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Comment by bunderbunder | Hacker News Reader

I believe that some of this is differences in communication style. I like written communication because I don't process verbal communication as well. But I've also had plenty of colleagues who are more comfortable with verbal communication, and may not process prose as well. Many of them seemed hesitant to believe they'd fully understood something until they'd had a chance to talk through it to confirm. And, yes, needed verbal prompting in the same way that I tend to need written prompting.

The most functional workplaces understand and respect these differences and make room for everyone's communication style.

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Yeah that's true to an extent. I've also had many occasions where someone asks for an update on x and I respond with a two line email asking a yes/no question and the person just says "let's hop on a quick call" etc. That's so frustrating because they're turning 30 seconds into 30 minutes.

Not the person you're responding to but just needed to vent that. It's been happening a lot lately in my world

Some people only really think things through by talking. Reading doesn’t do it for them. Even if they’re just talking to themselves, they don’t really process the information until it actually comes out of their own mouths.

You need to figure out which people are which type. You seem to be a “this could have been an e-mail” type of person. So am I. But my wife is a talker.

For some of those talkers, they actually need to see your face and not just hear your voice. Otherwise, they feel like they’re not getting any information from you.

And for some of those people, it has to be in-person, a video call won’t do — they can’t see your entire environment around you and all the things you can see which they cannot.

To be fair, over 90% of all human communication is not verbalized — it’s in the expression on their face, the way they look around the room, what they’re looking at while they’re talking to you, your body language, the faces you’re making when they are the one talking, etc….

Of the remainder, over 90% is not the actual text of the words being spoken, it’s in the delivery of the words, your tone of voice, are you speaking quickly or slowly, etc….

So, those of us who are on the “this could have been an e-mail” spectrum, we are depending solely on the text in front of us, which is about 1% of the total information that could have been conveyed through non-textual and non-audio parts of the process.

If you’re okay with that, then that’s great! But that only works with other people who are on that end of the spectrum.

So, to get back to my earlier point — you need to know what type of person you are, and you need to know what type of person the other person/people is/are. And you need to adapt your communication style to suit them. Or, make sure that they understand where your limits are and how far you can adapt, and then it’s up to them to try to adapt the rest of that distance.

My wife and I are about to celebrate our 27th anniversary. We are still very much a “work in process” on this topic. I am no expert, but I do have decades of experience with hard lessons that I’ve learned over the years.

Some people just don't have enough to do and setting up "quick chats" makes them feel busy.

ornthey think they have a lot of questions and think they will be less disruptive by having a call. You also didnt give them the response they wanted to hear, which is that you own the problem and they can tell somebody else that its being handled

I feel you.

I am sympathetic to the "different communication style" line of reasoning, but I don't really buy it in the example I used / people I work with at present.

As far as I'm concerned, responding to some well-prepared prose with "lets discuss this", is just a non-response, and a refusal to engage. If one wanted to have a useful discussion, but preferred something verbal, actually picking up the phone, or responding with something like "I'm curuous about X/Y/Z. Let's discuss this at 2pm, I'll send you an invitation", or "please find some time in my calendar for us to look at this."

That would keep the matter progressing, and provide the opportunity to prepare for a useful discussion. "lets discuss this" is just saying "I need you to spoon-feed this to me, but I'm not going to make arrangements for that, so you'll need to figure out how to deal with that.".

My theory is that it’s an intuitive rate limiting scheme devised to cope with the corporate fire hose. There’s no limit on the amount of text coming into an office worker’s inbox in a unit of time. But if one focuses on verbal communication, there’s always going to be a single stream.

Personally, I don’t do this; instead I deal with the stress of the fire hose by grinding my teeth to stubs at night. And for the messages I don’t get to, instead of “let’s discuss”, the sender gets nothing at all.

The kind of person willing to work into the night will also be rewarded with even more requests. Over time your colleagues figure out who works with urgency and who doesn't, and that informs who they ask when they need something.

Yep, this was me most of my career. Started a new job a couple of years ago, except this time I dialled down the effort to like 80% and enforced strict separation between work hours and home hours, and it's been wonderful

My gut based on what you're describing is that there is some degree of "strategic neglect" happening here, where people the people doing this are effectively allowing the things being asked of them to self-prioritize: the proposals/emails/PRs/etc that get attention are the ones where the person who sent it follows up or schedules a meeting to discuss it, meaning they're likely higher priority than things where the person doesn't make that extra effort. This is a longstanding if exasperating strategy many people use, but I think it's getting more popular now that lobbing out a long proposal is easier than ever (because of AI).

I've worked with a lot of people who will not engage with a request until the request has been made multiple times.

Its a very lazy way of filtering.

"It couldn't have been that important" is their logic.

I mentioned elsewhere that I was once coached to do this. In that situation it honestly wasn’t lazy at all. At the time I was fielding such a high load of incoming requests that even reading and responding to them was eating up a huge chunk of my time and preventing me from getting anything else (i.e., actually doing any of the requested work) done.

I realize that this looked to the people requesting my attention like deliberate stonewalling. That’s because it was. And it wasn’t cool. But, “This quarter I didn’t ship any software because I was too busy answering email,” would not have earned me a satisfactory performance review. And I certainly was not going to openly admit to anyone but my immediate manager that I was using persistence as a prioritization signal. I saw what happened to the poor schmuck who made that mistake.

Are LLMs are going to neutralize this as a tactic? Or reinforce it? They will happily bombard you with text, and you can set up an agent to fire back. More text than ever will be transmitted, with less and less of it ever coming to the attention of a human.

itll stay exactly where it is.

scheduling a meeting is telling somebody that you consider this to be a priority and therefore they should too

Just because it is your priority, doesn't make it mine.

The current situation I have is that I have 5 people demanding that I have their stuff as a priority, and they will schedule meetings to tell me such.

If I'm in 5 hours of status update and demo meetings every day how much actual work is going to get completed?

This sounds like the tragedy of commons. If someone arranges a meeting with you, it is more likely that you will work on their project afterwards, because you have already been thinking about it during the meeting, you already have the context in your mind, and probably a few ideas about what to do next...

Therefore, everyone starts demanding meetings from you, because they have nothing to gain by not doing so -- you wouldn't use the extra time to work on their projects, but on the projects of those who insisted on meetings.

If you have so many meetings that you can't get actual work done, that sucks for everyone, but again, they have nothing to gain by canceling their meeting, unless everyone else does the same thing. But the others won't do the same thing, because now you have time to work on some projects, and they prefer those to be their projects.

What I learned managing high performers is a disproportionate number of them had very hard childhoods and carry permanent scars that make this behavior destructive. These are the people that generally get ignored in every aspect of their life because their brain is operating much faster than the rest of society and get mistaken for being insane in every facet of their life. So when they experience this kind of behavior in an environment that's supposed to reward them for their ideas, it's stultifying. Those high performers are not going to continue putting effort and energy into novel ideas if they're being ignored.

The solution is pretty simple: just fire the manager.

a high performer will push through that to get what they want done though. the obvious case for a higher performer in this is to develop strong back channels and trust with whoever usually blows off unnecessary work

To be clear, I'm not saying a one sentence Slack message can't be ignored. I've coached these folks about how they might need to make multiple attempts to get someone's attention and they're always receptive.

But that's very different than when an engineer stays up all night investigating a very serious issue, writing it up completely, and offering multiple solutions in a wall of text that can't be brushed off in Slack. The engineer makes multiple attempts across multiple weeks and communication platforms to get their attention, and it's ignored. Not "we're busy but will get back to you when we can." Just completely ignored.

A high performer (and really anyone) should not have to resign themselves to office politics to workaround this kind of dysfunction. It's imperative to fire such managers so that you don't lose the trust of the people doing the work.

Totally fair. I don’t know your actual situation and I also find these kinds of interactions to be infinitely frustrating.

But it took me a long time to realize there can be a sort of “double empathy” problem across communication styles that makes it difficult for people to accurately infer each other’s intent. They might even be operating from two slightly etiquette norms, such that the same behavior is considered polite by one person and dismissive or hostile by the other. Not saying that’s your particular situation, just talking generalities since that’s all I reasonably can speak to on a pseudonymous forum like this.

You know, there are a lot of things I hated about working at Amazon/AWS. But one thing that worked really well for me was how they handled meetings.

First off, you have to have an agenda. And the agenda has to point to a document that lays out all the things you’re going to talk about. Depending on the nature of the meeting and what you are there to discuss, that might be a simple “one pager” or a more in-depth “two pager”, or a very in-depth “six pager”. But the expectation is that everyone will sit there at the beginning of the meeting and read through the document. If you want to read it in advance, you can do that. But the expectation is that everyone will read it for the first time at the meeting.

Once you’ve all read the document, then you can discuss it.

This method addresses both ends of the “this could have been an e-mail” spectrum. But it requires a lot of rigor, and you have to get good at writing proper documents. Otherwise, you’re going to get destroyed at every meeting where you are the person writing the document. Fortunately, they have a lot of examples you can crib from, so you can get good at this quickly.

They also delegate a lot of responsibility for making decisions to the edge. You can ask around to see if a meeting needs to be held on certain subjects, and the answer is usually “no”. You can make the decision yourself and justify it, and document that justification. Then you move on.

If you’re having a disagreement with someone on a topic, you really need to work hard to come to a consensus or agreement with the other person on that subject. You don’t want to have to write a document and have a meeting with a senior person, and then have them ask “why the fuck didn’t you two guys settle this yourselves instead of bringing this problem to me?” Bring solutions, not problems.

Or, if you have a problem that really is insurmountable, then at least bring along a couple of potential solutions or paths towards potential solutions, and then the meeting becomes a discussion of which path to which solution will be chosen and why.

This is similar to me asking some basic questions to the LLM instead of reading the text it wants me to read and review. The difference is that it’s a robot and you’re not.

LLMs are a good case study, and I'd argue it's exactly the same phenomenon - just with LLMs, people feel allowed to just say "I don't have time to read this wall of text, 90% of that is noise anyway", because LLMs won't get offended.

Also GP is presuming the person on the other end should automatically care about request being sent to them. They don't.

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