Again... in many contexts, yes I appreciate the detail. I'm not saying engineer-to-manager or engineer-to-engineer communication should also be terse.

But some people struggle to collect their thoughts clearly, and struggle to articulate simple answers to even the simplest of questions. I have seen this, and seen how detrimental it is to their effectiveness as engineers and teammates. My approach is to actively coach people on my team that I see with poor communication.

And it's a valuable skill that I'm advocating. When an engineer is invited to a VP presentation, and the VP asks "Has this feature launched?", you better believe they don't want a 3-minute ramble of the challenges they faced, or what they'd do differently, or whatever. They want to know: "Has. This. Feature. Shipped?"