One job I had a serious issue (that kept escalating until I got fired, since the other people involved were more senior) where certain employees never replied my questions properly (and it was my job to ask them) because they kept trying to "read between the lines" and no matter how I tried to phrase my questions, they would misunderstand 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.
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.