Ask HN: Why do some people not communicate clearly?
FWIW, I found this kind of question to be much less frustrating when I remember that communication is a 2+ player activity. If poor communication is happening, it is the responsibility of all parties involved to remedy the problem. That is, it&#x27;s not that &quot;Joe is bad at communication&quot;: it&#x27;s more along the lines of &quot;Joe and I do not communicate well&quot;. There are always hurdles, but if you&#x27;re motivated to communicate with somebody, work with them to overcome those hurdles. This is <i>not</i> pointlessly-spent energy: software engineering is primarily a communication-oriented profession (either with other people or communicating your exact intent via code). It&#x27;s part of the job.<p>Some strategies to employ that I&#x27;ve picked up from professors and colleagues over the years:<p>* If you ask a question and you feel that the answer does not adequately address it, ask for further clarification. The person answering may feel that they&#x27;ve answered based on the knowledge that <i>they</i> have but if you&#x27;re missing some critical bit of context, what they&#x27;ve said might not make sense to you. Canned phrases: &quot;I&#x27;m sorry, I&#x27;m still not understanding. Can you help get me caught up?&quot; or &quot;I might be missing something: [specific followup question about their answer here]&quot; or &quot;I&#x27;m not sure, but we might be talking about different things. When you say ___, do you mean ___ or ___?&quot;.<p>* If the conversation wanders, focus on what they&#x27;re saying and let them finish. Once they&#x27;ve completed their thought, if you&#x27;re still pretty sure that it&#x27;s tangential to what you were asking&#x2F;talking about before, ask a question that refocuses the conversation. Canned phrases: &quot;I think we may be getting slightly off track here. We were talking about xyz, but now we&#x27;re talking about ___ and I&#x27;m a little confused at the relation between the two.&quot; or &quot;I&#x27;d really like to talk with you more about ____, but before we move on, can we quickly wrap up about the xyz question -- [repeat your original question]&quot;.<p>* If team discussions go off the rails frequently, bring that up in a retro sometime. If everyone agrees that&#x27;s actually happening (remember that <i>your perception</i> of the conversation might be different from others), try to get people to agree on a strategy for noticing tangential discussions and then refocus the conversation to the topic at hand. A team I was on picked a random word that anyone could say or drop in the zoom chat during a meeting and everyone was supposed to stop talking about whatever they were talking about and come back to the topic at hand <i>or</i> justify how it was relevant. We had one team member who often hijacked the discussion with stream-of-consciousness style talking that started relevant and then wandered. Eventually, somebody just dropped &quot;Objection. Relevance?&quot; in the chat, everyone had a laugh, and then we talked about it in retro. This isn&#x27;t something that there are really canned phrases for -- it&#x27;s a team dynamic thing.<p>* Lack of clarity in speech is usually lack of clarity in thought in my experience. This is an opportunity for you to help them clarify their own thinking <i>as well as yours</i>. This takes a lot of practice and it can be tiring for introverts especially, but it&#x27;s really valuable time spent -- especially on a technical team. Canned phrases: &quot;I&#x27;m not super clear on the details of ____. Do you have a few minutes and can we dive into that a bit?&quot; (then continue to ask probing questions until they get to either a question or an &quot;i don&#x27;t know&quot;). This works best if you already have a bit of context about the topic of conversation&#x2F;problem domain.<p>* Over-complicating can either be an indicator of lack of clarity on their part <i>or</i> that it&#x27;s actually a really complicated topic and that the question isn&#x27;t valid as stated. For instance, &quot;How does the internet work?&quot; is a question that can have different answers depending on your audience. For non-technical people, it might be as simple as &quot;You plug these cables in, make sure these lights are on, here&#x27;s your wifi network name and password. I&#x27;ve already set up your devices for you and now Netflix works&quot;. For technical people, there are varying levels of depth that you can go into. If the answer is not at the level of complexity that you&#x27;re expecting, you can request a different level of complexity. Canned phrases: &quot;I see that there is a ton of detail to go into here and that you know a lot about it, but I think I need to understand the big picture before we dive into the details. Can you give me the sparknotes version of what ___ is&#x2F;does? Explain it like I&#x27;m five.&quot; or in the other direction &quot;Cool, that really helps me understand the big picture. As I understand, part of the problem entails [some slice of the problem domain]. Can we talk about the overall goal of that part of the system and then a bit of detail about how it works&#x2F;what it does?&quot;