Ask HN: How to speak like a leader, not like an engineer?
There&#x27;s not enough info here about whether your actual language is the issue, or if it&#x27;s your ability to think or communicate more broadly. I&#x27;ll try to touch on both.<p>Language as signal - jargon:<p>I&#x27;m going to steal a couple lines from this comic: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1735&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1735&#x2F;</a><p>* Appreciate that the way you are interpreted is your responsibility<p>* Understand that there&#x27;s no way to opt out of sending messages based on how you present yourself, and that attempts to do so send strong messages of their own<p>Signaling that you&#x27;re in somebody&#x27;s ingroup can result in comfort and credibility. You want this.<p>Used positively, tribal language lowers the cost of communication between parties. When I&#x27;m talking to engineers, our shared word for &quot;diffing&quot;, when referencing things that aren&#x27;t code, saves a LOT of time, because it&#x27;s a &quot;symlink&quot; to a more complicated and specific concept of comparison. It has the secondary benefit of signaling, in a very short space, a certain minimum depth of familiarity with a domain. People who are neither technical nor curious don&#x27;t hear those words as potential references to deeper concepts. They just hear silliness. They are missing something important and useful.<p>All jargon falls on a spectrum between &quot;deadly effective&quot;, &quot;tryhard&quot;, and &quot;absolute horseshit&quot; depending on its specific use. Leadership jargon can be every bit as deep as nerd jargon.<p>There are a lot of comments in this thread with various levels of butthurt that lash out at the unproductive use. When jargon is used ineffectively – or performatively to signal competence, insight, or proximity to the perceived cutting edge – its power is diluted and it risks becoming a cartoon of itself. The people who are misusing it have turned it from a thing that sounds silly to outsiders into a thing that is legitimately silly.<p>But don&#x27;t make the mistake of assuming leadership jargon is hollow by default. If you are the conversation partner with weaker domain familiarity, you are poorly equipped to determine whether a piece of jargon is being used to convey something hollow or something important. Every piece of it started out meaning something. Dig in a little. Embrace the language of other people&#x27;s domains instead of acting too good for it.<p>Level of detail:<p>Speaking of language and signaling...<p>In engineering land, getting in the weeds, knowing very specific things, spending lots of time exploring finer points all equate to thoroughness and signal that you&#x27;re a good nerd. In management land this can signal the opposite: an inability to prioritize. &quot;Getting The Big Picture&quot; can come off like a quip from a hellish 80s yuppie boss, but it&#x27;s important to scope your level of abstraction to your audience, and the higher up the org chart you go, the higher level your conversations are expected to be. People are going to have their own ideas about what&#x27;s important, so there&#x27;s a multi-level game of knowing how to find out what you need to know, knowing those things, knowing what other people think is important to know, and sending a signal accordingly.<p>Range of vision&#x2F;concern:<p>One of the lessons I had to learn painfully a couple times is that sometimes being protective of or generous to your team can be bad leadership. For as much as you are a downward facing shepherd of the people who report to you, so too are you an upward facing shepherd of the organization that sustains you and all below you.<p>There were times when I pushed for product directions, features, headcount&#x2F;budget allocations, etc that would be best for my team, the people on it, or the problems we cared about. I butted heads with the C suite a bunch, everybody had a bad time, and it was only once I had some time and distance that I looked back, apathetic where I was once deeply passionate, and realized that the things I was pushing for made no goddamn sense if it had been my money, or would not have impacted the higher level business outcomes in ways that justified some kind of cost (not necessarily monetary cost). This leads to the next point:<p>Quality tolerance:<p>Engineering culture frequently rewards obsessive concern with the quality of what you&#x27;re making. The cost of this pursuit often has diminishing returns very early on, and it can be painful to adjust your mind to view &quot;we only ever shipped the bare minimum across 5 domains&quot; from a source of deep shame to a source of resolute pride, or at least grim acceptance. Sure, another 3 headcount would let us take some section of the company from 3&#x2F;10 to 9&#x2F;10 in quality, but if the resultant gains can&#x27;t pay that extra ~million in salary, maybe it&#x27;s not the right time for that idea, even if you mean well. Lots of things that seem &quot;right&quot; to do are not actually justifiable. (See the section on Ought world and Is World.) Engineering culture says &quot;make the best thing&quot;. Sometimes leadership culture says &quot;don&#x27;t fucking die&quot;. This doesn&#x27;t mean you should ship shit by default, or go in expecting to build bad things, as this can be really toxic for morale. It just means that you should measure the cost – in cash, opportunity, morale, and more – from a broader scope, and optimize for rightness at those higher levels instead of at the lower ones. Sometimes this means making sacrifices.<p>Metagame:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.epsilontheory.com&#x2F;too-clever-by-half&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.epsilontheory.com&#x2F;too-clever-by-half&#x2F;</a><p>Related to the &quot;shepherd up as well as down&quot; idea, your goal is not to win single games. Your goal is to win the set of all games. If you get the feature you want this sprint but burn up the goodwill of someone you&#x27;ll have many consequential interactions with in the future, you&#x27;ve lost a metagame. Today is better, at the expense of all tomorrows. Inversely, sometimes losing is winning. Let some stuff slide. Give more than you take. Position yourself so that when something <i>seriously important</i> comes along, you have a cache of influence, credibility, and good will to spend on it.<p>Ought World and Is World:<p>Great engineers and great leaders both have their eye on a north star. Ambition is important. But it&#x27;s a trap to mistake to use your mental playbook for the world that you WANT to exist in the world as it actually is. In the world that ought to be, your peers, customers, market, vendors, etc are rational actors who make sane decisions and have sane values, for your personal definition of &quot;sane&quot;. In the is world, there are many combinations of quizzically different values, ignorance, and malice – in that order. One concept to be especially careful of here is &quot;Justice&quot;. I&#x27;m not saying you should behave unethically. You should be an ethical leader. But a lot of the time I find that when my gut speaks with words like &quot;deserve&quot;, &quot;fair&quot;, or &quot;unreasonable&quot; – I&#x27;m looking at the world through an intermediate lens that&#x27;s colored by my value structures. I like to try and reverse that lens, and imagine to the best of my ability a world where the argument I&#x27;m against is as true, sane, and worthy as I view my own arguments to be (steelmanning – the inverse of a straw man). Very often this reveals a credible alternate perspective where it turns out my answer is just an answer and not The Answer.<p>---<p>There are lots of other comments here from people who have been spurned by bullies, sociopaths, or some other management phenomena.<p>The peter principle: high performers are promoted until they are in a position where they cannot highly perform, so they stay there, sucking.<p>The dilbert principle: incompetent people are promoted to the position where they can do the least damage.<p>My take is only one version of the answer to your question. It&#x27;s intentionally focused on metacognition, metagame, and the assumption of positive intent. For a fairly different take that spends more time on bad actors and incompetence, I highly recommend The Gervais Principle: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ribbonfarm.com&#x2F;the-gervais-principle&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ribbonfarm.com&#x2F;the-gervais-principle&#x2F;</a>