In an American culture, it is "self-evident" that clear communication is about being direct and to the point. But this is far from universal. More generally, western cultures tend to conflate earnest and truth. "Telling it like it is" is valued. We don't realize our own "phoniness".

I have witnessed countless times people hitting a wall in meetings and other situations because they tried to address the point "butt head". Some typical examples I've witnessed

1. French/Japanese starting a simple resource discussion. As we French typically do, French manager starting a negotiating by saying no. Gradually softening while getting given more information. Result: French manager happy at the end, happy to start project, Japanese manager extremely stressed and thought nothing was decided.

2. American engineer excited about a starting project, mentioning how "awesome" things are. French engineer unimpressed, 50 % stuff not working, think the American is bulsshiting him, decides they can't be trusted. American just wanted to share his enthusiasm and wanted to build a working relationship. I was that French engineer long time ago, I really was super confused by American optimism. I thought it was all fake, I since learnt to tune and update my mental model :)

In all those cases, everybody thought they were very clear. I now work in Japan, and what Japanese would call very clear is very different from what we would consider clear in Europe or the US.

The other big piece of it is... communicating is a messy activity. I'm always amazed how often you can think people are aligned on something, then dig in a little farther and realize that people have wildly divergent ideas of what's going on. It's exacerbated when you have folks who are operating in a second language (this isn't a slight on them, I have nothing but admiration for anybody working as a software dev in a second language - I don't know if I could do it TBH).

I wonder if this is a bug, or a feature, if you will. Maybe the random distribution of variations in our understandings is an essential part of working as a team.

Let’s say, every ant is trained to react by spitting acid as a XOR: if A or B, but not A and B, attack!

If the social behavior is not a function of the rules, but more driven by whether a given ant believes {A, B}, and this varies in some distribution, I can imagine some interesting outcomes. Perhaps…

One ant accidentally believes A ~B. That is their sensory input but not the truth. They accidentally hit a beetle, score! Wildcard ant! You get to reproduce.

Not clear if that thought experiment extends into cultural differences. I’d say that means different rules, in my take.

But within one group with the same rules, a distribution of different and even wrong information seems like an advantage.

Maybe not for that one poor schmuck who wrongly believed A and B, and got his head bitten off. But antmortized we’re probably all better off.

In the Midwest people are too polite to say anything. Many midwesterners will bear an annoyance for years before speaking up as they are afraid of offending.

On the west coast if you’re an ass people will just stop interacting with you. You just won’t be invited anymore. The lack of interaction is the interaction.

I think rural vs suburban vs urban mannerisms might be a confounding variable here as well. I'm from the suburbs.

Like I just see from my hometown near Minneapolis that people would rather just act like uncomfortable things aren't happening or don't exist. They put on a smile and act all nice to each other but secretly there's all this shit that they harbor against one another. It is definitely a small-town thing too though. In a small town the people you are around have been there for a long time and they are going to be there for a long time in the future, so one way to cope with disagreement is to paper it over. Just not my personally favorite interaction style.

When I am in Japan, there is an obvious "this is not Kansas anymore" aspect. I love it, I lived there > 10 years but I don't need any effort to know I am like a fish out of the water.

On the other hand, California or Texas are still just unsettling, in an "uncanny valley" / twilight zone kind of way. Everything is "almost" the same, but yet so many small things that add up to a strange feeling. I guess American from a western culture background would feel the same when coming to Europe ? Not sure.

It took me heading back to an LA bus station and interacting with the random people there to feel that I was among real people again.

The mind fucking thing you’re talking about, the “uncanny valley,” is Canada. Vancouver is so much like Seattle, or any other US city in some ways, but there’s something off that you can’t quite explain. There are small details that are just wrong.

Have you heard americans talking about their digestion? You go to the bathroom? What are you doing there?

Try to get a direct negative response in USA, good luck.

I only realized the indirectness of my second sentence after I wrote it.

“The part that speaks French.”

I just frowned and walked off as it was meant to be a polite question. An educated guess would have said that they were from “the French speaking part of Canada,” but I guess they didn’t like small talk.

In hindsight, I find that interaction funny.

I could be wrong but as a Non-French speaker I've heard that French banter is a little snide or pedantic in nature on purpose but generally not meant to be mean-spirited. Kind of like when a friend says "No Shit Sherlock" but with less enthusiasm.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language_in_Canada

"Dear Sir,

I hope this message finds you well and in good spirits.

Would it be possible to arrange a meeting by telephone in the near future, perhaps even the next week, if that fits with your calendar?

I would shame myself if I neglected to mention that I will prepare the requested documents at the earliest convenience."

Is how I can only describe it.

That's why I try to be mindful of this; there's dozens of tools one can use to have effective communication. Begging the question, starting with a negative assumption, playing devil's advocate, etc. The key to good comms is a) have empathy for the person you're speaking to, and b) assume they're just as competent and well-intentioned as you are.

There was an anecdote (non-verified story) about this going around a few years ago.

A Big Company in Japan was expecting the big boss to come in and tell them what the plans were for the next year. A meeting was arranged with the smaller bosses. Big boss told them the plan and everyone just nodded and agreed that it was a great plan.

Big boss leaves.

There is a second meeting among the small bosses where they try to figure out wtf did big boss actually mean with his speech. It is culturally frowned upon to ask questions or admit you don't understand.

> - don't directly address the point of your question / provide a much complex answer (or even worse, a non-answer) to a simple question

> - don't stay focused to the point of the discussion

I often dive deeper if the question itself raises suspicions that the question asker might not fully understand the topic. For example, if someone asked: "can you unbatch those 1k RPCs?", I might go into more detail than a "yes" or "no". I do it to spare the question asker from making a bad decision, without wanting to embarrassing them by saying that the question is too simplistic, or makes no sense.

> - don't some level of clarity in their train of thought and speech

You yourself are missing words in your communication like the word "have" in the quote above. Also, I don't know enough linguistic rules to correct you, but colloquially at least your title is better understood if you write it as "Why do some people not communicate clearly?" So some compassion when others misspeak might be good. Often it's possible to read between the lines.

> - generally over-complicate matters by wandering off to other related subjects and extending the scope of the discussion

Creativity is often the expansion of a topic, or the merger of multiple topics. Maybe your question sparked their creativity and they're taking the opportunity to show you some of their creative thought process.

"Can we do _________?" is the worst question to ask me as an engineer. Like, yes, we probably _can_ do literally almost anything, with enough hours and money. But what's the budget? What really is _______?

Eg: If it's "analytics to a page", what do we want to track? Where does the data go? How do people view the data? I need to know the answer to those questions, plus the "budget", before even entertaining a yes or no answer. Which I think sounds like I'm beating around the bush by asking, but I'm not! :)

Helps so much getting to the root of the issue.

ive learned to ask that as my first follow up question for random requests for help: is this the real problem or are you trying to solve a different higher level problem

Some friendly individual put up a site to explain the issue to newbies: https://xyproblem.info

My response to that type of question tends to be along the lines of "what are you hoping to achieve?"

People have to plan how to break subjects down before and during speaking. Not everyone has adequate practice.

Some people have trouble with eye contact and might be fighting subconscious social anxiety while simultaneously scrambling to put their thoughts into words. If an audience wasn't present, it would be easier for them.

Some truly brilliant engineers struggle with this.

Edit: If you don't intuit this or perhaps struggle, I strongly recommend taking an improv class. It should be a fun and safe environment where you'll experience your brain lighting up all the communication pathways at once. If you want to go more subtle and read people's body language and tone, take a Meisner class. These both help tremendously for people that don't get in the daily "exercise" as a part of their normal day to day. I've also heard good things about Toastmasters.

If you ask me "how do I foo the bars?" 2 days ago, "how do I foo the bazs?" yesterday and now are asking "How do I foo the foobars?", it is easier for me to explain the information you need to handle that question rather than handle each time you need it incidentally.

Thanks, corrected the mistakes.

However, I wasn't referring to missing words (which can be inferred) or bad grammar. Actually I wasn't referring to written speech in particular. I was referring mostly to the way one structures their thought and expresses it to someone else.

Also, the question was referring to native speakers (I'm not an English native speaker myself).

It would appear that your initial post failed to communicate that clearly to awb.

So your posts don't really give this away to me, except for the dropped "have"/"has" that GP pointed out (I've seen this a lot from people who learned English as a second language, though I'm not confident enough to guess what your first language is). But it does give me two additional ideas that from a quick scroll downwards I don't think others have suggested: Language or culture.

Language is unlikely but I do want to mention it as a possibility because I have a concrete example in English speakers learning Japanese: Implied subject. It's a common point of confusion with beginners that usually doesn't get a whole lot of explanation, other than "you have to infer it from the context" [0]. Maybe something similar is going on here, a piece of context that would be made more explicit in your first language that we usually skip or just imply in English?

Culture is a possibility because I've seen it mentioned on here many times in the past, and I'm guessing if English isn't your first language and English speakers are confusing, you probably grew up in a (slightly?) different culture than you work in now, in addition to the language difference. I don't have good examples here, but what I remember is people talking about how people from some countries are very direct and in other countries that comes off as rude, and in the opposite direction the people trying to be polite sound like they're trying to avoid direct answers and it's hard to get them to say what they mean. That second one kind-of sounds like what you're describing here.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/japanese/comments/b8bae7/questions_...

Edit: Some people are posting links to culture-style differences further down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33657314

We live and learn.

Also, efficient communication requires knowing what your audience already knows.

1. it's still relevant in spoken language. Perhaps more so -- inflection, intonation, volume, and speed add a lot of subtlety to vocal communication that is even more difficult to pick up on than written communication. Pauses indicate punctuation. Tone can indicate something is less important. Volume and speed can be used in place of parentheses or even footnotes. Those are just the obvious things. There is so much information that is very difficult for non-native speakers to pick up on. Or at least is very difficult for me to pick up on.

2. They might be speaking in a way that parses well to a native ear but is deeply confusing to a non-native speaker.

> Also, the question was referring to native speakers (I'm not an English native speaker myself).

Here's a really important question: do other native speakers in your group express the same frustration about these SWEs?

Communication is a two-way street.

If they are 3/5 on communicating ideas and you are 3/5 on understanding ideas, then you may have issues that a person who is 5/5 on understanding ideas does not have.

I want to stress that even if you were a 1/5 (you're not!!!), the onus would still on BOTH you and your team mates to communicate well. It's not just your job to get better at understanding their mediocre communication; it's also their job to be empathetic and learn how to communicate better with you.

Example: I communicate a bit differently with non-native speakers in spoken communication. I slow my speech just a bit (not excessively -- I talk very fast naturally, so my slow is others' normal). I avoid complex wandering sentences with clauses that resolve on different sides of the sentence. I try to add more roadmaps and use more explicit communication. I rely less on intonation, inflection, and pauses to convey meaning when speaking. I made these changes after I worked in a country with a different language and realized how damn hard it was to understand that last 20% of information that everyone else seemed to be catching.

It's the people who never think about other people's mental models (or even their own!) that are frequently hard to communicate with.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that the way we interface with each other (the API of language) is purely stylistic and of little consequence. Every little aspect of language shapes our thoughts and impacts our ability to think clearly... Let alone our ability to transmit thoughts to each other through speech or text (conversion to and from which is very lossy).

Good communications isn't merely about speaking well[1], but about handling how others speak. If you are frustrated with people never giving simple answers to simple questions (as I often am), it is you who needs to adapt and change strategies. The expectation that a question that should have a simple "Yes/no" response will be answered as such is not a deficiency in the other party.

So to communicate well means to learn skills/strategies to handle a variety of communication styles.

One other thing to keep in mind: People are like objects in code that have a hidden state (their experience and views in the world). When you say something to them - no matter how plain, that hidden state is going to morph their understanding and how they interpret what you say. The solution is to learn how to get them to reflect back to you what they think you are saying (without annoying them).

Now in a given work place, it's not reasonable to expect all employees to understand how effective communications works, and it does make sense for the workplace to have guidelines on it - and those that think differently have to adapt. I'm certainly not arguing for "Let people speak how they speak and the onus is completely on you to adapt" (in the workplace).

[1] However you define "well" - there is no consensus on it. Being concise and precise is not it.

I've worked with people who do this consistently. Know this I would try to formulate as simple and direct a question as I could, but always the answer would be to a tangential, often more basic question.

At first I thought maybe the person was being condescending, answering basic questions that weren't asked, that anyone in my position should know. Maybe he was, I still don't know, but I refused to "believe" that. It's tricky suspecting something but forcing yourself not to believe that thing, but it was very helpful in that I was prepared to get past the initial phase of him not answering the actual question without it being contentious at all.

I agree with OP, it does seem like a lot of people make no effort to communicate clearly.

I’ve been on the receiving end of people who want their question asked exactly as worded, cross-examination style, and it is not fun. I wonder if it is that?

If the other person doesn’t answer how you expected, then expect that, persist, be kind and be calm. Assume the best intents.

They might actually be saying dumb things to help themselves make sense.

Here might be an example:

You: Why is the test suite taking 30 minutes now?

Them: Did you run it last night?

(Because they know something about the system state last night and want to check if the implied unhappiness about the test run length might be due to that)

One recent edited example:

My question: "I'm trying to investigate why a request is failing, I found it in aws, the logs for [service] contain a stack trace up to where the [microservice] request is made, logs are very sparse. Is there a way to get [microservice] stack trace?" [I included links to logs and relevant info]

His response is "Do you want a stack trace on every log? I assume dumping a stack trace is somewhat expensive (though I don't actually know if this is the case) so I would be hesitant to attach one to every log entry"

Did I ask to attach a stack trace to every log? I guided him through the original ask and did receive some help. If this happened one time it wouldn't register, but his initial response here was very typical, something I got used to.

You explained clearly and respectfully with the background info what you need.

They came back with a question. An odd question. I suspect:

* They are not experienced

* They have been “punished” before because someone asked for “X, and common sense implies X,Y” but the requestor wanted “X,Z”. So they ask dumb questions to be sure.

* Not enough coffee, and realtime conversation they didn’t parse what you said properly.

I would take the question with a sense of calm and not worry. It is a good think they are asking questions. Encourage dumb questions. 1% of the time they are smart questions.

As a senior dev it could be your time to shine with some mentoring:

“It would be fantastic to have a stack trace on every log, but I suspect this would cause performance problems and increase our log storage costs. It is sufficient to only have stack traces when an exception occurs”

I guess you said something like this at the time.

By the way stack trace logs where there are no exceptions are something I have done, but not every log.

Aside: A stack trace for every log almost sounds like a cool startup idea or monitoring product differentiator, as long as the UX is good and it doesn’t add noise.

Again this was an observed pattern, not just one time.

Stack trace usually means a full stack trace. I've rarely seen one in production - it's usually for unhandled errors. Usually it'll be a one line log which will point you to the point in code where it's erroring out.

Sounds like you just want the logs for the [microservice] for a particular failing request, and not the stack trace?

It'd be bad communication on both sides, here.

I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt, if my interpretation of something seems unreasonable I like to make sure there's not a more generous interpretation, and give the benefit of the doubt when possible.

Again it's about a pattern over time, not just one instance. I realize I'm consistently not being given the benefit of doubt so I work on my communication. It continues and I start to wonder if it's intentional. To answer your question in the other thread, it seems similar for some but not others.

I think some people form an initial impression of others and that impacts the communication going forward, probably not always intentional. I think also some people try to diminish others through public communication. I don't know if that is what I was experiencing but it could be the case, something to be aware of.

If it's the former, it's probably just them and not office politics.

> Know this I would try to formulate as simple and direct a question as I could, but always the answer would be to a tangential, often more basic question.

Always fails with them. At some point, you have to become humble enough to realize that your approach is flawed and look for alternative approaches.

"What's 2+2"? In response, the person explains how addition is. "Okay, thanks for that context, but I don't think we ever actually got to the original question - what's 2+2?" The person tells you a story about something cute their kid did when learning addition. "Again, I think we're getting off track - can you please tell me what 2+2 is?"

If they continue long enough, you need to start cutting them off or addressing the issue more directly.

"I've asked four times what 2+2 is, and you've told me several stories about addition but haven't answered the question. Is there some reason you're not able to tell me what 2+2 is?"

Repeat until you either get an answer to the question or an explanation of why the person you're asking can't answer the question.

"I've asked four times what 2+2 is, and you've told me several stories about addition but haven't answered the question. Is there some reason you're not able to tell me what 2+2 is?"

In a party, perhaps not.

I've often phrased it as:

"I've asked four times what 2+2 is, and I still don't have an answer to that question. I'm afraid I cannot proceed with X until I know the answer to that question."

Often, though, I've found that simply putting the burden on the other party unblocks them. It shifts their mindset from "I need to answer a question" (which they think they did) to "I need to solve this problem" (which they realize they haven't).

"We need X. Can you sort it out?"

And herein lies the flaw in your approach. It's reasonable to be annoyed that you're not getting the answer, but it doesn't mean your approach is helping you get there. It's the equivalent of "If someone doesn't understand me, I'm going to shout even louder" or "I'm going to use the same words, but speak even slower".

There's no good reason to think that more directness is more effective.

By chance did you mean "it's not unreasonable" here?

I mean, you could mandate everyone take courses on it, but the reality is that most senior leadership have poor communication skills and don't want to spend time on it.

Edit: To clarify: What I mean is you'll get further understanding and acknowledging that most communications is poor, and adapt to that than to expect people to communicate well. You may have spent years honing your technical skills, but most employees have spent approximately no time honing their communications skills.

My career is not built on programming. Rather, it's built on my ability to communicate effectively in writing and in spontaneous speech, and to serve as a translation layer between various parts of an organization. Your frustration is my opportunity.

In my experience, few people without the training or education will be effective communicators. What's my training? A philosophy degree. Theater. An interest in psychology and psychotherapy. Extensive reading. All sorts of management duties within my family, who are of a different culture and class than myself.

Tech is full of young people with CS and business degrees, lots of money, in a homogenous social context, without their own family. So they haven't been educated to express deeply abstract concepts effectively, and lack the experience of getting a large diverse group working effectively toward a shared goal.

It's not a question of intellect (though there are some with more innate aptitude than others), it's a question of training.

After years on non-technical or customer-facing teams, followed by a dozen years in technical roles, I've noticed that my ability to effectively communicate abstract concepts has greatly diminished. This has held even for things I deeply understand at both a micro (the technical details and dependencies) and macro (the business context) level.

Unedited, this comment full of parenthetical statements and loaded with commas, is a prime example of what's happened. Is it due to over-training one's brain to account for all the little details? Anxiety about all that could go wrong? Over-excitement about being on the precipice of nailing something? Or more general cultural trends in the way we process information? Time will tell, unless the Singularity catches up first.

Language means compressing and serializing information. Commas and parentheticals are a more efficient way to leave the information in a slightly more compressed state. Generally we are describing a graph serially, and adding the details as we go rather than coming back one by one and zooming in is just more efficient.

Also, I honestly suspect that often people just don't have the detailed level of understanding to be able to add it on the first level. And those details can be quite critical.

I mean, also the actual amount of things that are relevant that they have to say may make their communication seem cluttered compared to someone with a more simplistic knowledge base and thought process.

Here’s how I address your issues, when I encounter them:

> don’t directly address the point of your question

I clarify why I’m asking - in the future, I make sure the person I’m talking to has the same context as me before asking.

> don't stay focused to the point of the discussion

I make sure I understand what it is I’m asking. Usually, this happens when I ask a dumb question.

> don't some level of clarity in their train of thought and speech

I make sure we have a common intellectual structure/framework to use. Usually, this happens when there’s more complexity than I initially realized

> generally over-complicate matters by wandering off to other related subjects and extending the scope of the discussion

Could be a lot of reasons for this. Usually, I asked a big question and put them on the spot, so they’re rambling. I give them time to answer, and May schedule a meeting to discuss.

You may be noticing a pattern here: in general, if someone isn’t communicating clearly with me, it’s my fault, and I can fix it.

It happens often when question goes through 'occupation boundaries'. Eg you are manager (judging by 'my experience is with SWEs') and you ask 'simple' direct question from swe "can you implement this feature". And instead you get wall of text. Which might be frustrating, but is it SWE to blame?

Really?

I hate long discussions so I try to answer my questions as succinctly as possible. In this case, if I think I can implement, I'll simply say yes. If not, I'll say no and give the reasons why.

I guess I'm out of my depth?

I find a correlation actually where people who struggle to give clear answers/explanations, struggle in their own decision-making. They get ensnarled into ever-deepening details and can’t cut through them to make actual progress.

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?"

In your example, I imagine that the engineer is trying to be seen as still worthy of employment despite not shipping a feature. That motivates them to show themselves as:

- Able to overcome some challenges.

- Able to learn from mistakes.

This is a self-reenforcing cycle. An engineer who struggles to make decisions will struggle to deliver at pace. An engineer who struggles to delver at pace will have more experiences of getting fired. An engineer with more experiences of getting fired will be more fearful and thus struggle more to gather their thoughts and communicate clearly.

The only solution I know of is more secure professional relationships such as with a coach such as you’ve been acting as.

Another factor is that people may be addressing what they perceive (consciously or not, and correctly or not) to be your underlying concern, rather than what you literally say.

And sometimes people may actually be ahead of you, and may skip over things they believe should already be clear to you, with the result that they seem incoherent and sidestepping to you.

People also may simply disagree with what they perceive to be your point, and start elaborating on stuff in an attempt to get you to see their point of view, without explicitly stating that they disagree with what they perceive to be your premises, because in their mind it’s obvious from what they write.

Or they intentionally want to steer the group towards discussing those topics either for their own benefit or because they believe it is the right problem to bring into focus. If they are successful in doing so without coming across as rude, that could be viewed as great communication even if it leaves some questioning communication skills; it really depends on the situation. You see this all the time in political debates and while it's easy for some to see the situation for what it is, it typically rolls off the masses and the candidates are better for moving the debate to topics that are more in-line with their strengths and positioning. If a candidate is able to use such tactics and become elected, it would be incredibly difficult to state that she or he is a poor communicator.

Humans talking to each other in a business setting (I'm assuming nobody in this thread is talking about casual conversations that happen outside of work) is inherently political. You are either positioning or being a passive onlooker. If a conversation is only filled with the latter then nothing can possibly get accomplished (which, to be fair, is not an uncommon outcome for a meeting).

> The greatest fallacy is assuming to know what people are actually thinking, without them saying it

Assuming everything people say is what they think seems to be an even greater fallacy, but I am going to choose not to turn it into a superlative.

It's pretty damn uncommon for me to have been the only one in the room who didn't understand, and surprisingly often it turns out some of the others thought they understood, but a little digging prompted by my question or chain of questions reveals they in fact did not, so speaking up helps avoid problems later.

It's worth noting that if you're the only one who spots some problem (or potential/opportunity) with an idea or plan or approach, that can feel a lot like being the only one who's not following ("why is everyone else nodding along? What am I not getting?"), but in fact it means you understand it better than anyone else present and really, really need to say something.

Often it's way more valuable to know that, and safer in many cases too!

Guessing the right answer in school was always acceptable. Just sitting silently always made the teacher upset. People are trained for ~10 years to just guess/make stuff up when they don't know.

Yes. This was problematic. I remember my first semester in grad school taking a (for me) tough course. On a midterm, I didn't know how to answer a question, and I thought it was disrespectful to pretend to solve the problem (random relevant equations I could think of) and waste the grader's time with it.

The professor called me into his office and said "Look, I can't give you points if you write nothing. Next time, write something and you'll probably get some partial credit."

Certainly any time where the work output could potentially harm someone if it's incorrect. Arguably also any time where producing incorrect output or wasting a bunch of time could adversely impact your or a colleague's career. All in all, rather often.

My university CS intro course labs always had an extra "and see if you can do it in O(log n) instead" or such bonus question. The bonus part always "impossible" if you didn't get that a-ha moment.

I think you had bad teachers.. (which is unfortunately much too common)

I've had to train myself to actually respond in this situations "let me think about that for a second". Because although the silence is awkward it is way better than rambling off and getting something wrong or having someone interrupt your train of thought by trying to ask again or saying something else before I've actually had time to think about it. For that last part, I've also found it helps if you make really exaggerated "thinking gestures" (look up with a very quizzical expression on your face, tap your had, stroke your chin, etc.).

A human loading indicator.

Some people seem to think that spewing a stream of nonsense is superior to admitting that they aren't omniscient.

I respect people more when they can confidently say "I don't know".

I don't know why that is. I suspect it may be partly being uncomfortable with uncertainty and racing to build an internal map, or having been trained to do so by (real or perceived) unhelpfulness in increasingly automated and disembodied tools.

There is also the phenomenon of perceiving a different purpose for gestures and the act of speaking: does it serve them, or does it serve the audience? Preference or even awareness of this latter issue may be due to old age, life experience, I dunno; seems like people who used to be in the "serves the speaker" camp used to more generally talk about "art" or "expression", and now they talk about "internal truth" and "narrative"; dunno if that means anything or helps.

I can swing either way.

This is what filler words like "so..", "um", "ah.." are for. They mean "I'm thinking and will respond in a moment". I'll also often start the answer sentence even if I'm still thinking, but very slowly to stretch out the thinking time. "Soo.. if.. the... thing does.. that.. then we have to foobar."

> - don't directly address the point of your question / provide a much complex answer (or even worse, a non-answer) to a simple question

- Discusses a point that is not relevant to the subject matter / Expects simple answers to complex questions

> - don't stay focused to the point of the discussion

- Overly rigid and unable to explore the problem space / Keeps bike-shedding unimportant detail

> - don't have some level of clarity in their train of thought and speech

- Expects fully formed thoughts and opinions on a new topic

> - generally over-complicate matters by wandering off to other related subjects and extending the scope of the discussion

- Unable to follow discussion through related topics and unwilling to consider the broader perspective

--

There is also a big individual difference, during discussion, some people will quietly think out their entire argument, reach a conclusion and present it, they "think to talk". However, another group of people cannot do this to any useful extend, and will have to speak to make their arguments and conclusions.

I am in the latter group, in a discussion, I write (or speak) to think, I'm simply unable to prepare an entirey line of reasoning and then present it, I must make it up as I go, and this naturally leads to a bit of redundancy, backtracking and "moving around" the subject matter before reaching a conclusion.

Just like it is unreasonable of me to expect you (the think-to-talk type) to externalize your entire internal chain of thought, it is unreasonable of you to expect me to internalize mine.

-Empathy/Respect: recognize that people generally are doing the best they can, and try to meet them where they are at/assume good intentions.

-Ask clarifying questions like "What I am hearing you say is x". or "I'm having a tough time understanding how this relates to the problem we are trying to solve, can you break it down for me?" or "Just to confirm my understanding here, it sounds like you are suggesting...."

To the specific points in your post - I find that the difficulty in clear, concise communication rises considerably when it's a live, realtime discussion vs. when it is asynchronous. Compact and precise language takes a lot of time to formulate (I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one).

>generally over-complicate matters by wandering off to other related subjects and extending the scope of the discussion

This one is a tough one. Sometimes this happens when the structure of the meeting is wrong, or there's not someone who's empowered to say "let's set that aside and focus on x". Sometimes though, exploring the possibility space verbally, even when it's a dead end is just how some people synthesize the problem and internalize it so they can understand it better. Sometimes it's necessary work that needs done before everyone can effectively 'play' with the problem you are trying to solve.

Sigh.

> don't some level of clarity in their train of thought and speech

This “rant” literally provides evidence the poster is a crappy communicator. Are we sure they’re not blaming everyone else out of frustration with their own shortcomings?

I suggest they read some Camus and consider in a relative world not everyone is composed of the same statefulness they are.

Some people are legitimately better than others in all of the above and my view is that those who are better have a responsibility to help the team.

Here are some things that have worked well for me:

* Good information gathering can happen in group discussions but I try to avoid problem solving in groups of more than 3 people.

* A super powerful question that focuses the conversation is this: "What are the decisions that we need to make in the near term?" Now if the answer to this question involves more than 2 or 3 things, politely propose that the group focus the conversation on just 1 or 2 decisions.

* In an engineering context it is extremely rare to find someone who is both very unfocused in conversations and at the same time very effective in getting their solutions built. So, don't waste too much energy trying to correct these people or bring them back on track because they just can't do much damage. Instead spend your energy in small group discussions with other effective engineers. This is where the real decisions are made and the large group discussions are for propagating these decisions for transparency.

My train of thought often branches when asked a general question on a particularly large topic::::

-My ability to communicate during such conversations may come out very rushed because of the amount of material to cover such a topic. -My choice of words may vary depending on a particular subsection of that topic. -I may feel unsure or frustrated with myself in having to double-back or rethink my choice of words on the fly.

What would help us both would be a very specific question to a very narrow topic. That would allow me to be relatively brief while providing full meaningful context to the question at hand.

On a personal note, it doesn't help that I am often sleep-deprived and drink too much coffee just to keep a resemblance of normal functionality. Pre-existing health conditions may affect mental state and ability to communicate with others.

Exactly this. If the questioner is experiencing these responses, he should consider the prompts he offers. Is he adequately communicating his expectations and constraints?

We cannot control how a question is answered or the communication skills of the subject. We can control the questions we ask and how we frame them.

"I'm pressed for time at the moment and was hoping you could help me. Can you give me a concise answer on [topic]? Specifically I am interested in the details of [scenario]?"

In sales this goes a bit deeper. You control the flow of dialogue to the point of engineering a conversation from open to close. I'd recommend trying commission based sales to anyone, just so they can gain some of these techniques.

For the train of thought, this one sometimes happens to me, specially when brain-storming ideas or when I'm thinking about second or third order consequences to the "thing" we are discussing.

Also, I think may be cultural? In some countries people prefer to give more context when talking while in others they want to go to the point as soon as possible.

The other thing I run into is outright not having the wherewithal to communicate clearly - either I am tired, distracted, or just can't recall the right words - aka a communication issue. And that's not to mention people who have outright communication problems - shyness, speech impediments, psychological issues, etc.

In short, speaking clearly and concisely is a luxury of precise knowledge and excellent communication skills, as well as an absence of ulterior motives - to vent, to make yourself seem smarter than you are, just to have a conversation partner, etc. To be honest, this thread is a great reminder to stay on topic.

Are you certain that you have clearly communicated your question to the listener? I frequently encounter questions asked without context, questions without assumptions being stated, or questions which are trivial/dontcares.

---

ME: Is X true? And if it is, does that mean Y would also true?

THEM: Yes, Y would be true.

skip a beat

ME: Ok, so to be clear, X is true?

THEM: No, X isn't true.

ME IN MY HEAD: :facepalm:

---

This happens all the time, and is why I've learned to simply not write multiple or compound questions per message in Slack. They have to be broken up into single questions I ask one at a time or else ~1/3 of people will only address one part of what I'm asking.

I still have no theory of why this seems necessary. My only hypothesis is that some people just glance at any given body of text and don't parse the entire thing. Understanding begins to break down as soon as a person has to read more than a single sentence.

Or perhaps my style of communication is the dysfunctional part and I just don't understand why.

You asked if Y would be true given that X is true. It's called leading the question. The other party agreed with your assertion, hence the "would" as in "Y would be true, IF X were true," with the emphasis on the if being mine. Then you used that to assume X is true, which they never admitted to, so they corrected you by stating X isn't actually true.

Yes, as a separate question from the former.

I know you're trying to explain why people can interpret my hypothetical questions as a single question, but it still doesn't make sense. What you're saying that I asked doesn't describe everything I asked.

The first question is independent of the second, and the second question is dependent on the first. The first question takes precedence, and was asked separately. It stands alone and doesn't depend on the answer of the other question. Otherwise, I would have structured it as a single question statement, like "If X is true, then would Y also be true?" That's a different question from what I asked because it's not asking whether X is true, but in the case that X is true.

To place precedence on the dependent question seems backwards and inefficient to me. Why answer it when it's negated by the independent question preceding it?

If the roles were reversed, my answer would be "No, X isn't true" followed by either "And yes, Y would be true as well if X is true, but X is not true" or "And no, Y is isn't related to X and can be true even if X is false."

> (am assuming the direct leader, but only speculating).

No, this is usually not with direct leaders. It happens with colleagues I need information from, and occurs even with a query that simple.

1. Is X true?

2. If X is true, does that mean that Y is also true?

People sometimes, but not always, follow suit and number their replies.

Plus colloquially if asked a two part "or" question, there is some ambiguity in a single part answer, but usually a "yes" will refer to the second part.

"Shall we go to the shop or the café?" "Yes." -> café.

This drives computer programmers nuts because we're so used to thinking in boolean logic terms but it's very common.

> "Shall we go to the shop or the café" "Yes" -> café

Not a pattern I run into. Maybe it's regional?

Because the focus isn't on communicating. The focus is trying to make the discussion a logic puzzle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_c...

The rambling could be a way to communicate some context, emotions, while you are expecting a yes/no answer, typically from a low context culture.

[0] https://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-bet...

* lack of practice; of reinforcing feedback in the form of pushback when not making sense and approval when making sense; perhaps because etiquette makes us too nice to respond in a tight feedback loop

* or a failure to learn from that feedback when provided, because distracted or not viewing it as important, or something to do with excessive dopamine-stimuli that makes longer-term learning difficult, or by nature.

* or, because communication is not so much about precisely expressing things as it is about saying enough to allow your counterparty to produce a mirror of your own mental model, a poorly calibrated sense of what other people know, due to mostly being around people who think very similarly to them

* an overactive mind that has a lot of different things to say—whatever comes to mind—and no particular training in how to organize all those things

I benefitted immensely from a presentation a coworker once gave on the "consulting pyramid" style of writing. In short, your thinking is constructed of "data > arguments > conclusion", and you actually come by those data and arguments in a somewhat random order; if you present an idea exactly as you came up with it it will be a complete mess. Instead, always lead with the conclusion, then a few top-level arguments; then build on the arguments in more detail; then supply data.

This is amazingly general. In writing you can create your argument exactly like this, with increasing detail / volume at each level. In verbal communication, supply the lower, larger levels only if asked.

It seems that having somebody tell you this stuff one time is enough to shake a person out of the mode of "say whatever they're thinking as soon as they think it."

It also helps to recognize rambling and incoherence as confusion, and take that as a cue to go write the whole thing down and organize it.

For example:

I asked a team lead the bare mininum permissions that were absolutely mandatory for the SDK to work, the CEO asked me to make clear what permissions were mandatory and what ones were optional based on features that clients might, or might not, use. The team lead I asked about this, gave me just a list of all permissions used, with no explanation when one or another is needed or not.

So I asked: "Is X permission enough for the SDK to work on iOS?" and the other guy replied: "The W permission is needed to use Popular Feature"

I then asked again: "If there is only X permission on the plist, will the SDK start, on iOS?" and the other guy replied: "But then Another Popular Feature won't work."

I ended having to be extremely precise: "If the programmer uses solely X permission, and attempts to start the SDK, and he doesn't intend to use any features at all, except start the SDK and get it to report RUNNING enum state, will this work?"

Finally he would reply: "Oh, yeah, it should work, oh wait, the programmer would need permission Z too..."

Because of timezones this conversation took over days, delayed projects and got clients angry.

I concluded that some people just assume others won't speak plainly and will attempt to find the hidden meaning.

Another classic issue is when you ask something on Stack Overflow for example, people assume it is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem too much, and will mark your question as duplicate or downvote it... But sometimes you are not asking about "Y" in the XY problem, you literally need to know "X". Wikipedia page there lists as example someone that asks how to get the last 3 characters when what they really wanted was to figure out the extension, but sometimes, people really needed to know the last 3 characters, and it had nothing to do with file extension.

Growing up, I had a terrible middle school educational experience in the 80s but two of the things they did right were A) computer club/lab where we could learn about programming and computers and B) a requirement to have an "oral presentation" (aka "OP") in front of our English class.

For introverts like me this was so worrying the first time but they made it easy by letting us choose almost any topic that we liked (I think I did coin collecting one time, I remember other students doing something on the Soviet military or sports). Once I got up there and into my OP it wasn't that hard and actually I felt relieved that some of my audience was bored. I feel that I am a better communicator because of it, both as a speaker and a listener.

Some workplace tactics I've seen to handle the situation you described include "BLUF" declarations (https://www.lauramfoley.com/bluf-statement/) for presentations or meetings. I met one guy in the military who said they do this, and if the scope of what is to be discussed is not clear or there is disagreement on what should be covered the meeting gets cancelled.

Having said that, his emails were horrible. Sometimes he would accidently put in a 'no' in the sentence, so he actually wrote the opposite of what he meant. I knew him well, so I could guess that this is the case, and followed up verbally to check what he means. At the same company the CEO also wrote pretty terrible 2-liner emails.

I personally put great value on clear and concise communication, esp. clear and concise writing. However, in my experience, having worked at ~10 companies, I'm an exception on this.

Most people seem to view the act of typing a message/email as a necessary evil, and they will just do one pass of typing, send it, and hope for the best.

Most people do not: (i) proof-read what they write (ii) care about grammar (iii) consider whether this is clear and concise (iv) don't think whether this is a good time to write this.

On the last point, eg. as a manager I never write any emails that might affect people's mood on a Friday, because I don't want to f--k with their weekends; there's no point, I can just send it at 9am on Monday and everybody had a great weekend. But, in my experience most managers aren't considerate like this.

For example - and it feels silly to type this because it's so obvious - as an ops-guy, I know we have to think about service downtime, its duration, our control over the downtime, user impact of the downtime and also the transitive impact of a downtime. This makes it very smooth for me to discuss a maintenance window with a call center manager, because even though our services aren't the same, we're knowing each other concepts. On the other hand, we've had developers who didn't understand how terrifying a rather uncontrolled downtime of unknown length is.

Or another example, some developers simply don't know that we're running a couple dozen instances of their software for different purposes. If you don't know that, "doing an hour or two of tinkering" for this update seems fine, because you just did it once for your test system. On the other hand, we're suddenly looking at literally man weeks of work if we accepted this.

Growing aware of such blind spots is doing good for me, and also growing awareness to the awareness of such blind spots. Some people who are very enjoyable to work with accept they have these blind spots and are happy to dig into them. Others are in fierce denial and more difficult.

Switching from verbal to written communication, or vice versa, can sometimes be helpful. Often when asked a complex question it's difficult to answer on the spot, not because they don't know the answer but because they need to organise their thoughts to explain it to you, or are trying think of any other information they might have forgotten, or other stuff. So a written answer they can compose might be easier.

Sometimes your simple question is not so simple, and doesn't have a clear cut answer. You do need to be open to that.

Of course sometimes people are not answering in good faith, and sometimes you're talking to a customer service drone, or even an actual AI responder, who are literally just choosing answers from a dropdown menu and not really reading what you've written.

I've found 1-on-1 discussions with this person to flesh issues out are much more productive than group discussions because fewer people are in on it and when I'm in the right mindset I am able to to put the effort in and help this person make the very significant contribution to the group they are capable of.

Overall, preparation is a useful tool for communicating on difficult topics. There are so many things I can talk about succinctly now that took me years of working over again and again to get where I am. Having a script, having some visual aids, etc. can help anybody be more articulate.

I know an activist who used to be notorious for ranting at public meetings who has gotten help from people in her community to prepare what she says ahead of time and she makes a much better contribution.

I'm a bit sensitive to what you say because sometimes I "think differently", particularly when it comes to what one might think is essential as opposed to what one might think is particular.

One case is that whenever the subject of "doing a calculation in parallel" comes up I will start with introducing batching because almost always the unit of work takes less time (often by 100-1000 times so this is pretty general) than a context switch regardless of what technology you use. In my mind the batching is essential and how you schedule the work is superficial.

I'd say that my approach is faster and more reliable because most people will schedule a unit of work that is too small and not get any speedup. They are going to introduce batching or give up. I've also learned the hard way that few people, particularly in a group, are going to be receptive to this, that I'm going to be accused of being obstinate or an ineffective communicator and as painful as I find it (it takes continuous mental effort to suppress) I will let people go ahead and learn about batching the hard way.

Some people's neurons are organized such that topics of information are tightly bound without reaching too far into adjacent topics.

Other people's neurons are broadly organized with topics of information overlapping.

Neither method of organization is superior. They each have pros and cons.

Tightly organized minds are efficient at particular tasks and can delve deeply into any particular area of knowledge, but are more rigid and less able to cope with new situations.

Loosely organized minds are less efficient and their knowledge is more superficial, but they're able to be flexible in the face of new situations and more apt to generate novel ideas to solve problems.

Trying to do both simultaneously is very difficult -- especially if some parties are focused on depth while others are focused on breadth while trying to communicate on the same level.

Are you sure you've clearly communicated to them the point of your question and all relevant context?

>- don't stay focused to the point of the discussion

Are you sure everyone in the room entirely agrees on what the point of the discussion is?

>- don't have some level of clarity in their train of thought and speech

Surely there must be some level of clarity.

>- generally over-complicate matters by wandering off to other related subjects and extending the scope of the discussion

If they're related subjects, are you sure that they're entirely irrelevant to the discussion? Why are you the only one who gets to determine the appropriate scope for the discussion?

Many people seem to totally lack the capability of understanding simple questions. I often have to ask yes/no questions, and even then I have to say "please answer yes or no". Then I have to go beating 1 bit information at the time... really frustrating, specially with people with master or even PhD degrees! Ok, where I'm now it seems a PhD can be bought around the corner for 2 cents.

In my experience this also happens when they try to explain something. Right now I'm relatively new in my position, and it was a real torture to understand the system, because nobody seems to be able to explain it in a linear way. They start "there is this function, and this function, which depends on that, btw, there is also this here... did I mention this other module?!... ahh ok... no no.. sorry, I forgot this interface..." It was really exasperating!

I think this may correlate strongly with the lack of ability for text comprehension, that is often reported in school tests.

EDIT: I see some answers referring to learning disorders, disabilities, anxiety, not knowing the issue at hand. I'm talking about people which do know the topic (explain the code they have written, for example); in a situation where I'm not the boss, and is no interview, just a coffee talk between equals; witout any diagnosed problem oder disability. As said, even with PhD titles, which imply they had to defend a Thesis in front of a panel with complex topics...

In my experience of sometimes being on the other side of these conversations, the problem is that the person asking for ‘yes/no’ answers is exhibiting a lack of understanding of the subject being discussed. They are asking questions that are not relevant or perhaps even misleading. I’m struggling to get them to stop focusing on irrelevant or wrong things, and listen to more background information that’s required to reach a base level of shared understanding.

To the point you're saying without the seeming antagonism - yes, you're right, a quick "wait, I think we need to talk about the background here because we're both making different assumptions" can and does work in most conversations with most people.

In the worst cases, though, some people take it as "ugh, why can't they just provide a yes/no answer to my simple question!?" and the conversation can become increasingly difficult.

If someone's thinking this a lot - like, they think most people are doing this to them to the extent that they wonder why "many people seem to totally lack the capability of understanding simple questions" - it would be wise for them to re-examine their assumptions.

PM: Are we good to go live on Wednesday? (it's Monday)

Me: Feature X isn't fully ready yet. Data science needs to address a bug that I found 2 weeks ago. If they fix the bug, I'll prepare a release for Wednesday. Alternatively, we can go live without feature X.

PM: Feature X is required. Data science says they'll have the bug fix ready. So are we good to go live Wednesday?

Me: If data science implements the bug fix, I'll release on Wednesday. (I don't trust data science to be ready, but I'm not going to say that)

PM: Okay, so we're good to go live?

<two or three more cycles>

Context is very relevant. Yes/no questions often aren't yes/no. I didn't even include the full conversation where I tried to clarify what he means "go live" or whether the customer had signed off. In the end, customers hadn't signed off and he hadn't coordinated with other teams. The release has been put off for at least a month.

I think this is somewhat different than a yes/no informational question. In this case, it wasn't even a yes/no question, it was a yes/yes question, he wanted me to take responsibility.

Me: maybe, I'm not sure. ( your answer is incorrect, let the manager probe you further)

This is... not surprising at all? Are you new to industry? Have you only worked at greenfield startups?

Particularly true for products with significant R&D components, btw.

> Ok, where I'm now it seems a PhD can be bought around the corner for 2 cents.

Some advice for hiring people with advanced degrees:

1. The masters degree itself is not a good signal. Especially in CS, MS programs are viewed as pure revenue streams and explicitly treated differently from other programs in terms of rigor and signalling value.

2. The PhD degree itself is not a good signal. For example, the University of Phoenix awards PhDs.

3. Some CS subfields are worse than others in terms of PhD signal:noise. Machine learning is a big abuser -- faculty at lower ranked programs can often get away with using PhD students as super cheap entry-level SWEs/SREs ("graduate student descent"). There are some subfields of CS where a PhD is a better signal. Actually, this can happen at higher-ranked universities as well.

So, what to do?

1. For masters degrees without a thesis component, I'm not really sure. Treat it as a new grad who took some extra coursework.

2. The great thing about a PhD (or Masters with thesis) is that the output is a 100+ page document. You can read usually about 10 pages of that document (intro, conclusion, fist page or so of each chapter) and have an immediate sense for how well the person communicates.

I discovered this recently. Working in the CS department at a large state school, the masters students are not respected. I have had professors tell me they don't care if they cheat (they mostly do) or share solutions, they are just there to pay their tutition and get their degree. Working directly with some of these students, I have found that they lack understanding of basic computing concepts, even fundamentally how computers work. It's breathtaking. Maybe some schools are exceptions, but I've come to interpret a masters degree in any computer-related subject to only mean that the person had the funds to pay for it.

Sadly, immigration is a major pull into MS programs, and it's not always the case that the student can actually afford the program... especially if the immigration plan doesn't work out.

- We are building an embedded system, which has a data interface, which is not working properly (nothing is being received). We have to take care of the emitter, other team the receiver.

- My question: after lunch you are going to see with the oscilloscope of there is activity in the interfaces lines?

- Answer: No need, the registers in the ASIC indicate transmission is ok.

- 2nd question: but maybe there is a malfunction in the ASIC, and still there is no transmission, so we should test.

- Reply: The other team will check if there is reception or no.

- 3rd question: but the other team confirmed there is no reception, even with oscilloscope... could you test?

- Reply: what test do you want me to do?

- Me: measure with oscilloscope

- Reply: what for?

- Me: To confirm the transmission

- Reply: I dont follow...

- Me: here I start to ask, step by step:

    - We have a problem of transmission, right?

    - Yes!

    - Registers in ASIC indicate no problem, right?

    - Yes.

    - The other team reported still there is nothing in the receiver, right?

    - Yes.

    - So it would be useful to physically test with oscilloscope if that is being send, don't you think?

    - Yes, sure!

    - So you are going to do it, later, after lunch?

    - Yes, no problem.

Unless this is your subordinate and you are convinced of a plan of action. In that case don't ask, just be direct and tell them what you want to test.

Btw: at the end the test confirmed the suspicion.

"OK, we both agree there appears to be a problem with the transmission. How do you propose we investigate?"

From the dialog it appears you were two steps ahead of the person and what he really needed was time to think it through. Asking the open ended question gives him space to think.

You propose I use an open ended question, where the discussion could easily go sideways, when I clearly stated:

"In this case is my subordinate."

"I already had asked him to do the measurement. My question started more to be sure he actually is going to do it."

I do not see how an open question would help here.

Nice example of communication going wrong here...

It makes sense to give a subordinate a directive. That he is a subordinate, however, doesn't mean a direct question will lead to effective communication.

I've worked with both types of managers - the ones that ask direct, pointed questions and the ones that ask open ended ones. I think the latter are more effective, but it really depends on the role (you don't want open ended discussions in emergencies).

For me, though, "We have problem X. What are the options for resolving it?" has a better chance at success than "We have a problem X. Can you look into Y?"

The other side of this, trying to insist on yes/no answers to questions that are not yes/no questions is also a bit of a recipe for disaster.

> EDIT: I see some answers referring to learning disorders, disabilities, anxiety, not knowing the issue at hand. I'm talking about people which do know the topic

Some learning disorders do exhibit really good math and logic skills but poor conversational skills. Or just requiring a lot of time to put thoughts together and being really bad at on the spot real time conversation. Casual conversation and being academically talented are really pretty distinct skills that dont neccesarily come together.

"will you have the project complete by Friday?" -> you may be able to state "no," but there are certainly caveats to any "yes" answer.

"will you try to have the project complete by Friday?" - in this case, "yes" is most likely an acceptable answer, but you still probably want to pull in additional context, e.g. "but I am prioritizing x, y, and z."

Good, correct conversation is rarely binary.

"Well I started with this module and Bob is still doing stuff, but it seems like some work still. Ah, also have this meeting tomorrow - btw do you know if Alice is joining? Did we say you prepare the slides or does she do it?" leaves me hanging not knowing whether they'll manage or not and we're off to a side discussion.

"Yes, unless Bob can't get this merged until tomorrow." or "No, this became way bigger than expected. Do you need to communicate this to someone, or is it blocking you and we might be able to split it up to unblock you?" are way better answers. It shows that the person understands the scope of their task, they can estimate roughly the amount of work, but also stay open to prioritize or compromise.

Even "I don't know yet, as I first have to read through this document to get a grasp of the scope. I'll come back to you in the afternoon" is a way better answer that's neither yes or no, but you take the responsibility to find out.

IMHO you can pretty much always provide clear answers, but it requires for you to understand the scope, the shared context and some social intelligence to realize, that the other person probably has a reason for asking and that the questions or anecdote that just came to mind should probably be of lower priority.

I think what i was reacting to was more the types of questions like "can the site scale to 50,000 users? Yes or no" where the real answer is, well it depends on how active they are, what they do on the site, are they are logging in at 9am monday, or a million different factors and there is no reasonable yes or no answer.

It is often good to provide additional context to identify common ground and from there guide the discussion.

A system that can be described in a linear and continuous fashion without drilling down is either too simple, or too broadly described, neither of which is particularly useful when complexity is high.

“If a man writes and speaks "neatly" it is because his thinking is orderly; if his expression is forceful, the thought back of it must be forceful. But if he blunders for words, and uses phrases which express his meaning clumsily, I believe his mind is cluttered and ill-disciplined.”

[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_I_Never_Hire_Brilliant_Me...

Sometimes the audience can make you bashful.

> don't directly address the point of your question / provide a much complex answer (or even worse, a non-answer) to a simple question

Understood the question, and without acknowledging the immediate implications, goes on to spell out the pictures that pop into their mind without sharing context for it.

> don't stay focused to the point of the discussion

In their mind, they are following the discussion to where it naturally leads. They only failed to connect the dots by providing context.

> don't have some level of clarity in their train of thought and speech

This one's hit or miss. Maybe they do have something that ties together what they're talking about but haven't shared it clearly. Other times, they're just rambling on.

> generally over-complicate matters by wandering off to other related subjects and extending the scope of the discussion

Continuation of two points above. If there were more sync-points where participants would be clear about what they acknowledge and agree on, acknowledge and disagree on, then they could get to why/where there are discrepancies in their viewpoints. Unfortunately many are unable to express why/what their objections arise from and are gut reactions which may be valid but difficult to name.

I think an effective way to fix this conversation pattern is to adopt "Yes, and ..." rather than the unspoken 'ok' then spoken "But ...".

* to avoid committing to some specific work.

* to avoid revealing that they haven't done some expected background investigation or groundwork.

* to try to cover up simply not knowing stuff.

* engineers may overthink a question and the answers for fear of saying something incorrect, because almost everything is riddled with conditions and limitations. And sometimes incomplete counts as incorrect. It's hard to know which may be relevant to the situation being asked about, leaving the busy-brained techie flustered. "Oh, in C, you use the + operator to add numbers. Oh but wait, if there are overflows, it is undefined; don't interpret my answer as meaning that you have a nicely behaved, safe addition. Oh, except for unsigned types ... I should also warn you that the operands possibly undergo promotion to different types, and one operand is converted to the type of the other according to some hairy rules that have portability implications; just try to avoid mixing signed/unsigned or integer and floating."

Politicians are evasive. Canada's Justin Trudeau has become internationally noted for using questions as prompts to dump carefully scripted messages.

One time, after interviewing more than a dozen candidates for a job position, I was pretty much convinced that the people who gave the shortest answers were the most knowledgeable. The most verbose candidate was used as an example to the recruiting agency, "we explicitly don't want this" -- he was invited for an interview only because he had successfully bluffed his way through the recruiter.

(1) They're focused on some other problem, and then they're asked to participate in a discussion. This requires unloading their brain, literally, so that they can devote full attention to the discussion (i.e. 'stay focused'). Some try to only devote partial attention to the discussion so that they don't have to unload and reload their brain all the time - as this takes a lot of time and energy (think: cost of a major context switch).

(2) They don't spend much time interacting with other human beings, so their communication and social skills are somewhat lacking, i.e. not much so-called 'emotional intelligence'. People can learn this skill, but for those not practiced in it, it does require one's full concentration (see point one). Others fall into the 'lecturing to the classroom' mentality, i.e. they generate a one-way stream of information, not a discussion.

One solution is to schedule technical discussions ahead of time, and make a point to never interrupt people when they're in the middle of something. If that doesn't work, maybe some kind of communication skills training program is needed.

* Didn't clarify requirements. Didn't outline or discuss potential solutions and tradeoffs to different approaches up front. Instead spent days writing an overcomplicated implementation based on their understanding of the problem in isolation. Typical code review feedback triggers a defensive response citing sunk cost fallacy and will not engage with non-syntactical questions, for example "why did you choose approach it this way instead of that way" is ignored or called out of scope

* Didn't prepare or share meeting agendas ahead of time. Instead tries to explain meeting context verbally on the fly. Monologues for 10-15 minutes touching unrelated points, outlining different ways we could structure the meeting, gives random bits of anecdotal context, then says "what do you think?". Is met with crickets. Attendees are confused and very little is established or clarified. Rinse and repeat at the next meeting.

These left me pretty much stumped and negatively affected my future efforts with the individuals.

I wonder how other people would approach these situations?

If you are bouncing ideas off other workers who have other responsibilities and don’t really know much about your problem, I suspect they see it as more of a social conversation and don’t feel a responsibility to stay on topic, and will be happier pivoting to things they understand better or find more interesting.

On the other hand, if you are trying to have a deep technical conversation about something you and another expert are working together on, and they can’t stay on topic, there’s a possibility that they aren’t very good at their job. Although, communication is a two way street, and there are probably only a couple people working on your specific problem, so it seems like it would be hard to get a decent enough sample size to figure out which party’s communication skills aren’t up to the task.

Finally there is the case where you are trying to get information from someone who know the problem much better than you. For example, someone who has designed a library that you are trying to use, where they know the internals and you are just trying to figure out the API. In this case, they might decide that they simply can’t describe the API without telling you about internal details that feel, from your point of view, like an expansion of scope and a waste of time. In this case, they might be wrong, but unfortunately it is hard to tell due to the knowledge asymmetry, so there doesn’t seem to be anything to do but go along with them.

Generally a conversation is more productive if everybody knows what everybody else’s incentives and roles are (lots of conversations are just for fun and not intended to be productive, which is probably why we’re used to not really thinking about this before conversing).

For me I think it comes from my background as a software developer.

When working at a task, the first thing I aim for is identify the most complex problem and build a trace of solution for that - it gives me a fair estimate for the task size to take all the complexity upfront, and makes it easier to delegate part of the details if I need a hand to keep a deadline later on.

When someone comes with a question, my brain is hardwire from 20 years of practice to go deep, trace a solution, and build on top of it.

The result is that there's hardly any linearity in the speech. Details get added out of order, preconditions get explored as needed by the core issue, and in general everything emerges based on the need of the argument to have a solid structure and not the need of the listener to follow up to the solution and of course if you take a total approach then it's hard to stay on topic.

Now as I said I've tried to get better but it's been hard beyond recognizing how one own thought process work.

2) Some people will always communicate poorly as worse than average communicators will always exist in nature.

3) On top of this, phones and other modern technologies provide a constant distraction for people. That average person might have appeared far more competent in a different era where they lived more in the moment and had to focus on what was in front of them rather than trying to resolve a problem as quickly as possible to go back and look at their notifications.

4) IMO, the question shouldn't be "why don't some people communicate clearly", the question should be "why does it seem like more people are communicating unclearly than before". To that I would say a combination of technical distractions as well as dropping IQs.

5) My personal life tip for both programming and interacting with people in your daily life (real-estate agents, waiters, customer-support people, plumbers, etc) is to make very simple requests without conditionals whenever possible. Everybody gets confused with words like the following: if, unless, and, or, until, when. To reduce the chance of confusion, say straightforward things to your busy waiter like "Please bring me some bread" and don't give convoluted requests like "If my appetizer or salad is ready, bring me that and my bread, but if the meal is ready, I want you to please get me my drinks first." Convoluted requests with conditionals are most often a chance for confusion.

Also, we seem to have lost respect for editors in writing and it may have spilled over into oral communication. When answering a technical question it would help if people kept the old inverted pyramid structure in mind. Instead people indulge in a "let me take you on a fascinating intellectual journey to parts unknown; Will I ever answer the question you asked? Who knows? But I appreciate your patience and indulgence".

I will often interrupt a few minutes into a monologue that doesn't seem to be circling my question and say "It's ok if you think I asked the wrong question, but in that case you need to say 'the answer to the question you asked is X, now here is why I think it is the wrong question...'"

Weaving together an on-the-fly response that both ties off the thought process and presents a narrative that doesn't lose the audience is a skill not many possess without extensive practice (e.g. high-level debate training, trial law, etc..).

Examples:

She starts off with "To make a long story short...". I tell her: "Honey, all of your stories are long and I like them to be very short. Just leave off 'To make a long story short' and get right to the point."

She answers yes/no questions with long-winded answers that make it very unclear whether it's yes or no.

She drifts WAY off topic very easily. We might be talking about some current topic and she'll go off with something like: "Oh, let me tell you about what happened when I was 7 years old and attending elementary school and we had this girl that lived next door that would always ...". It exhausts me when she does this.

She's very hard of hearing (has hearing aids in both ears) and even still she often doesn't clearly hear what the other person said and guesses at what they said. Then replies with something completely unrelated.

* They don't know how to politely communicate that they don't understand the question or disagree with the premise. The mental transformation from "that makes no sense, I don't understand what you're asking about" -> "I may be missing context here, but..." isn't something that comes naturally to everyone.

* They don't know precisely how focused they should stay. Sometimes the discussion really is too narrowly scoped and needs to be broadened, and it can be hard to calibrate.

* They don't know how to prompt other people, who may have a very different sense of which angles are relevant or how wide the scope of a conversation should be, to focus back down on what they need to talk about.

> don't have some level of clarity in their train of thought and speech

When I am working on a software project, especially a big one, a lot of my brain power is dedicated to holding a mental model of how it works, how the pieces fit together, and what the variables are. Even while I'm not working, a large block of my mental capacity is occupied. In the most extreme cases, I've had trouble coherently communicating/finishing sentences.

> generally over-complicate matters by wandering off to other related subjects and extending the scope of the discussion

Sometimes when I start answering a question, my brain will follow a series of thoughts and free associations. Part way into an answer I'll have forgotten what the question was. This probably ties into the above, but it's also just how my mind works. This might be a common trait amongst developers?

It is a combination of personality and the persons understanding of the topic.

It boils down to you yourself not communicating your intention in the conversation a lot of times. You can say "java is a poor choice because of gc", do you want to talk about langauges in general, are you looking for them to relate to you on your experience with java, are you trying to get better context about why the person wants to use java? Are you mentioning that because you want to get to know the person better and that was your ice breaker?

Understand that other people live in a completely different world in their minds than your own. Being clear and direct is not enough, being specific might also be required which means saying obvious intentions and meanings out loud.

The process of translating thought into a language (written or spoken - also picking a language, being multilingual), and then into concise language, at least for myself, is a multi step process.

A younger version of myself would be “too lazy” to keep that process hidden in my brain and would verbalize the whole algorithm with all its complexities and dimensions until getting to the point.

It took trial and error and practice for me to realize people just wanted the point and fill in the details afterwards if necessary. Or that the other person wanted to find the reasons themselves as a way of confirming our thoughts are synchronized.

It takes quite a bit of computational brain power to do all that well, whereas it’s easier to ramble and and brain dump.

The opposite is often (but not always) true. If a person does not communicate clearly, it is usually because they cannot think clearly (at least about that particular topic).

Take a moment and ask yourself legitimately, “What do I owe the person(s) who I’m speaking to?”, by way of rights. Not monetary “owe”, but civil “owe”, if you’re not keen on any we can talk it out elsewhere. But try this out maybe. Worry less about the hang ups that other people have, because they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, and focus on what your duties and obligations are toward these people. The outcome will not always be favorable or pleasing to you, but it’s not about that.

You could find another profession where the common communication problems have to do with getting upset and crying about interpersonal conflicts.

The useful insight is this…most people think they’re being clear even when they’re not. Their brain is making sense of the world in a way which may not make sense to you.

One quick hack, especially for engineers, is “I heard you say X…but I’m not sure that’s what you mean. Is that right?”

Most of the time, reasonable people will notice the communication gap and help close it.

Them: "I couldn't get it to start up correctly because the parameters weren't right. What are the right parameters?"

Me: "What are you even talking about?"

It got so bad at one job that I created a sign that said "Context Please" that I would hold up to my coworker. I could only get away with it because we worked well together and were friends. He just had a big problem with context in his communication.

1) People don't receive formal training in logic and argument formation.

2) People don't properly calibrate their own emotion or take into account the listener's emotions when deciding how to make their argument.

Lots of people keep asking: "what do I need it for, I just want to study X". They just don't realise how important that is.

In a work context:

- Some people just follow their train of thought wherever it leads. It works OK in their internal working life, because it leads them interesting places. They may not realize that they have to maintain a clean "interface" with the external world and have some of that chatter not cross that boundary.

- Some people have hangups. They like to draw the conversation to their own things which make them look good.

- Some people are just self-centered. I don't mean conceited as in full of themselves necessarily, but as in they really find it difficult to see the world through another person's viewpoint. The world only exists through the viewing pane of their own interests and experience.

- Some people over communicate when they are nervous instead of keeping it crisp. I do this. It's important for me to be relaxed in a meeting where I am presenting.

- Some people just don't know how to gauge their audience. They try to explain the whole "elephant" when asked about it, instead of trying to scope the answer to the audience's level of expertise and the scope of the question. Imagine a blind man considering a vacation to Africa asking, "What's the dangerous part of an elephant?" - Well, it's partly the pointy things on its face, but also they are gigantic and ill tempered. There, I answered it in a concise way, but you can imagine (say) a nerdy zoologist getting wayyyy into the details of anecdotes of the myriad ways elephants have killed people.

- Playing dumb, by the way, can be a sneaky way of setting people's expectations to gain an advantage. See: The scene the Shlomo character in "The Honourable Woman" has near the end of the season where he admits that as CEO of a telecom that he actually understands all the tech from the top to the bottom. And that people's expectation that he doesn't reveals things about them in their interactions.

- If you read original texts by great thinkers from Plato to Adam Smith, they really aren't easy to parse. If they couldn't do it, what chance do you have :)

- It's recursive: to explain idea A, you need to understand idea !A in the other person's head.

- There's infinite complexity out there: Even if you can explain idea A, you're leaving out a lot in terms of related ideas B, C, D

(Disclaimer, I make a product to fix this: https://demogorilla.com/docs/compelling-demos )

I think people should generally fight this need for simple answers... the world is a messy place, and if you're turning to a practitioner of said mess for advice then you should expect a suitable answer. (It also avoids the other person looking like a buffoon or pointy-haired boss to me, which is one of fastest ways to lose my respect)

But if they have to give a "yes*" or "yes, but..." answer, than some of those fundamentals might be relevant. But you wouldn't expect the discussion to get into signalling theory, again, unless it was relevant.

Given that nontechnicals have such a hard time grasping something as basic as abstraction, I certainly would not trust them to make judgement calls on it effectively.

Which again leads to the question of just how accurate an answer is the nontechnical person looking for?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

Most of the software engineers I have worked with never put anything in writing because they lack confidence in their ability to express their thoughts in a written form. When that becomes common in a work culture you tend to have lots of meetings where people over communicate verbally as a compensation while everyone else is silently playing games or watching paint dry.

I look for this kind of structure when I interview people, and it's amazing how many go breadth-first with their answers, and it turns into a hard-to-follow stream-of-consciousness.

Me: "Please describe system X"

What I want to hear: "System X is composed of major subsystems A, B, and C. I'll talk about them in order. Subsystem A is composed of attributes 1, 2, and 3, which I can describe later if needed. Subsystem B is composed of 4, 5, 6..."

What I often get is: "System X first has subsystem A. Subsystem A has a lot of attributes, like attribute 1, which itself is composed of detail alpha, the research behind detail alpha is this: ... ..., ok, now back to attribute 1, there's also detail beta, which is really cool because ... ..." and we're out of time without even getting to any of the other attributes, or to subsystems B, subsystems C, or even mentioning any of their attributes.

It's easier to go from stream-of-consciousness to depth-first, but you lose your audience. Better to take the time to structure what you're going to say, and present it breadth-first, top-down.

EDIT: Somehow switched depth and breadth :)

Me (manager): “Hey Bob, did you and the other team figure out a solution for the problem you mentioned last week?”

Bob: “Well, we had a couple of long meetings and went through a lot of issues.”

Me: “Great. Did you come to a conclusion?”

Bob: “Well, there was a lot of disagreement at first, that’s why we spent longer than we intended to in discussions.”

Me: “I see. So did you figure out a solution?”

Bob: “Well, I need to think about the impact now, might need to do a lot of refactoring.”

Me: “Ok, but did… you… agree… on a solution??”

Bob: “Oh. Yes.”

“Bob, did you deploy your API to stage yet so we can start experimenting with it?”

“Well, this version isn’t final yet… there’s a few things I might want to do differently. It won’t be deployed to production for at least another 2 weeks. The whole thing is actually a lot trickier than it seems…”

“Bob, is this on stage or not?”

“Oh, yes”

I had undiagnosed ADHD which I've finally gotten diagnosed after 30 years. I somehow managed to get into tech (at some of the most prestigious companies) as a software engineer but I couldn't advance past mid-level engineer because of a severe lack of consistency. I would have weeks where my output was massive followed by weeks of low output.

- don't directly address the point of your question / provide a much complex answer (or even worse, a non-answer) to a simple question

I might've gotten distracted mid question. Or worse, I forget a word I was about to use and need to think hard about what that word was.

- don't stay focused to the point of the discussion

Some other tangential idea might've popped up in my head and in the moment I find it so compelling I need to blurt it out.

- don't some level of clarity in their train of thought and speech

My short term working memory is terrible.

- generally over-complicate matters by wandering off to other related subjects and extending the scope of the discussion

See above

Anyway, I think most people are on some spectrum of having the ability to maintain clear trains of thought and I think it's one form of intelligence. So you should feel fortunate to have this ability naturally and learn some patience with the rest of us peons that are not as good as you. Intelligence, patience and compassion will get you far.

An umwelt is an individual's subjective experience of the world, shaped by their sensory perceptions, language, culture, and values. Because people have different umwelts, they often perceive the world differently and may come into conflict with one another.

Simply put, people are unequal when it comes to understanding and without clear understanding many people will struggle finding words to explain what they mean.

To recap again, language is difficult and communication requires active effort as opposed to just assuming that what one has in his mind will always come across perfectly no matter what words/utterances are used. Unfortunately, not everyone knows or ponders upon it.

But imprecise communication is something you'll have to get used to if you want to do important work. The most precise communication you will find are in higher level math textbooks, where the proofs rely on predetermined axioms and careful logic (and when proved these statements are called "trivial"). Issues in the real world are built on top of imperfect information.

Reminds me of a Feynman quote on what makes a topic that we can have a discussion on:

"We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance–gold transfers we can't talk about, because those are understood–so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!”

Yes, and not just because of cross cultural issues, as some of the sibling comments suggest.

I've seen people who don't address questions clearly, sometimes cannot explain their train of thought or reasons for making certain decisions (which may or may not be cargo culting at times), or have especially pronounced challenges in regards to async communication as well - not electing to use a spell checker and usually having typos (both in their messages and code, unfortunately), communicating in cut off short sentences without providing the proper details, or always asking for a call.

I suspect that communicating effectively is a skill like any other and many simply choose not to make an effort to advance it. Alternatively, some may not be comfortable with writing in any capacity (e.g. dyslexia), or alternatively, explaining themselves verbally (e.g. anxiety).

In regards to my latter points, I actually made this site to hopefully give some tips on async communication: https://quick-answers.kronis.dev/

(some of the already existing sites seemed to ridicule these people, which I do not want to do, but rather offer tips)

That said, I am also not perfect and have made the occasional communication blunders myself. That's why nowadays I try to re-read what I'm about to post, or consider how I word things at least a few times before hitting submit. Even in communication that takes place in-person, I try to introduce people to the points I want to make bit by bit, giving them whatever context may be necessary.

As for engaging with others, all you can do is encourage them to share more information as it's necessary, not get sidetracked and be very patient yourself.