from Hacker News

When to Overcommunicate

by danshapiro on 1/31/20, 7:41 AM with 48 comments

• by throwaway713 on 1/31/20, 9:55 AM

  I personally find overcommunication annoying and don't like to hear constant status updates from people; just handle the work and let me know when it's done unless you have any blockers.

  That said, I've received feedback from multiple people that they never know how my work is progressing, are surprised when it's completed, and would like more status updates along the way, so I think it's safe to say that my preferences are an anomaly and you should probably follow the article's advice instead.

• by dangrossman on 1/31/20, 6:01 PM

  I find it amusing to see this come from Glowforge, a company known for its poor communication with customers. They sell $6000 lasers to consumers but have no phone number to talk to them. You order, give them your money, and then you'll hear nothing from them from over 30 days while you wait for your purchase: often customers don't get so much as a shipping confirmation before their order finally shows up at their door. If you email them, you get an auto-reply saying they hope to get back to you within 3 business days, which means troubleshooting an issue with their products can mean multiple 3-day round-trips back and forth to get resolved under warranty. And they have a habit of introducing and pulling software features without any advanced notice, when many of their customers rely on their $6000 lasers as production equipment for their small businesses, so these unannounced changes can be disruptive to say the least. All issues that could be fixed with some better communication. And it's too bad, because I think they easily have the best product in their niche of consumer-targeted laser engravers (ping me if you'd like a $500 discount... I own one).

• by jezclaremurugan on 1/31/20, 9:55 AM

  Anecdotal experience - I've noticed that shipping late by 2 weeks with advance notice to stakeholders is taken way more positively than shipping late by 1 week but informing people late.

  This seems like plain common sense and required courtesy but I've been on the wrong side of this from both approaches enough times from both sides of the table - people somehow have a block in sharing the bad news (also because in unhealthy places the messenger is shot - just makes me realize that I'm in a good place).

  (In any case the blog actually talks more of sharing the context you are in and not just about sharing bad news early - sharing context is definitely safer and a better approach)

• by specialist on 1/31/20, 12:55 PM

  I wish there were more articles like this about communications, organizational psychology, effective coordination, etc.

  But mostly, I wish there were ways to recognize, navigate, negotiate people's different styles.

  TMI from recent my turn at the woodshed:

  Noob manager (Jane) is unhappy with my communication. Wants more detail. Her prerogative, so I try. So in addition to adjacent desks, always on Skype, standups, status reports, very verbose commit messages, novels added to JIRA tickets, I start writing daily status reports.

  Months of "improvement", no change in satisfaction.

  So us chickens are sitting around trying to troubleshoot something. Me (Bob) and another coworker (Stan) casually noticed that a third (Steve) seems to have a great working relationship with manager (Jane).

  Stan and I are astonished (gobsmacked) to learn that Steve is privately texting (via Skype) Jane 15-20 times per day. The smallest updates. "Just committed changes for JIRA 123". "PR 303 approved and merged." "Build successful!" All sorts of emoji.

  I would have NEVER thought to spam my manager all day every day. But that's apparently what Jane wants.

  The weird part in all this, like most miscommunication, is Jane couldn't say what she wants. Nor did it occur to her to tell Stan and me to be more like Steve.

• by hinkley on 1/31/20, 6:28 PM

  Any long lived project (that doesn't want to end as legacy code) is a performance art piece.

  If you've ever seen five minutes of an opera (go to YouTube if not), they move their mouths in an almost comical exaggeration so the people farther away can see what's going on.

  Early on when I relied on subtlety, I'd find repeatedly that someone has grossly mistaken my intention and undone a bunch of work that I put time into. The bigger the gesture the harder it is for them to either misunderstand or feign confusion (easier to ask forgiveness... unless forgiveness involves admitting you're an idiot).

• by xbryanx on 1/31/20, 2:40 PM

  George Bernard Shaw probably didn't say that, "The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place." https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/31/illusion/

  The source of that aphorism is probably William H Whyte and is better understood with its context about listening.

  "LET US RECAPITULATE A BIT: The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it. We have talked enough; but we have not listened. And by not listening we have failed to concede the immense complexity of our society–and thus the great gaps between ourselves and those with whom we seek understanding."

• by terom on 1/31/20, 5:09 PM

  I do a lot of ops-ish work, and in addition to all the nice declarative configuration-as-code things where infrastructure changes are reviewed and applied in pull-request form, there's a lot of ad-hoc debugging/diagnosing and one-off changes that get done.

  I totally over-communicate on everything where I'm debugging or mutating the actual shared infrastructure. In some places, this is literally in the form of displaying all `sudo` logs in-line in the IRC channel. If I'm debugging some issue, I'll be copy-pasting links to google results, screenshots of the the monitoring graphs and any diagnostic command output into that slack thread. Once I figure it out and either run some one-off commands or make a PR to fix it, I'll include those in the the chat. If I typo some command and (almost) make a mistake, I'll certainly mention that as well.

  It's a real-time log/diary of the investigative process and any changes. These slack threads are typically solo threads, with just me replying to myself. This is fine. Occasionally other people will comment on something, occasionally I'll be searching for and referring to those threads later on.

  Stuff that I'm working on solo and isn't leaving my laptop outside of a `git push`? Not necessarily worth mentioning before it hits GitHub, but please spend some time and write a useful PR summary.

• by kaetemi on 1/31/20, 10:44 AM

  Both have advantages, from my experience.

  Communicating useful everyday things with coworkers brings in a more friendly atmosphere, which lets people trust you with work.

  Going on full communication blackout helps in focusing on actually getting said work done.

• by a_imho on 1/31/20, 10:34 AM

  The article is a fluff and mixes a few concepts. Quality over quantity. Quantity is a bad proxy. Not in any particular order but some things more important than quantity: availability, clarity, accuracy, transparency, traceability. Too many people love to listen to their own voice and opinions a bit too much anyway. If I had more time I would have written a shorter comment.

• by luord on 1/31/20, 3:57 PM

  The example given for negative feedback is kind of at odds with the point of the article itself.

  Seems like, in that case, the managers themselves didn't communicate until they had to, and even though they were seeing a problem, they didn't communicate earlier. Now it's in the onus of the employee to give constant updates else he risks losing his job, even though he wasn't given constant updates from the other direction in the first place.

  In general, the article seems to be saying "tell everything to the managers, make their jobs easier", and here I thought one of the responsibilities of management was making work easier for the employees.

  Sure, communicate, but it should be in both directions.

• by shruubi on 1/31/20, 11:58 AM

  I want people to be capable and independent, they should be up front and honest about things but if someone is too stuck on the minutia of "how and how much" in terms of communication then what's the point?

  On top of which, to be perfectly honest, the people I work with are barely a step above strangers to me, so the last thing I want is to hear about their personal life. I certainly don't know or trust these people enough to trust with anything more than "I've got personal/family/medical issues, can you work with me while I handle these things?" and quite frankly I don't want or expect anything more from my coworkers than that.

• by amwelles on 1/31/20, 1:08 PM

  I started communicating more by giving end of day updates to my managers after I started falling behind on projects. It didn’t just help them—it helped me. It kept me on track and I could more easily see when/if I was falling behind.

• by war1025 on 1/31/20, 5:42 PM

  > The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

  I've found that usually when a conversation is going on, particularly in text format, much less information is conveyed than you think at the time.

  An interesting thing I've done before is to go back through old conversations where I thought I really "bared my soul" about a particular topic.

  Often there is next to no information actually exchanged. What I was actually doing was feeling strong emotions. They were in no way conveyed over to the other person.

• by mewpmewp2 on 1/31/20, 2:00 PM

  There is one aspect of communication. Asking questions. Sometimes I wonder if I am not asking enough. I will always try to figure out myself rather than ask. I am afraid if I ask about something and it is actually findable I am perceived as lazy, stupid or incapable of finding the answer myself so I have to waste others time and ruin their workflow.

  I wonder if I am hurting myself with it and is it good or bad for my career and life.

  I suppose there is a balance there somewhere, but I am not sure whether I am underasking or overasking etc

• by rwnspace on 1/31/20, 10:35 AM

  We don't need any more arms races, thank you. It doesn't take much to work slightly less hard (or less publically), communicate in a way that's efficient with other people's attention and time, and stop humblebragging on social media about your lifestyle and material goods.

  It's not good to wear training wheels all the time. Worrying about the minutia of communication makes you less able to see what is being said, and makes you look for confirmation of your predictions/worries instead.