Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

The number of times I see my words interpreted as though my choice in words had been imprecise is a near constant source of pain, particularly in the workspace. I might be on the spectrum, I am undiagnosed.

About six months ago I was tasked with building a little RPC for a different division to be able to kick off a long running process and documenting it for them. The documentation was complete, correct, and relatively terse. Less than a page.

I sent my manager the documentation to pass on, and for reasons I will never understand he passed it through AI before handing it over to the other department. No one informed me.

Within a day I start getting feedback that makes zero sense. Seemingly no one can get the RPC to work. I had tested this extensively, the complaints made zero sense. One of the complaints includes the actual request being made and the endpoint is entirely wrong. Not a single character typo, a complete fabrication. I ask where this came from and they point me to the documentation they were sent. Every single thing was wrong. The endpoints were wrong, the required parameters were wrong, there were invented features that do not exist. I am a very easy going guy, and I have genuinely never been so furious in my entire life. I am still angry as I write this. If the job market were not what it is I would have quit there and then.

I feel like people using AI to both read and interpret language is the death of rigorous language. I have genuinely been pondering for months if generative AI is the "Great Filter" preventing space faring civilizations from flourishing. Around the same time a civilization begins to enter space they invent a device that destroys their minds.

Let me add a couple to this list.

1. No amount of knowledge or discussion will make a person accept something they don’t want to accept.

2. To truly listen means to place yourself mentally and physically in a vulnerable state. Because you will likely hear things that run contrary to your experience, beliefs, and worldview. Judging people is often a self protection mechanism; which means you will almost never listen to someone.

3. Listening often means not jumping to a solution; but absorbing and processing someone’s pain. Product managers for example are quick to jump to a solution, a new feature, or they’ll push the request off as “oh, ok, we’ll make a ticket for that ”

When in actuality, they should be listening to the use case, looking for the pain, and finding a way to solve the pain points. As opposed to trying to understand what feature the user wants to request.

Communicating effectively is the central problem of all humanity!

This vent criticizes developers for not knowing how to listen. that's why it comes off condescending. The root problem is that people don't know what they don't know.

The best communicators are translators. People listen because the message becomes self evident in their understanding.

It's hardly a breakdown because everyone is acting like a toddler with their fingers in their ears.

This is ironically why we reach for systems and engineering. The system can build in gap detection and frameworks for translation. It's not perfect and creates its own problems but scolding each unit human to listen better does nothing for the collective environment: the team, the company… the system.

The converse is also true. People saying something assume that people listening are understanding and thinking about the same thing. This is why it's important to write things down in details and as-unambiguous-as-you-can forms.

If you're in a meeting and someone puts up a slide deck with a 6 word bullet point that 'explains' what they want, that is a signal that literally no one understands the goal. If they put in a meeting without writing a one page doc about it, they don't understand it well enough to explain it.

And if your progression hangs off delivering that thing, you should by demanding that you get a clearer picture.

Once a customer's expectation is in-line with with can be done, and how long that will take, and how much it will cost, and when it can be used in production, you have one happy customer, even if they are unhappy with the projected start date, or the projected cost (generally a deal-breaker, so that's why I align that upfront with ballparks).

You can listen all you want, empathise all you want, but the reality is the reality - they have to acknowledge and/or accept the realities.

Having a customer relationship manager who agrees to everything the client wants is going to result in one very unhappy customer. The customer-interface person needs to listen to both the client and the internal team, to make sure what the client expects is what your team can actually deliver.

I've caught myself frustrated at users for not understanding something I've spent years internalizing. The problem is: they've spent those same years internalizing something else entirely. Their knowledge isn't absent, it's just elsewhere.

2. people aren't listening

I don't think this is right; I think the reason is - to use the metaphor from the cartoon image at the top - that what most of the people involved in the not talking and/or not listening were looking to get out of the situation in the first place was the ribbon cutting, not the road, and they got it.

Funniest experience I've had with this is paraphrasing someone almost exactly in a reply to check I understood, and emphatically being told that was absolutely not what was being said.

1. Can u add X 2. Can u change Y

Without understanding cost of doing all this. Yes, i can do all and everything you ask for, but each action has a cost, which you fail to understand.

We cannot do everything if we need to launch a reliable product.

I think it's a mistake that such people often stop even listening to those who are less well-read or less experienced in a subject; they prefer to adopt the position of the 'source of truth' and the teacher. Although, it seems to me that people who are less 'biased' by extensive reading often come up with original—perhaps unpolished, but original ideas. To hear those ideas, you have to know how to listen and extract thoughts rather than suppress them."

Totally understand, but I would love if the author included links to these other things for articles/etc they thought did a good enough job not to repeat them!

I'm so sick of it. Comunication is a tango. If you - who need the product and are ready to pay for it - don't take your damn time to effectively articulate what are your needs then you should go to school again and learn it.

By the way, since you all non-engineer people are so good at communicating, why are you not communicating effectively your needs?

Bring on the down votes.

A good article about the costs of not listening to your customers would be useful.

Talking to a 'yes and autocomplete' that will agree with everything you say and praise it as a "Great idea!" will make everything terrible

Lol on this one. I mean, yes, it is true, but also funny.

(Procrastination, Red Dwarf reference)

You know, I was actually hoping for a good listicle of things to watch out for in meetings. The author should take their own advice. Assuming bad faith immediately kills all productivity, so there's no point in finishing reading this.

I agree with the general notion that there are often knowledge gaps getting in the way of better planning and execution. I was hoping for techniques to overcome them, but (sigh) I guess that's just more "engineering" getting in the way.

I've been doing this for long enough to realize there's no substitute for experience. It's basically the opposite of all the popular advice. If you're serious about any successful long-term career, you can't avoid looking foolish and having lots of difficult discussions. There are no shortcuts. There is no "higher path" you're missing out on. If you're going to grind it out, at least save face by working at the "shitty places" with bad reviews on glassdoor where you can safely fail without damage to your ego or reputation. When you finally get hired somewhere nicer mid-career, you can just bury all that in your mind and pretend it never happened. Nobody cares anyway.

If we're going to be judgy, I gotta say some of the worst people I've ever worked with never got out of that phase. It's that simple.