but just sort of recounted some seemingly random but presumably related facts.

Yeah. It's just some random self-help piece. But slightly worse, as at least self-help books would provide some examples.

"When in actuality, they should be listening to the use case, looking for the pain, and finding a way to solve the pain points."

You have now described the value of product design (no matter if the person doing this is labeled PM, UX, Product design, or whatever)

ive listened my fair share . sometimes ppl get stuck in cogitation . especially around their pain points . having someone throw them off by implementing a solution helps reframe their thoughts . we discuss the solution instead . on the other hand, my empathy may come off as lacking .

> No amount of knowledge or discussion will make a person accept something they don’t want to accept.

Not sure it's ever good to assume this beforehand though. Most things are negotiable, if you know how to negotiate right.

The points in # 2 are profound. I plan on sending this to someone who is dear to me. Maybe he will "listen" to it, too.

Thank you.

"To truly listen means to place yourself mentally and physically in a vulnerable state."

If you can guarantuee me this will not be abused in every situation ever and/or come back to haunt me, i will gladly always give up as much time as i can to actually listen. :)

Nobody reads the docs, tickets, or comments under a task, nobody really checks the code they are reviewing, and nowadays thanks to AI, some people don’t even read the code they “write”.

People love to ask for documentation, as long as it doesn’t exist. It lets them off the hook, “oh I would have known what to do, I wish we had this documented”. Then you point it out that you have it documented with video walkthrough, asked the team to read it and give feedback multiple times, and nobody gave a f.

Managers ask detailed questions about the IC’s tasks and priorities, only to forget it half an hour later and ask again and again.

I don’t see the point of fighting this, I’m sure I do the same to some degree. You just need to assume nobody reads anything and nobody listens or remembers anything, so be patient and explain everything every time… at least I don’t have a better strategy.

What I say: I want a pay rise.

What management hears: We want more pizza parties.

I am a developer, I also have worked enough other jobs to know how important communication is and how bad developers can be at it.

A typical pattern I recognized is that many developers communicate like bad medical doctors: they do "Mhh, Ahh" and then after a way to short period they fire out a diagnosis of what you need, sometimes without you even having said everything relevant yet.

It is nothing new that people in software are at times not the best communicators. For the first part the interesting bit isn't what your clients want, it is what they need. Unless they are the usually rare customer that has a good understanding of how software could solve their problem elegantly, you will have to assume it was someone's job to come up with something and that someone has never written or thought a lot about software before. That doesn't mean their ideas are worthless, but it means the work of finding the requirements and coming up with a solution is usually not done when you arrive. And the way to get it done is communication, by observation and by having them explain the processes.

Many software developers are in fact really not listening in my experience. Not that developers are the only people that happens to, doctors or other technicians also come to mind. They are often trying to quickly come across as competent by showing off their good grasp of the subject. To them you are a clear case of some category of problem they have dealt with a hundred times. This can work for them.. Until it does not.

Passing on what an ancient greybread told me. He said look at it as a Noisy system (signal is always lower than noise no matter what you do) with bounded chimps inside it.

Bounded meaning there are upper limits to what anyone can do. And there are upper limits to how frequently model updates of the chimp brain can happen per unit time. And the limits of a group are much lower. At the extreme end Large institutions once they settle on a model of reality can take decades to radically update it. Even if all signs say reality has totally changed.

So with those constraints in mind decide what you want to spend your energy and time on.

> Communicating effectively is the central problem of all humanity!

If that were true, there'd be something about it in the Bible.

> To truly listen means to place yourself mentally and physically in a vulnerable state

if it's not two ways, stop trying, stand up and leave.

If there is a tech-person problem it is this one. I constantly have to interrupt collegues when they try to explain a thing as their explaination attempts are usually way too low level or even bordering on being self-referential. So they explain the concept by using other concepts the listener won't understand either.

In my opinion it all boils down to a lack of ability to remember how one felt before understanding a certain concept. If you did you would have an empathic understanding of how word-salady a lot of the explainations are.

The first thing you need to tell a uninitiated person is simply where to generally put it and how they already know it. If you explain DNS for example you explain it via the domains they know and how it is like a contacts list for webservers so your browser knows where to look when looking for google.com.

Whenever you explain anything you might want to ask yourself why the other side should even begin to care and how it connects to their life and existing knowledge. What problem did it originally intend to solve?

Many tech people may start in a different

You must be in a position to be convinced yourself, in order to be convincing.

> Or maybe we're spending too much time on communicating.

This is a phenomena I have yet to experience in the wild.

> Cut all the unnecessary meetings and only allocate the minimum viable time to communicate.

Most meetings are not about communication. They are usually prescriptive in form and dictatorial in nature.

> Then everyone will be listening.

Listening is a skill, one which is can be perfected if practiced. Neither meetings nor their duration are contributory to this skill.

You don’t have to assume it, but you should be more than prepared for it to be the case

More than that, sometimes one side doesn’t want to accept something because everything they know about it says it’s wrong. Then they’re faced with evidence and reason prevails.

I usually have very strong opinions but try to hold on to them very loosely. It happened that I was convinced with evidence that I am right and refused to accept any alternative until new evidence slapped me in the face. At that point knowledge and discussion made me accept something I had previously thought preposterous, sometimes to the point of outright dismissing any conversation, this is how preposterous the proposition sounded at first sight.

What I want to say is that if you don’t know your audience, if you don’t know for sure your attempts are fruitless, it’s always worth a shot to use your knowledge in a discussion and let the other party digest that and see if it that moves the needle.

Let us know how that goes, telling someone who is defending themself from you how they should "Be More Vulnerable!"

Yeah. As phrased it is bad advice - nobody actually needs to be "vulnerable". Everyone should be in a headspace where they might actually change their mind rather than persuade the counterparty, which feels like vulnerability to people who define themselves by their own beliefs. The trick is not to do that; a person isn't their beliefs. People have beliefs, but those can change. They're still a person both before and after the change (which sounds a bit ridiculous to have to say, but by observation some people don't seem to believe it to be true).

There is no guarantee of this. The only guarantee is that if you put yourself in a vulnerable state, and someone abuses that, you now know their true intentions and can adjust accordingly.

I am biased in this answer on vulnerability, and I know it. I’ve lived a full life. I’ve nearly died multiple times, one instance was on my knees with a SWAT Team standing behind me with rifles pointed at back.

When you’ve lived through such events your risk calculus changes. Things that seemed terrible like being fired or laid off, tend to feel not as insurmountable or scary.

I say this to outline my bias, but also add evidence to my view on vulnerability. I’ve seen both sides, and while being concerned about abuse when vulnerable is a concern that should be seriously considered.. often people who are forced to make that decision miss the other part. The audience.

Vulnerability will almost always grant you the favor of the audience. If you work a job with half decent people, being vulnerable and abused when exposed will cause leadership to side with you. In my experience, most people are decent and want to cause the least harm to others in personal and intimate settings. So being vulnerable is almost always a win, even if it’s not the win you want.

And the place/scenario in which you’re purposefully vulnerable results in abuse/neglect without recourse for action… well.. then unfortunately you’ll know that situation is untenable and unlikely to change. So you can react accordingly.

I was the yielding type, not speaking up, letting others take charge. In my experience, it's not always worth it, especially if you care about the thing you are working on. I went so far as to just dissociate from everything and distance myself from others. The problem is that people deserve your honest opinion if you care about them, even if it's not what they want to hear. But it's so hard to spend mental energy to listen, correct, try to prove your point... even if you succeed, they will resent you for it.

> Managers ask detailed questions about the IC’s tasks and priorities

I've told the various teams that I wouldn't have to phone anyone if they updated the ticket. When I see a ticket that has not been updated for 2 months, there's no way I'm not phoning the assigned person.

Problem is that, even when I was a f/time IC, we hardly ever update the ticket unless we feel we have made progress. An update saying "Chased bug with no success $TODAY, requested $SENIOR to consult with me on this" feels like a worthless ticket update, but from the client's PoV, this is valuable info - it means that it hasn't dropped off our radar, we haven't forgotten about it, etc.

In fact, people do read documentation when they know it exists and when it is reasonably written.

Nah. Our CEO just fires everyone who asks for a raise because they're a liability now.

FWIW, this is in a country that supposedly has really strong unions and worker protections.

Id guess by your smile there is an element of humor in your response, so this isn't a rebuttal, but rather i identified a lot with your point, and I was thinking that this is such a human response to vulnerability.

If it was guaranteed that it will not be abused or that I would regret it, it would not _be_ vulnerable. Just like its not bravery if I am not afraid or I am assured of my safety. Such a paradox. Being vulnerable for me is acknowledging that it might have an increased probability of a more negative outcome, but still trying to be vulnerable because of the huge connection unlocks that (often) occur in my experience.

On balance intellectually i am coming to see the expected value from being vulnerable in communications is high, but my little lizard brain keeps saying to me "what if you get hurt though" and being closed off haha. its an exercise to shut it up.

Without effort there is rarely a big effort. You have to listen to achieve better results. If you don't listen, your results will be misaligned. Unfortunately no one can guarantee that you won't be abused. You have to ask yourself if the risk of being abused is worth the result (typical result: bigger money for a better program).

I’ve been at it 18 years for different organisations and my experience and strategy is the same as yours.

No one bothers to read/understand anything until the very last minute, then they realise “oh shit this won’t work in this scenario, and it’s always a showstopper”…

Yes, all said, developers likely are the worst communicators because they over index on their self-ascribed strengths: logic (and logic bullying). Not so much because they aren't smart or capable.

But singling out specific archetypes is an obvious contradiction of the article, which is weird. Author is in the UX design space so likely has particular lived experience with specifically eng orgs.

Sounds like innovator's dilemma + a quote i saw recently:

Former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: “Consensus ... is the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved.”

I buy that inevitably the system becomes it's own constraint and local optimum. But working together is a practical reality too. Worth making the best of.

> You must be in a position to be convinced yourself, in order to be convincing.

This claim is demonstrably untrue.

Do you believe that a written argument cannot be convincing? Or do you believe that when you read a written argument, your beliefs can somehow be transmitted back to the author, even if the author is long dead, and be convincing in that author’s mind?

When I taught I often thought of it as explaining in a spiral: first I must go around the concept, before I can dive in to the concept. Going around gives boundary and definition to what I'm talking about, allowing people to place it in the proper spot in their mental framework and to relate it with other nearby things. It also gives some motivation for what this thing is and why they should care. Then when that is done (and it does not take long), the details can be discussed, and they're easier to communicate because people are primed to receive them.

You can spend too much time communicating and not communicate enough at the same time. Effectiveness is the key here.

> Listening is a skill, one which is can be perfected if practiced

communicating is also a skill

learning to communicate effectively can be perfected too

> This is a phenomena I have yet to experience in the wild.

I have totally seen infinite meetings where nothing is achieved, nothing is really said, but someone socially isolate just talks and talks and talks because it is his only chance to interact.

Spending time "on" communicating is not the same thing as communicating.

I think this is, more often, that we are spending too much time pretending to communicate. Far too often I've found myself in a meeting that doesn't have a quorum, but people try to have the meeting anyway. Even more often than that, I've found myself in a meeting that doesn't have the sufficient pre-requisites to be useful. It will just be some AI slop document dropped in front of folks, with little to no regard for coherent thought or responsibility. It's 30 minutes of gaslighting the readers, trying to make them feel stupid for "not getting it", followed by 10 minutes of "this meeting was a waste of time" course-correction (we read our docs in the beginning of meetings).

And the problem is that the communication (or alignment) is the thing that the meeting is supposed to be about, sharing well-considered thoughts and cohesive direction, soliciting meaningful feedback against clearly-articulated assertions. Instead, we're all-to-often addressing someone's attempt to turn their job into a group project, the stone soup of the modern business world. You can lay this bare by asking "what is the aim of this meeting?" early on, to level-set that the meeting owner isn't just setting up a study group.

Birds-eye-view-only managers only see work get done in meetings, so they assume that the meeting is where the work gets done. They don't understand all of the work that went into what came before the meeting to make it a successful one. If you rush the "communication" before you've found the clarity of thought, your meeting is just noise.

There's a simple but powerful response to this sort of persistent malaise, one that strikes fear in the hearts of the secretly inept: "I don't know, but let's figure it out right now."

When it's time to slow down and walk through the problem, I hold folks to an ordering of dependency: Why, What, How, Who, When... If you don't know all of the things before (e.g., Why, What, How - if you're trying to figure out Who), you cannot proceed. I don't care if you're an intern or a VP. No short-cuts to bullshit hand-wavy answers.

Decompose the problem, do the thinking, reason through it right there, and, if the team doesn't change its behavior, find another team. In the right environment, some folks are willing and able to step up to the plate and act like grown-ups working together to craft something better. Sadly, quite a few can't (or won't) answer the call to be responsible adults.

So they call another agenda-less meeting.

Then we ask "whys" to understand the non-technical process. Maybe there is no need to add/change anything.

> We cannot do everything if we need to launch a reliable product.

Agreed, otherwise it would be Turing complete Excel/Email clone.

"The closed mind, if closed long enough, can be opened by nothing short of dynamite."

In these situations, the non-technical people don’t understand the costs, the technical people don’t understand the benefits. The communication from both sides is needed to find a good cost-to-benefit tradeoff

It is! If I contort a little, the Tower of Babel is the communication problem in reverse. But original sin means we're born sinners so towards effective communication is toward God. But that's not the point of life, the point is serving God as a sinner for salvation (bible stuff, not my point).

What a privilige it must be to be able to have a job where you can stand up and leave when your psyche can't handle it. Ever done tech support for ten hours a day? :)

You've missed the point and agreed with the GP.

Too much time is spent attempting to communicate and as such, communication isn't actually happening.

(i.e. we all spend way too much time in useless meetings where nothing happens and few people are any more informed than they were before)

In my experience in software architecture, drawing a diagram often saves you >60 minutes of discussion and potentially multiple meetings. This works even with a badly drawn but truthful one.

Use an Ai agent + Mermaid.js for a quick scribble if you are in a remote meeting. Use white boards or pen + paper in a local meeting.

Diagrams are so much clearer then words, especially if the concept or logic in question is not trivial.

This is kind of the exact thing the article is about though. They're not "failing to understand" costs - they just have different context. Your job is to help them make informed tradeoffs, not to expect them to already know what things cost before asking.

I’ve been in so many meetings where the outcome is to plan another meeting, and include even more folks. Whichever team brings the most folks steers the decision in their favor, and thus manages hire more unnecessary employees for political will (which then increases the need for even more meetings).

The way out is creating a singular vision (eg leadership) and assigning teams goals they can work independently on towards that vision. It is to remove dependences between teams (and thus the need for them to communicate as much), not to increase communication or Jira tickets or Gantt charts or RACI matrices.

Strangely, even more annoying than the "I I I I" articles that reeks of narcissism.

So you estimate costs in months and dollars, and give that in response to each. Very solvable issue.

> Assuming bad faith immediately kills all productivity, so there's no point in finishing reading this.

First, the author is not assuming bad faith. They are saying that judging people is common pitfall. And the "hating or dismissing people for misunderstanding the thing you documented badly" is something I have seen done so many times, that yep, it exists.

But second unrelated thing is, sometimes there is a bad faith. Refusing to accept that bad faith situation can happen just makes it massively harder to solve the issue. It empowers the person acting in bad faith.

Kinda depends on what your position and circle of influence is.

I will admit that sometimes the circle of influence seems bigger than expected though.

> logic bullying

Wow, you've just described my communication style when I'm angry. So consice yet captures the problem so well

That cost has now gone way down, with AI doing that code thing. Love it or hate it, that is the reality.

Judging people doesn’t imply bad faith. We are all judging people all the time. It takes constant effort trying to be self-aware of it and trying to compensate for it.

Some people are just too stubborn, especially if they come from a place of authority and seniority. I'm doing house repair work right now with an older relative. He learned how to do repairs and renovations by himself, things like working laminate floors, mortar, laying tiles etc. The things is, he has his own reasoning and rhythym of doing things and doesn't like to be challenged, but I feel his ways don't always make sense, esp when I feel he is rushing and improvising (a programmer can tell). I haven't done much handy work myself in the past, but I'm a millennial, so I google things, watch youtube videos, and I read instructions. I also know that it isn't rocket science, my parents built our own home brick by brick. And now, every step of the way I have to be pushy to get my way, and make it sound like I'm not imposing or too nitpicky or challenging his "expertise", it's very taxing, I made a big scene once already and the whole relationship is now strained.

I've had the privilege to have been more than half a century on this planet and my experience has not been super great regarding being vulnerable. It takes great skill to not have it mentally affect you. Even if you get ten thousand positive results, a mere two bad results will affect you even more. Nevertheless i agreee it is always better to start with empathy.

But what about my impression that it is getting worse? When I (as a developer) was trying to help customers with the product 20 years ago, about 50% (my guesstimate) of the people were actually reading what I wrote, at least to a good degree. These days I am lucky if it is 20% who are reading answers to their problems more than in a completely superficial way. I blame social media and smartphones.

> If I contort a little, the Tower of Babel is the communication problem in reverse.

That is what I was referring to. I don't see that you need to contort anything. The story plainly states that without communication problems, man is powerful enough to frighten God, and that the solution God reaches is to introduce communication problems, leaving us stuck in the situation we actually have.

The importance of communication has been recognized for a long time.

Either leave or make your psyche able to handle it. If your psyche won't be able to handle it, you will have a mental breakdown and leave anyway. Which outcome would you like more, leaving before or after mental breakdown?

I don't think "attempting to communicate" - or especially not "attempting to LISTEN" as in the title here - would be the stated reason for many meetings. "Pitching people on your shit" or "making sure shit gets done the way management wants it to" is much more accurate for most corporate dev and B2B/B2C sales/product meetings.

For the typical "agile" process for software:

- standup: this fits, attempting to communicate status and request help with blockers

- backlog grooming: attempting to figure out what to do with artifacts of generally-async communication (tickets from a backlog, either created by you in the past or by others). attempting to fit them into the process best. Communication is often seen as a necessary evil, and this process often goes faster with fewer people. if people bring up questions, there may be some attempts to communicate in explanations.

- sprint planning: work assignment and time management/estimations. similar to above, questions could spark attempts to communicate, but it's not the primary purpose.

- sprint retro: improve the team dynamics and the flow of the process. communication is usually assumed here, but in practice it's "people saying things, they get written down, then the next sprint happens same as the last." there often isn't effective communication to the people who could change things

I think if the goal of meetings was more specifically "we are going to communicate until our mental pictures are exactly the same" you'd end up with faster/better actual work from everyone on the team.

But in big orgs that's usually not even what's wanted. If the plan sucks, but it's a VP's pet project, it's not good for various whole teams in that org to all effectively communicate with each other to realize it sucks but not have the political skills or pull to change the VP's mind...

Unless you are literally in manacles chained to an oar on a slave ship, you have the option to stand up for yourself. Everyone has to navigate the needs of life somehow. The simple universal requirement to find food somewhere somehow in no way translates to "what a privilege it must be". You have exactly that same luxury because it's not a luxury it's simply existing.

> Too much time is spent attempting to communicate and as such, communication isn't actually happening.

This is where I think we have a different definition of communication.

> (i.e. we all spend way too much time in useless meetings where nothing happens and few people are any more informed than they were before)

Hence my clarification of:

  Most meetings are not about communication. They are usually 
  prescriptive in form and dictatorial in nature.

For example, if a project kick-off meeting consists of the highest ranking managers talking and everyone else having no contribution, listen to what they are saying; their "vision" is all that matters.

Another example is when product and/or engineer managers use "stand-ups" to ask each engineer the status of their deliverables. Listen to what they are saying; we micromanage and do not trust the team.

  Listening is a skill, one which is can be perfected if practiced.

I've done tech support for years, since 1996.

Your assumptions are also very wrong, my psyche could kill you, I simply know what I want on my side and you on your side, we have to meet somewhere in the middle, otherwise it's not listening, it's abuse.

If you don't stand up for yourself, nobody will.

Your view is US centric, I live in Europe, we have rights, we can't be fired for having opinions. We don't work 10 hours a day, we have rights.

You have this strange stance where employees are slaves, living in a one man dictatorship.

We are not.

Maybe this is just my interpretation but OP effectively argued "too many ineffective meetings, we should have less unnecessary meetings and a clearer, independent direction".

The commenter above argued that the problem was slightly different, it's not too many meetings for communication but too many that are not achieving effective communication. A meeting in itself does not create communication (of information and exchange of opinions etc.) and the commenter wanted to increase the number of meaningful meetings instead of/in addition to just cutting down meetings by numbers. The criticism of not enough time spent on communication is in the same vein, both agree on the issue of "too many unnecessary meetings".

I have feedback in the past that people don't like diagrams upfront, because it presents a finished solution.

Has it, though? There's still features that bring large user value and require 10 lines of code, and features that bring a small user value and require AI to burn tokens on huge refactors and babying to make sure it doesn't break anything.

i've all AI subscription, cost is definitely down but risks aren't. You can still break things, you can make mistakes.

Critical issue is that it expects leaders to actually lead. Common yet fatal flaw in many plans.

Yes, it helps to keep the bigger picture (pun intended) in focus and something tangible to criticise. Same for design docs. Otherwise, the conversation‘s spotlight just keeps moving around and might even follow whatever thread one of the more prolific speakers just came up with, which carries the danger of derailing the whole thing and adjourning without a decision.

it's not possible to make everyone understand nuclear physics, there is certain threshold of cognitive skills/motivation required for that.

I think the quality of comms is definitely getting worse, I work for myself now and I am very selective of clients now. So I don’t butt heads against it as much, but it still happens despite best efforts, especially when people move on or even go on vacation.

Literacy skills have been falling and it shows up in testing of a lot of different countries, and it basically lines up with the arrival of iPhone/Android(or real smart phones).

That's kind of it though, isn't it? If you're going to convince him there has to be a reasonable chance that the opposite will happen and that he'll convince you that he's too old to learn new tricks or whatever and he's going to have to do it his way because he isn't up to the challenge of doing a better job.

If your range of outcomes is [He'll do things my way, There'll be a scene and a strained relationship] then sometimes there'll be a scene and a strained relationship. If the range of outcomes is [we do things my way and he hates it, we do things his way and I hate it] then that's at least softer on the relationship. If you're lucky maybe you don't even care and you can just live with some parts of the work being bad.

One of those awkward things is that being good at negotiating means that other people are more likely to get what they want. It is actually a bit counter-intuitive.

Oh the author continued by saying: "Stop assuming they are bad at their job or their lives".

This was too absurd and hostile for me to continue listening.

I asked myself whether I thought the author was bad at writing, and realized I fell into their trap.

I asked myself how lost and angry someone has to be to write crap like this, and realized I did it again.

Some people have a real knack for being so defensive and insecure that they invite their own pain. They unwittingly coerce people who meant them no harm into doing so. Everyone is a victim for trying to take this blog post seriously.

That's certainly one way of looking at daily stand-up. The other way is that humans aren't perfectly spherical communicators so sometimes daily stand-up really does manage to bring up blockers for the manager to actually resolve.

Yes this clearly illustrates the difference in labour laws and basic human rights between US and Europe. "to have a job where you can stand up and leave when your psyche can't handle it."

This just sounds nuts to me, not being able to have the right for sick days/leave when your mentally unwell...

It's also counter-productive, people that are unwell won't be very efficient. Happy and healthy people work better.

Standard philosophical problem, you're disagreeing about the definition of a word instead of the content of the message.

Step back and think if a dispute over the usage of the word is necessary or helpful in this context.

Amusingly this is where a lot of communication goes to die, loss of the big picture and discussion of how to use particular words.

Clearly you agree with OP about how time is wasted but you're insisting on using different language to express the same idea.

Y'all are saying the same thing over and over with slightly different words proposing that the different way of saying it has a meaningful impact on the message. It doesn't.

>"too many ineffective meetings, we should have less unnecessary meetings and a clearer, independent direction".

>it's not too many meetings for communication but too many that are not achieving effective communication

^^ there's no meaningful distinction between those two, discussions that devolve into such things suck all potential value out of a thread.

I take it seriously and don’t feel like a victim at all. Maybe you never think that someone is bad at their job or their life, but many people do, myself included. It’s neither absurd nor hostile when someone points it out. The article isn’t about morals, it’s about what is a constructive way to get useful results.

The people involved in commissioning and funding nuclear power plants don't understand nuclear physics either.

The customer doesn't need to understand how the solution works, as long as they can understand that it would solve their problem (in the case of the power plant: producing "clean" energy) and any potential drawbacks or limitations (in the case of the power plant: the waste byproduct).

The point here is that as a "tech person", it's your job to help the customer understand the cost of what they're asking, and come up with a satisfactory solution based on your understanding of their needs.

The distinction is explicit in the statements you quoted. One is advocating for lessening the number of meetings. One is saying that won't help, and instead advocating for increasing the quality of meetings.

> Standard philosophical problem, you're disagreeing about the definition of a word instead of the content of the message.

Perhaps I should have said we have a different understanding or expectation of communication, instead of "definition." For this confusion I introduced, I apologize.

> Clearly you agree with OP about how time is wasted but you're insisting on using different language to express the same idea.

I do not.

Again, as I previously self-quoted:

  Most meetings are not about communication. They are usually 
  prescriptive in form and dictatorial in nature.

OP postulated:

  Or maybe we're spending too much time on communicating.

To which I disagreed. OP then opined:

  If too much time is allocated then its hard to stay focused 
  and there's always the next time that can be used to 
  clarify.

Which is an indirect reference to meetings, not communication.

Finally, OP concluded with:

  Cut all the unnecessary meetings and only allocate the 
  minimum viable time to communicate. Then everyone will be 
  listening.

Which erroneously correlates meetings with listening. Your original response included:

  ... we all spend way too much time in useless meetings where 
  nothing happens ...

Thus reinforcing said erroneous correlation. I blame myself for insufficiently expressing my thoughts on the difference between listening, which is implicit in communication and the topic of the article, and meetings, which are an assembly of people requiring only physical presence.

Actually, it isn't.

The first is:

* Acknowledging that too many meetings are ineffective

* Suggesting reducing the number of inneffective meetings

* Saying there needs to be clearer, independent direction

The second is:

* Stating that there are not too many meetings in general (the first says nothing about this)

* Acknowledging that too many meetings are ineffective (same as bullet 1 of the first sentence)

* Not suggesting how to address either problem

I agree with GP. There is no meaningful distinction between the 2, but the first suggests 2 ways to solve the problem of ineffective meetings whereas the second simply acknowledges the existing of problems.

You're still doing it. Now with "definition" vs. "a different understanding or expectation of"

You are not understanding, perhaps willfully, what people are writing and muddying the waters by trying to make unimportant distinctions about words instead of engaging with the meaning as intended by the author.

Every one of your clarifications has just been a pedantic restatement of what someone else clearly meant using different words trying to make a distinction which is not at all necessary to make.