Hacker News Reader

Comment by http-teapot | Hacker News Reader

I've never been as busy as the past 4 months. I don't reply to emails that requires lengthy text. If I can reply by "Yes", "No" or any of the derivatives then you'll get an answer from me.

If you have a problem, what do you think is the solution? If you need something, what exactly do you need? You want to contact me, what's your phone number and when are you available? You don't feel great, why? How can we solve the problem?

It's super important to not hurt people feelings and speak right and that takes a lot of my time (especially as a non-native English speaker.)

On the other end I commit to read every emails.

View on HN

> If you have a problem, what do you think is the solution? If you need something, what exactly do you need? You want to contact me, what's your phone number and when are you available? You don't feel great, why? How can we solve the problem?

These are going to seem constructive criticisms for people with whom you share communications preferences. That ought to be a lot of the people who read HN. Information-driven people, in a sense.

Outside of that group, good luck if you ever have a boss or colleague who prefers rapport and empathetic communication over the more direct, rational style you prefer. You are going to continually wonder why that boss expects you to read their mind. They are going to continually wonder why you can't consider others' needs from time to time, and put yourself in their shoes.

A tough reality for those with a strong "just the facts" bias, but a commitment to read every email is laughable in this context. Without stepping outside of your comfort zone and learning to accommodate different communication styles, you are vulnerable to the sort of emotion-driven problems that come crashing down right at the most inconvenient time.

>Good luck if you ever have a boss or a colleague who prefers rapport and empathetic communication over the more direct, rational style you prefer. You are going to continually wonder why that boss expects you to read their mind.

That hit home for me. I once got called down to HR to find my boss there. I discovered at that moment that she was frustrated with how long it was taking me to do my job. Part of my job is pulling data for mailings out of our database. We have ~1 million constituents, and regularly send mailings with tens of thousands of recipients. She had performed that role before me, and she felt that it could be done much more quickly that I was performing it.

Turns out, I could perform the task as quickly as she expected, but I had totally misunderstood a conversation we had months earlier. Word had gotten to my boss that a person had called in because of a factual error on a piece of mail we had sent them. She came by my desk and asked me about the error, as I had specifically said the file was 99.5% error free. I mentioned that the incorrect information had been put in the database by someone else, and the error rate was about what I had expected. She told me that she wanted 99.9% error free mailings from then on.

Later on, I sent her data for another mailing. She came by my desk and asked if the data was 100% correct. I said I was confident it was 99.9% correct. She said we couldn't have any errors this time, and we needed to make sure that the data was 100% correct. I told her that it was fundamentally impossible to be 100% sure the data was correct. She said that she understood, but she wanted it 99.99% correct, as we couldn't mail constituents information that was wrong. I said it would probably take 10x longer to run the data, but I could do that if she wanted it. She did, so I proceeded to make sure the data was 99.99% correct.

She was absolutely flabbergasted when I brought these conversations up. To her, she thought 100% confidence meant "pretty damn sure" and 99% confidence was somewhere around "It's probably right, maybe." From my perspective, 99.5% correct meant we'd have 5 or fewer bad rows for every 1000 rows in the data.

It was so weird for both of us, because we both thought we had been incredibly clear with the other person. I thought I had been very clear with my point -- I had spoken with her about how long it would take to ensure the data was 99.99% correct several times, because I was concerned about the delay. She had thought she was being emphatic, ad I was just being a pain in the ass. The thing is, that I'm generally not particularly hung up on the difference between literal meaning and figurative meaning, and she generally pretty clear when expressing what she wanted in technical conversations without hyperbole. So she hadn't even considered that I was interpreting her comments literally, and I hadn't considered that she was being hyperbolic.

It was definitely a huge learning experience for both of us. We had both been really stressed for months because we failed to communicate effectively with one another, despite both of us recognizing the same problem and trying to bring it to the other person's attention.

Interesting story. I sympathize with you. Seems to me that when you use actual numbers, they should mean what numbers mean -- otherwise, what's the point of using them in the first place? So yes, 99.5% means 5 errors in 1000 rows, etc.

Just tell her you're giving it 110% effort :-)

>110% effort.

I'll just make 55% of the rows doubly accurate. The other 45% of the rows... well, we just won't talk about those.

> When you use actual numbers, they should mean what numbers mean

That's what I thought, but percentages seem to be thought-terminating cliches for most people. I generally use ratios when presenting information to most people as a result, but I really thought my manager and I were on the same page. This issue certainly wouldn't have happened if I had described our error as "1-in-200" from the start.

I report directly to the director of the organization now though, and in addition to being much more pragmatic about necessary trade-offs, he is pretty hands-off. I think a hands-off style to management goes a long way to reducing communications errors. Each conversation becomes much more important when you aren't having them just for the sake of having them, so everyone seems to pay attention more.

I hope your manager took at least some responsibility for the miscommunication, because I can't figure out how you could have been clearer. Pointing out the cost of getting to true 99.99% accuracy should have been enough -- particularly when the prediction was borne out.

Nobody understands percentages. This isn't just something that happens to people with normal average intelligence. It happens to lawyers in adversarial situations; it happens to doctors and nurses talking about test results; it happens to bosses.

If you ever find yourself using a percentage you're often better off switching to normal numbers. "1 in 10,000"; "50 out of 100"; "9,999 out of 10,000". This is especially true if you're communicating changes. "Risk rises from 1 in 10,000 to 2 in 10,000", rather than "100% increase in risk".

After 20 years of working I've learned: answer quickly (to the emails that you intend to reply to) even if the only thing you can say is "I have read this and will get back to you".

I used to fuzz and wait until I had the ultimate, perfect reply.. usually like 12-48 hours later. Turns out that is the wrong approach - for the reasons outlined in this article.

> On the other end I commit to read every emails.

That was my defense too! I iterated it over and over to my team (my bosses would get preferential treatment...), but noone would believe me - unless I responded. People tend not to believe invisible things.

This is a good strategy, and even better if you tell them when to expect a proper reply (and then you stick to it). That really helps the sender make plans at their end, and thus reduce their stress.

I also, perhaps a little surprising (but not really), found that it reduced my own stress as well.

Actually, this would be a neat function in a mail client. Let's call it "Not now" - an action that:

a) pre-composes a reply with a canned response (but lets you edit it)

b) reminds you if you don't end up replying within some time (perhaps even parses that time out of what you ended up writing in that response)

Didn't they add "snooze" button in Gmail recently?

https://support.google.com/inbox/answer/6067583?hl=en

Seems like it only does the reminder part though.

That makes sense, I think acknowledging with a "thank you" could go a long way. Not a big fan of committing to get back to the subject since it'd just delay the inevitable and possibly pile up onto a huge pile of todos. I guess there are sometimes no way around it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com