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'.
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).
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.
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!
It’s been my experience that those that most loudly say they value extreme directness like this are also those with the most fragile egos. If you directly tell them something they did is wrong or non-optimal, they conclude that you’re an idiot, don’t change anything (or, worse, double-down), and will sometimes even berate you (directness!). You need to couch your discussions with them more than is usual with others.
Many people are taking what I believe to be the wrong message here.
I believe the author's intent was (or should have been) to describe how THEY wanted to receive communication, not how EVERYONE should.
A skilled communicator will craft their message for the audience. Some want "just the facts" with no social lubricant. Others want the banter to build person-to-person relationships. Some want a quick statement of context for everything. If you can adjust the message to the audience you will be more successful at working with them.
I have begun including "how I want you to communicate with me" as part of my standard "introduce myself to new team members" talk.
This is just advocating being lazy in communication. Which is entirely expected and in harmony with our time starved work environments.
> 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 read this passage on the blog's diary page and I found it beautiful and poignant.
> 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.
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 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 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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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:
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.
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'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".
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 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.
> 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.
Maybe this is a bit US-centric, direct negative feedback is very common in many cultures, e.g. Dutch
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.
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 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?
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 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.
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.
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 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.
I think the author's sentiments can be neatly summarized as follows: "I wish I didn't live in a society".
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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
> This is the literal opposite of professionalism
I'm curious what definition the author is using of professionalism.
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".
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
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.
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".
Related. Others?
Crocker's rules - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12881288 - Nov 2016 (54 comments)
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.
Given the subject, it is funny to me that this post is meandering and repetitive.
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
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.
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.
This sounds absolutely perfect for interaction with an LLM. It should be a toggle switch in settings.
Is this appropriate to apply to the managerial conversation closers like “let’s take this offline”?
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.
Based on his more recent posts (e.g., on Facebook), I doubt Lee Daniel Crocker would approve of Crocker's Rules any longer.
>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).
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
Agreed.
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.
This article spends a lot of words to tell us that we should be more succinct in our communication.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
“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 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?
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
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).
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:
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.
> "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.
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.
This is a recipe for disaster. Please don’t follow Crocker’s Rules; just get better at communicating than the person who wrote this.
“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.
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.