Why do some people not communicate clearly?

A crucial point not mentioned yet: cross cultural issues.

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.

Here are some altruistic reasons these events might occur:

> - 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.

Some years ago I decided to take communications seriously and read a bunch of books on it. It was a major shift in how I view it.

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 am, charitably, a pretty decent developer. I also have what I think most would agree is a pretty successful career.

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.

Communication is a two way street. In general, if you’re often getting responses that don’t have the information you need, then you need to figure out how to change how you ask a question.

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.

I dunno what’s up with these Ask HNs which are utterly transparent humblebrags but in this case, chances are what you think is clear communication lacks a lot of context and nuance, and despite obviously feeling superior to them, you’re missing or ignoring important information that people want you to possess.

People seek what is emotionally comfortable for them. This steers their communication. For example, they may wander off to topics they feel more comfortable with, or where they unconsciously hope for more emotional payoff. You can’t treat people as being rational actors, except in the sense that they may actually be quite rational about achieving their emotional goals. This is often completely subconscious.

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.

Lots of people are afraid to say "I don't know" in my experience. Although, sometimes people ask me a question where I have to work out in my head what the answer is and it feels weird to sit there in silence for 15 seconds as I do so.

Let me reverse that for you:

> - 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.

Communication is extremely complicated. It's also not a solo sport. There are at least two people involved at all times. There are some specific skills that you can practice which I have found have helped me a lot with this problem.

-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.

> Why some people do not communicate clearly? > P.S. Apologies for this rant (that probably lacks clarity as well)

Sigh.

I think you are describing something that is fundamentally difficult for all human beings. (1) Understanding abstract problem statements (2) solving the problem (3) communicating the solution to other people accounting for their various levels of understanding and context (4) the meta problem of knowing which problems to solve and which conversations to have.

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.

I often have a hard time communicating. This is a hurdle I deal with on a daily basis and makes for stressful encounters with others.

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.

I notice that when people don't have a clear answer to a question they will talk more than if they know the answer. To me, it seems that some people get anxious of not knowing the answer that they prefer to say something rather than nothing.

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 single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. (George Bernard Shaw)

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.

My favorite form of poor communication:

---

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.

This might be a case of low context vs high context culture :

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.

Here are a handful of answers derived from personal experience of myself and others:

* 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.

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.

Effective communication is an undervalued skill in many companies and cultures. If you've never been encouraged or allowed to speak up, it can lead to the situations you described.

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.

I once worked at a startup and reported to the CTO. This guy was a genuinely smart guy, a little bit of a genius, in the sense that he had a knack for approaching problems from a different perspective and coming up with different/creative solutions.

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.

After dealing with devs, customers, account managers, security guys on the customer side and such a bunch, I'm starting to realize something that's tricky. If you don't know a concept exists - or it slips your mind - you cannot include and deal with it in your communication. This might be inconsequential in some cases, or lead to misunderstandings in other situations.

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.

I'm an instructor at a coding bootcamp, and for my own sanity I've made teaching students to communicate clearly a priority. Honestly most of the time it's just laziness, and I can improve their communication massively by telling them to do things like formatting code snippets correctly, using the correct and precise terminology, replacing pronouns with the actual thing, and even just using complete sentences (this one kills me...).

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 know one individual who frequently gets into discussions that get bogged down. When I take the time to get to the bottom of it I'd say half the time this person is correct, has something important to say AND has a unique perspective which would get lost if they didn't participate... even critical to the success of the group. The other half of the time this person sticks to a position which is either wrong or irrelevant.

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.

If you understand human minds through the perspective of electricity flowing through branching webs of neurons, it helps you understand why different people have different methods of communication.

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.

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

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?

In no particular order: ADHD, anxiety, a poor night's sleep, lack of interest in the topic, disdain for co-workers, TBI or concussion, low-grade fever, a hangover, tight pants, too cold, too hot, overtasked, caring for a sick or elderly family member, caring for a sick child, the list goes on and on.

YES. Absolutely!

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...

If You Think Straight, You Can Speak Straight [1]

“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...

In a word: Context.

> 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 ...".

People sometimes communicate unclearly on purpose:

* 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.

In engineering it could be:

(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.

A couple of challenging communication and behavior patterns I've experienced are:

* 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?

It really depends on who you are talking to and what their role is, right?

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).

Being a bad communicator trying to improve I've been quite reflective about this

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.

1) Sometimes not staying perfectly focused on what you see as the main point of a conversation is not the wrong thing to do. In a meeting discussing a complex business problem for instance, a smarter person in the room might see that the root cause of a problem you're all working on is "Problem D", whereas everybody else is focused on "Problem A".

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.

Poor communicators do not try to imagine the state of anyone outside their own heads. So they fail to explain things that the other person doesn't know, and over explain things they find more interesting or relevant than the answer to the actual question asked.

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...'"

Clear communication requires a certain amount of skill (at communicating), and that you actually understand the thing that you're communicating. Neither of these is quite as common as one might hope.

I am not about to defend everyone as a decent communicator, but I do want to highlight a difficult scenario -- when discussing complex subjects, experts often strive to provide a complete answer/retort to a question/statement which almost always contains many caveats and a may necessitate pulling in background from tangential areas that comes across as meandering if not viewed through the same lens. Concise is not often accurate, but it's what non-experts want to hear. It's a catch-22, as the seemingly muddy conversation loses them distinction but if they do not pursue that route, then they mislead their audience and bad decisions can be made as a result.

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..).

My wife has this problem. It's very tiring and draining for me at times.

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.

In my experience it's typically a lack of skill. I've had to mentor people on being better communicators, and some of the typical problems I've seen along the lines of your points:

* 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.

Personal answers from a spacey SWE:

> 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 not inentional. I disagree with otherw saying it is cultural as well.

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.

There are certainly other points, but I think a big reason is practice/training.

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.

Speech is a reflection of thought. If a person does not think clearly, that person cannot communicate clearly.

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).

People are annoyed, tired, aggravated, victims, assailants, insecure, overconfident, shy, sad, angry, etc. A whole hodgepodge of things. There really is no way to ELI5 our way out of this.

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.

These are communication problems which often group together for engineer-types. There is a certain _kind_ of brain which finds engineering problems interesting and also tends to struggle to synthesize their ideas.

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.

I've had some coworkers who were particularly bad at communicating the context of what they were talking about. They'd start talking about something and I couldn't understand what they were saying because they didn't say what something was.

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.

In my experience there are two main reasons:

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.

I am considered to be a strong communicator (so my boss tells me), but I still find myself talking too much, and going off topic at times. So I've put some thought into this just for my own profession to try and get better at it.

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.

There's a lot of ways to say the same thing: because it's hard.

- 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 )

Communication is a skill, and the vast majority of people have not been trained in it.

One of the things I've struggled with in my communications with nontechnicals is that they often want simple answers to complex questions, when that simple answer often hides important details that might make it incorrect, dishonest, or disingenuous.

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)

In addition to what others are saying, I find a lot of communication problems, especially technical communication problems, are rooted in the Curse of Knowledge [0]. I try to work that bias into conversation on technical teams but it can be challenging. It's easy to over-correct for this bias and the over-corrections can illicit bad reactions to the conversation.

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

Excluding learning disorders and mental health disorders and the quality/clarity/precision of communication is a reflection of both education and practice.

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.

Good, structured verbal and written communication tends to be breadth-first, not depth-first. This doesn't come easy to a lot of people, especially programmers where solving programming problems often times involves discovering (and addressing) a tree of sub-problems.

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 :)

The words “yes” and “no” are way undervalued as appropriate responses to a question.

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.”

Many reasons can be there which are probably out of there control like anxiety/adhd/autism etc.

As someone that used to do exactly everything you describe

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.

People have different umwelts.

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.

It's possible (if not probable) that they are frustrated with you as well. Perhaps your questions show your lack of basic competence around the topics you are asking about, and they feel the need to either give you a bunch of background you would need to properly understand, or else they have decided it is hopeless to try to bring you up to speed so they are trying to say some stuff that will satisfy you and make you go away.

I've always felt incredibly at how trivially we take our ability to coherently sync our minds by using symbols and utterances. Language is so fascinating and unfortunately, there will always be people who are good at at and those who are bad at it. My insight is to never assume that the person opposite of me will always understand my interpretation of what I'm uttering and therefore repeat often, using different terms, analogies and (surprisingly) gestures. Many a times I've felt that I do not ask a super confusing question clearly but still my professors are able to understand what I'm trying to communicate about. But they are some of the smartest people I've ever met in my life and it'd be unfair to hold everyone to their standards.

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.

Without a specific example its hard to pin point why your conversations are like this, but what works for me is giving the other person a "conversational framework" in which to fill out information, and giving reasons why that information will have influence on your mental model.

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!”

> Anyone else feeling like this at work?

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.

I don't know how to translate some specific terms to English, but in certain point of my life, I took a course about "internal customer service" at my job, i generally don't like those kind of subjects, but at that time it was part of my duties, so... I went to the course, the teacher started talking like this: "Everyone of us have an 'access code' to communicate with each other" that grabbed my attention, and then he said something like there are "visual, auditive, and kinesthetic" kinds of people. I discovered then, that I was a visual person and finally at my 33yo totally understood why i do not understand others when they talk to me and try to explain anything. To me, school was very hard. So, maybe this could be one of many many reasons, i hope this help others to investigate more about this subject, and take some extra steps before losing your time trying to explain something to someone using an incorrect communication channel.

Context: Engineer now manager.

I have been on both ends of the conversation. From what I have learned, each technical question to some degree requires reciting what architecturally is occurring from memory. The more complex a system becomes the harder it is to do that. Potential solutions are writing documentation, reducing complexity, or staffing people to keep complex parts in their memory.

Have you ever done a questionnaire that has terrible questions which are just so open like "What tool is important to you?" asking this to an engineer is a very open ended question - typically the quality of responses gathered for bad questionnaires are abysmal.

Therefore, answers/responses can only be of a good quality if the question is.

Next, you may ask a question which in your eyes is simple but in the eyes of someone who understands more is actually complex and has many factors.

Ask two people how does a car move forward? One may say I press the gas, the other may say pressure increases in the engine which moves blah etc giving power to the wheels etc. Both answers are correct, no one specified the amount of detail nor the success criteria of the response. No one knows what you're thinking nor what you want, try to be considerate just because you think others aren't communicating clearly doesn't mean they aren't.

It's possible that you don't understand what is being said and therefore attribute that to bad communication but in fact it's a deficiency on your side.

If someone says someone is bad at communication sometimes they simply don't understand what's said and they want a simplified answer. That doesn't mean the person responding is bad at communication.

As others have mentioned, in tech nothing is black and white if you ask me how can we fix X: immediately I would give you a couple options; maybe a hacky workaround and a long term fix giving an explanation of the advantages and disadvantages so you can take an informed decision. None of this is bad communication it's actually portraying a sense of ownership and ethics.

Simple answers to questions may mean the wrong solution is chosen.

There's no such thing as a simple answer to a complex question.

Finally, communication is not code, like any form of communication back and forth has to take place and this is healthy and normal. If you feel it's tiring then you may want everything spoon fed.

I've had people repeat everything I've said with different pronouns to confirm their understanding - in my eyes they had a deficiency in understanding because they are literally repeating what I'm saying over instant messaging.

Take a step back and put yourself in their shoes and be sympathetic and compassionate.

* Lacking the ability to concisely identify what is being asked possibly due to non-typical brain functions.

* Social skills lacking due to upbringing and/or medical conditions

* Dwelling a lot on information and not enough on nuance or emotion

* Feeling superior and communicating in a way that advances what you think is important more than what the audience want to know

* Not giving enough value to why the person is asking the question or wants you to articulate your message

* Lacking self-awareness and not even knowing that they are communicating badly

* Too much on their mind to easily detach into communication mode

* Don't care enough about the people they are communicating with so they don't try

* Not considering the intent of the forum they are in. Is this something for noobs, for PMs, for Managers? Is someone asking me for an opinion?

* Sometimes the question/discussion is not as clear as the asker thinks it is, so rubbish in equals rubbish out.

* Sometimes I honestly don't know like when you think you've asked something really clear and the answer is confused, you try again but eventually just have to quit!

My experience:

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

Those that are savvier have a point they're trying to get across, not addressed by your question. A common tactic is to ignore the question being asked and give the answer to the question you wished you were asked. Most interviewers let this go, so people do it all the time.

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

A lot of people have pet topics that they have knee jerk reactions to. So even if it's not the point, just mentioning the pet topic will make people want to pipe up, even if it's not the point. It's an emotional reaction.

Also, I find most people don't really listen. Their head is full of what they're going to say next that they don't have any idea what the main point is.

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

Takes practice. Most people don't write enough, as writing is a way of making thought linear and subsequently articulate.

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

Sometimes it's an insecurity thing. If you don't know what's being talked about, one tactic is to change the topic to something you do know about.

Generally, it sounds like you (OP) thinks that the reason why people converse is to exchange information, even if it's a technical discussion. There are other reasons, like establishing social status, to socialize, to think aloud, to impress someone else, to influence others to their goal, etc. I think once you know these other motives exist, it makes these behaviors less mysterious.

Maybe they do communicate clearly, but from their perspective you are the one who's just not getting what they mean, despite they expressed it in concise, elegant way.

People are coming from various cultures and backgrounds, you should accept that it means that communication style can be very different. In all cases, be patient and ask questions till you are satisfied.

You might try telling them how you want them to answer. "Can you tell me in a few words how you would X?"

You may not get what you want the first time, but just keep politely giving them guidance, and eventually you will "train" them on how you like to get answers.

When they successfully give you a succinct and cogent response, thank them: "Wow, that was very well stated. Let me repeat it back to you: Z. Perfect, thank you."

In terms of why this happens, they may be formulating an answer on the fly, but feel like they have to start talking immediately. So, they're working through a half-formed thought in real time. There's that old joke: "I'm sorry this letter is so long, I didn't have time to write a shorter one." Simple is hard.

I struggle with this at work, too. I'll ask a question that I hope is a one word, or at most one paragraph answer. Five minutes later, I'm grinding my teeth, thinking "stop filibustering this meeting."

Would this answer suffice? No, people are people, no, maybe, maybe?

In my mind, this would be a stupid answer to a question that requires introspection and maybe also take time to explain why I think what I think and potentially, other beliefs that could be impacted by making a stand on this view.

Technical discussions are similar - you want to explain why you think it is so.. After all, if the question were so simple as to have a very simple answer, why would you ask it in the first place? You also want to point out other things that can be impacted by the answer or by each of the decision arms. Sometime, lack of clarity also comes from unstated assumptions of what you know and what others think you know.. but if someone makes that assumption, you are going to say they are not directly addressing the point.

I think it would help in thinking conversation is a 2-way street... you provide appropriate noises and feedback to get what you want, while listening to answers.

One time I had a conversation with a coworker who was asking me what they thought was a simple question.

I tried to explain over and over again that I didn't think the question was very simple, that there could be at least 3 different answers depending on the context and that he would have to specify more. But he was so certain that it was simple that he didn't want to listen to any of my explanations. Eventually it came down to him trying to force me into saying either:

a. That I was too stupid to answer or even understand the question. b. Some false solution to the problem that I already knew wouldn't work with the reliability we needed.

From that point on, I was pretty damn sure that I didn't want to work with this coworker ever again, and I eventually left the company largely because of them (this obviously wasn't the only issue I had with them, or the company at large, but still it played a large role).

I once left a project 4 months in mainly because the boss couldn't communicate with me clearly.

The answer to any "what is X?" or "what's the difference between X and Y" question invariably resulted in an hour-long meandering tour of the whole domain. But not really the whole domain... just tiny inconsequential bits and pieces of it, which I could never pause him long enough to get him to assemble. If you mention that "X is basically Z with 2 exceptions", I need to be able to pause you and ask you what "Z" is.

The first time and the first month this "dive into the deep end" was useful. It takes a while to load a new domain into your head and it's all going to be unclear and ad-hoc at first.

But at some point, I really just needed to know what X, Y, or Z is so I could get on with my work, and I knew I'd never be able to get that answer out of him.

My biggest tip is to learn when it's going awry and force a level set. Step through the question. Break your question into mini questions to guide the thought process towards the answer you want.

I know I'm personally awful at explaining technical things I worked on a day or more ago. Even just some simple spreadsheet or something, if you want a confident answer you'll let me open it up and look at the formulas. Don't expect me to answer off the top of my head. I'm pretty confident in saying this aloud but many people are not. They feel like it reflects negatively on their intelligence and whatnot. I feel like many people start rambling on when they just simply don't know the answer or don't understand the question. In this case, just make sure they understand the question/problem and give them time/space to get the answer.

I think certain cultures believe they are direct in their communication. But directness often has a price, which is an expensive one. When one is direct, they are making lots of assumptions of understanding and culture. When one is more careful and circumspect, one is ensuring better that one is understood fully. Clear communication requires a complete knowledge of the subject matter. Without complete knowledge, a partial picture is painted, one that shows only a portion of the true thought. I believe there are many who do not write things down. Those that don't typically do not have clear thoughts. Writing IS thought, and if you can write clearly you can also think clearly. All of the examples in your rant pertain to a lack of clarity brought on by laziness. The party is unwilling to write things down.

Communication is an important skill. Describing a system or specification. Quickly laying out alternative solutions with an exact focus on what makes those alternatives distinct. Conversely effectively asking a stakeholder the questions that answers which solution is the acceptable one among a set of solutions they might not yet realize is closed. As a developer this is one of the most important skills. It’s at least as important as the art of writing code itself.

Now, there is always differences in communication style so someone you consider a poor communicator might be considered a good communicator by someone else. Some people are also better at verbal communication than written or vice versa. Find a mode of communication that works.

But apart from that, chances are that poor communicators are simply poor developers (or managers, or designers, or whatever) because of it.

> I'm frustrated thinking of all the pointlessly-spent energy required to have those discussions the first place.

Have you effectively communicated this to those you're conversing with? Why not? This is worth some thought.

Otherwise, I have noticed the same and agree with you. I recommend the book Crucial Conversations.

This is not pointlessly-spent energy! It is part of the job of software engineering, in much the same way as fixing compiler errors and debugging is part of the job of software engineering. Your work isn't done just because you have a program that makes sense to you.

Think about technical discussions as a thing that you need to spend extended amounts of time and energy on - probably more than programming, once you get senior enough as an individual contributor.

(So, yes, I think it's a lack of skill, largely because of a lack of recognition that it's a skill worth developing. I can't say whether the "blame" is yours or theirs, but it is highly likely that everyone has a lot of room to get better at it.)

People think every one shares the same definition for words like a dictionary, but people don't learn words from the dictionary they learn them from context of other peoples speech.

The fact that context is communication seems to be lost on most people and in an effort to be efficient assume every one else is using and understands their definition.

The examples you give could all be caused by this. They could be trying to establish context or gain understanding of definitions. As in they are talking in an attempt to understand you rather than answer the question.

Is clear communication answering in the least words possible or covering all possible interpretations of understanding? Annoyingly its both.

In my case it is simply (unmedicated) ADHD. I can communicate in writing well in most cases, but am not able to communicate clearly in real-time because my mind is running faster and in more directions than I can speak. On medication I am suddenly 100x more eloquent and structured in my communication and can convey even complex problems with relative ease.

It is literally a difference between night and day. Without medication, I stumble over my words, have problems finding words, and it's very hard to not get distracted by 10 concurrent trains of thought. It's a source of great frustration and pain in my life because I do not like being medicated.

SWEs are all types of people, but one characteristic that tends to benefit us is a capacity to think about problems. With it comes the burden of overthinking problems. This can spill into overthinking our own personal relationships with the job we have, and even become a source of anxiety.

We're not being paid to be anxious at work, but I personally feel that accepting that this is common is a reasonable basis for having relationships with team members and trying to find a productive manner in which to solve problems together.

One aspect of working on a team with many brilliant, anxious people is that we can become hyper-competitive about the small technical areas we have been a reputation of success around. We start to defend our areas with an overabundance of technical details - a firewall of jargon that can keep others healthily out of our spaces.

Pulling others IN to these spaces is still a traversal of that firewall; there's no playbook for getting the anxious to be less anxious, but I find that treating SWEs as people, and not engineers, has helped me build stronger relationships and earn a little trust. Trust that I spend on helping me get my work done. And hopefully, theirs, too.

One particularly divisive technique I continue to tinker with, is the "zoom out", or the "level set". When I have to broach a new topic, or body of work, with my fellow SWEs, I find it useful to address what the problem is as though we don't even work at the company solving it. This divides everyone into two camps: those annoyed by hearing the obvious, but then those who, in good faith, have no idea how to get involved with the work but would otherwise like to.

I try not to dwell too long during a "level set" because if it's not becoming obvious how to contribute with a little back story, then perhaps the fit isn't very good anyways and I let people scatter. And, to my own point of mental health, I have stopped insisting that anyone can do anything if they put their minds to it.

No one else communicates the way that I do. It's absurd to expect them to. So, to borrow from Postel's Law, I put far more effort into trying to understand how my coworkers perceive the requirements, than I do telling them what the requirements are to me. The time 'wasted' on this extra preparation has time and again saved me from countless hours of meaningless effort. I have saved entire quarters of the year by asking a few extra questions that were not obvious, by not needing to embark at all. Listening, it can be far more productive than speaking.

Most systems discussion could benefit from the use of a whiteboard.

Most systems discussion devolve to describing a few key structures that are better represented graphically. Think protocol sequence diagram, flowchart, logic table, state machine, stacked graph.

It's actually your fault for demanding a verbal answer to a graphical question, and rejecting the feedback you receive.

Additionally, highly-educated folks are trained to do this because it is a popular way educators verify comprehension, since asking a verbal question about a graphical fact simplifies the process of "hiding" part of the solution, and verifying that it's been comprehended rather than regurgitated.

When you communicate you deal with another human being you don’t get to dictate all the ways in which that interaction will go - they have a contribution in terms of direction as well as content. Lots of your points above seem to see a conversation entirely from the perspective of whether it accomplishes your goals for the conversation. The other person doesn’t necessarily share those goals.

So if they “don’t stay focused on the point of the discussion” they may well be entirely focused on the point of the discussion from their point of view - the point of the discussion for them may just be different from you.

I believe communication is the responsibility of the sender (not a two way street, like most people say).

When I started taking personal responsibility for all communication mishaps, things changed around me.

If I think someone is communicating poorly, I attribute it to my own ask being vague - and make sure to clarify my current goals by mapping to every else's goals. "Seek first to understand, then be understood" was the mantra I kept in mind.

People rise (or fall) to the expectations around them. If someone lacks a key skill in life, it's possible they've never had a good role model for that skill. You could be that role model!

I'm in a highly regulated/high consequence-of-failure industry and its often a defense mechanism. A way to contribute without contributing, or a way to provide input without being held accountable for that input.

People will endlessly speculate about other options, or criticize a decision with no input on a viable path forward.

I'll let it go for a bit, but eventually its time to hold their feet to the fire: "I require positive confirmation that you accept decision X; or for you to clearly define an alternative path. If I do not receive an answer by , I will consider that acceptance of X".

For some people, if they are invited to a discussion, they believe their job is to talk. If they don’t know the topic well or don’t have an opinion on it, they will instead talk about something they do know and care about.

Why do some people not snowboard skillfully?

Why are some people bad drivers?

Why can't I cook a great lasagna?

I'm fairly associative and I tend to wonder off like you describe. When someone asks me a question it lights up tons and tons of context and information which I start to describe. My mind wonders a lot, so a lot of the time I'll have an answer already there and at these times I'll usually be very eloquent. But sometimes a lot of details and caveats pop in to my mind and I feel compelled to include them in my answers.

On the flip side this sort of thinking enables me to be very creative in my job and often I am the go to guy when you need solutions for difficult problems.

I have spent a lot of time working with front line users and engineers in requirement gathering. I recognise the situation you are describing. Part of the problem (IMO) is that some people ‘think out loud’ when answering a question and use the interaction to clarify their thinking on the fly. This can be useful in identifying edge cases - but can also feel exhausting. My advise is the focus on your questions and use them to steer your interactions: Write them down - send them out in advance - document their answers in front of them then share them after. Good luck!

Because entirely successful communication is impossible. It never occurs.

Because mostly successful communication is difficult. People do not entirely understand what they are "saying"; people do not entirely understand what they are "hearing"; people do not achieve consensus on the meaning of the terms utilized beforehand. As a result, people are almost never participating in the same conversation.

Because of a lack of training. Because of particular neurological configuration. Because of past emotional conditioning. Because of social pressures.

Because brains.

Cause it's hard. It's even harder now that meetings are remote and always involve one guy using Linux with a broken mic cause those two things somehow go together.

I've found that talking to people 1:1 after each meeting saves a ton of time you'd spend on wasteful coding due to miscommunication. Like if they want a feature from your service, just ask why they need it again. Usually, the first time, they don't tell you precisely what they need but actually an overly generalized version of it.

There can be a lot of different reasons but simple misunderstanding is often the cause.

- They couldn't give you a direct answer because they didn't understand the question.

- They couldn't focus on the point of the discussion because they thought the focus is something else.

It's good to consider that you can be the one not communicating clearly and try to see where your message could be confusing. Maybe try to clarify the question you have and explain why you have it. It won't always work but a lot of the times you can find the right approach.

Communication is a skill. It needs to be practiced. It usually means that people need to get out of their heads, and imagine what the other person currently knows, and what information you can provide to them to bridge the gap between you and them.

I work with a brilliant programmer who is one of the worst communicators I've ever worked with. It's exhausting, because he doesn't have the empathy required to properly explain things to others. I'm definitely bringing this up to him during feedback time.

I believe that at least some of it is lack of empathy and perspective. People too often don't stop to think about what the questioner is actually asking, from their perspective. So the answers come from a different perspective, often missing the real question. We could of course also sometimes place blame on poorly formulated questions, but a really good communicator will be able to recognize that and get to the heart of the topics and make sure that everyone is coming to a common understanding

Not your exact question but I think some people miss providing context because they don’t or can’t see through another’s viewpoint and do a diff on what the other person knows or doesn’t.

You're clearly pretty annoyed by this.

Have you considered that people at work may not want to stay rigidly on target 100% of the time, and may find your hidebound need to do so bothering as well?

I have a liberal-arts degree but I code for a living. I'd describe my skill as "would have difficulty writing my own compiler, but can handle pretty much anything below that". I don't have a communication problem as you describe, but I've seen other engineers that do. It's just a rarer ability among them, unfortunately. Brains taken up by highly-complex problems often do not have bandwidth for careful or clear written or verbal communication lol

If I sense lack of clarity and focus in your question, I will tend to provide extra context with my answer just to make sure you are not about to make a mistake.

If I sense you come with a very pointed, clear, relevant question or request, and I have a history of clear communication with you, I can trust a short/tight answer is enough.

But I agree with you on one thing, all things being equal, people who think and speak more clearly tend to also write (code, documentation, emails) clearly.

I have traits/behaviors consistent with what I know to be autism. Whenever I speak I have to translate images to words. This is often slow staggered for me. Also, I often don't remember what was said/asked while I'm talking so I just keep my train of thought going, and that leads me to other topics. I often end my talking with "does that answer your questions?" just to be sure I didn't veer too far off topic.

Why aren’t you in the nba? Why can’t you fly a commercial airplane? Why can’t you fix 19th century pocket watches?

People are different? They have different strengths and weaknesses.

Some of the best developers I’ve ever worked with communicate differently. Eg One guy hardly spoke but was genuinely a nice guy and was a math genius that turned out awesome code.

Maybe it’s YOU that has to change your communication strategy when talking to other people

Why are you even asking this? It has to do with mammalian brain pathways that are much much more complex than anyone understands. There's little time for the question at hand - more importantly is COVID responsible? I've done extensive research into Vitamin D and that's probably what you're looking for.

Hopefully this answers your question - pretty spot on I'm assuming.

Some people are a combination of being not that bright and loving to hear themselves talk.

What you can do is tighten the question down so there is no misunderstanding.

- Can you explain X in 30 seconds?

- Is X going to definitely be done by Y?

etc.

People often communicate (and think) sloppily through-out their lives and it is only when they encounter people who are an order of magnitude better or worse than they are, that they become acutely aware of it. :)

Communication skills are hard, and just speaking your own ideas in a way you think is clear isn't enough for effective communication. Learning to manage conversations, bring things back to a focus when they wander, and work on understanding the person you're communicating with to help keep conversations focused is a part of becoming a senior software engineer.

I'm not saying I'm doing it, but intentionally unclear/ambiguous wording/communication leaves space for blame, so you can always be blamed for understanding something wrong way, if shit happens.

Plus also world ain't black and white, so I don't like giving answers/statements you can't backpedal from, politicians are known for this speak.

In my opinion it is mostly because people have things that they want to say. They're most often not interested in answering your question but seeking to use it as a jumping off point for what they want to talk about. This is why some people always end up circling back over the same pet subjects no matter how specific a yes/no question you ask them.

I find a lot of poor communication is driven by 1)“interpretation” by the receiver of the query, 2) by the fear of saying I don’t know or an answer perceived to be received negatively (e.g. “no”), 3) or by people who want to give you what they perceive to be the “answer”, when you are in fact seeking to understand intermediate facts or context.

Idk your context but usually politicians communicate this way, they never give a straight answer to the question. They are taught to do so. It's the standard way to get attention and distract from the point / question, attacking opponents, asking more questions... Of course, there are plenty of other reasons for that.

Have you read "Thinking, fast and slow"? I believe it will provide part of the answers you're asking for.

In general, people (especially young adults) do not want to look stupid. So if they do not know the answer they start talking / writing about the shit they know.

But senior engineers and wiser people will answer with: I do now know. Or simple “yes” or “no”. Or answer with clear question or two if the initial question is not clear.

Does anyone have any recommendations for books/courses for improving verbal communication? Not talking about pubic speaking, like toastmasters, but improving your ability to do things like mentioned by OP?

I feel like there's lots of stuff about this on writing but less related to verbal communication.

I would subdivide the group into those who seem like they intend to communicate the desired point(s) (and simply fail for whatever reason) and those who actively don't wish to, such as for pride, to cover their lack of knowledge, to favour alternate options, to slow down a project etc.

I will just address people communicating verbally.

The idea that people know what they want, and are able to communicate it without thinking and planning is not realistic.

People need to take a second and think, and even then, it's hard and they probably don't know what they actually want to say.

In my experience there is a strong correlation between your ability to communicate clearly and your ability to write clean maintainable code.

The 10x developers I have worked with are all excellent communicators. The worst developers I have worked with most definitely weren’t.

Different reason for different people.

Some people are bad at communication due to social anxiety.

Some people are bad at communication because they're trying to be the smartest person in the room.

Some people are bad at communication simply due to lack of practice.

There are other reasons, but those come to mind first.

Speech is a (relatively) low bandwidth protocol connecting two very densely connected extremely high bandwidth systems.

Changing the state of a system through the speech protocol is a slow, time consuming and error prone task. Some people are better at it than others.

In my experience when somebody is pointing out flaws that they see in many, many others then it's often the individual that has the problem. Is that what's going on here? You don't appear to acknowledge it might be you are the issue.

I'm going to assume that this is something you are experiencing with your coworkers. In that case the primary question is whether the people you are talking to have anything to gain by communicating effectively with you.

As someone in Tech, are you neurotypical? Is the other person? Are you sure, in either case?

Neurodiverse brains communicate differently. Some of the patterns that you described could be ADHD, for instance.*

*Labeling the other person won't help.

There can be a variety of factors from learning disabilities to time required to form thoughts correctly. May be they would provide you with a better answer if you ask a question and let them answer it in a couple of weeks.

I've found generally they do not know the answer, but are presumed to know and as a result instead of saying "I don't know" will use the points outlined to seem like they do know.

Two reasons: 1) Not focusing on why the question is being asked. 2) Not understanding the person asking the question's scope of knowledge

You need to target your communication to the audience.

More communication is not better communication.

I've met so many people who assume that talking more means they're better communicators. Not necessarily true. In fact, often the opposite is true.

In "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" Richard Rhodes shared one of my favorite quotes from the atomic physicist, Niels Bohr:

"I try not to speak more precisely than I think."

A lot of people struggle with this, but they can learn to communicate more clearly and effectively. I recommend the short book:

How to Get Your Point Across in 30 Seconds or Less by Milo Frank

Is this one on one or in a gang? Get a gang of devs in a retro and some will veer that group off topic every few seconds! One on one I have rarely had problems.

Because no one likes short and to the point answers. Big, longwinded answers are seen as better. See any interview ever and resumes by extent.

Do you ever watch political debates? The answers to many questions there are totally nonsensical. So probably the same reason is just “politics”.

Maneuvering deliberate ambiguity is a professional skill. That being said, most people will actively avoid making your problem their problem.

Mostly because they don't have the ability and can't. Good, concise communication skill is a skill that can be learned but most people are unaware of how bad they are at this. However, there is also the factor of trying to please others. Some people just cannot say No directly.

Best you can do is to just redirect the person again. Don't necessarily criticize them but just say "Hey I understand but can you confirm xyz? Is that a Yes or a No" and depending on your relationship with the person, keep going or not.

"Discussion" -- sounds synchronous af, lol

Do you have autism?

I noticed that, quite often, unclear or poor communication was the result of habits and unchallenged assumptions about others !

There are always two sides to a dialogue.

The one asking. The one answering.

The one asking thinks their question is simple. It could be true, and it could also be a lot more difficult to answer. It could be the asker is missing some context, which the one answering thinks they do have some of that missing context, and attempts to fill in the hole before answering that question. Sometimes the one answering is the one missing some crucial context and attempt to adjust what they think they know to what the asker is asking.

I didn't really answer your question, but my point is

TL;DR nothing is ever simple, and two people who look at the same thing will never perceive the same things

managers tend to /want to/ over-simplify things. SWEs have to bear the consequences of every exception to an over-simplified rule, that non-experts did not want to know about. Yeah there's a 1% problem, complex, unrewarding, but we'll spend 90% of the total effort on it because we can't have our system crap out once a month

Sounds like the people you’re describing are highly anxious and highly insecure, it could be as simple as that

I think your edit indicates the answer beautifully. It's a damn hard problem!

TL;DR: Communicating clearly is HARD. It requires effort and training. Not everyone has had the training or is willing to put in the effort. Some people don't realize it. It's not something that comes naturally to most engineers (or people).

Though it has a terrible misnomer of a name, the art of "Business Writing" is basically about reducing the number of useless words you use in emails/conversations.

Some good resources:

   * The 2-page "Business Writing" section in Scott Adams' "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big"

   * https://www.coursera.org/lecture/management-leadership-english/4-8-business-communication-concise-language-PfBKs

UPDATE: The "Business Writing" section from Scott Adams' book is available here: https://bestwriting.com/book-notes/how-to-fail-at-almost-eve...

Maybe you don't ask questions that brings back the answers you want ?

In my experience, three reason: 1) culture 2) language 3) muddled thinking

The human brain is way less capable than it likes to delude itself it is.

Bad theory of mind for the person they're communicating with.

Often being indirect or imprecise is a cover for ignorance.

They are still faking it and haven't made it yet.

Takes about 15-30 seconds to figure out if the person you are talking to understands or is being evasive. In which case you need to adjust and put on kiddy gloves, slow down, and coax information out.

Because human beings aren’t machines.

ASDs. Myself included for example

Communication skills vary wildly.

seems like you are also not communicating clearly, what is SWE?

people avoid accountability because it's difficult

Yes, I have the same feeling at work and here is my understanding of the points listed:

Q1. Don't directly address the point of your question / provide a much complex answer (or even worse, a non-answer) to a simple question.

A1. This comes down to a lack/abundance of knowledge and/or how to handle a specific situation. If someone is not directly addressing the point of your question, they may not have the knowledge to answer and therefor may feel uncomfortable because now they don't know how to handle the situation they are put in. They have a sense of pride and they don't want to look like they know less than you or others around them.

A good example is asking someone something personal in a topic that you may excel at and they may lack. On the other hand, it can be the opposite. The person asking the question may view the other person answering with an over complicated answer. In reality, it is the person asking the question who has little knowledge and the person answering has greater knowledge.

Another good example is telling people what I do for a living since it is in the semi-conductor field. I have only had two people, not including family, wanting me to explain more about what I do. For others, if I try to explain beyond saying "I work on photo lithography equipment," they view it as an over complicated answer.

Q2. Don't stay focused to the point of the discussion

A2. This comes down to caring about the subject at hand or scope of knowledge and divided attention. I think if you are in a discussion and the other person starts losing focus then you may have exceeded their knowledge base in said discussion and they don't care to continue. On the other hand, they may simply not be giving you their full attention in the first place which will lead to de-focusing on the discussion.

A good example is simply what you and the others around you have in common and if you think on the same wave length. If people don't have some similarities or they don't think the same way, they won't stay too focused in a discussion.

Q3. Don't have some level of clarity in their train of thought and speech A3. I think this comes down to two things: 1.) How well and how comfortable is that individual with articulating their thoughts and emotions and 2.) How comfortable are they with their knowledge base in that discussion. This can be a cultural thing, a language barrier, a feeling of confidence in ones self and the topic

Q4. Generally over-complicate matters by wandering off to other related subjects and extending the scope of the discussion A4. So this one is easy because I think we all have encountered someone like this in our lives and if you haven't I can explain. If someone is over-complicating matters by wandering off to other related subjects and extending the scope of the discussion, it is because they may have basic knowledge on the discussion and since they don't want to look stupid, they wander off on to other related subjects to make it look like they have a broad scope of knowledge.

I work with someone who is exactly like this. The first time I worked with him, we were talking about interferometers (very accurate LASERs for measuring), and boy, hehe, that conversation just went from one "related" topic to another. Anytime I try to ask something in depth on the topics he brought up he gets upset and veers. At first, I though he was very knowledgeable, but I later found out this is a trick he pulls as a dog and pony show to "show how smart he is." In reality, he has very little life experience with those other topics yet he talks it up like he knows so much. Long story short, he constantly always goes behind are backs at work, he's untrustworthy, pain in the ass to work with, but stays employed since he knows how to work on our systems very well. This person has an extreme sense of pride and doesn't want people to see his mistakes.

In conclusion, why do some people not communicate clearly? They either can't or don't want to due to some kind of motive they have which may either because they are simply trying to hide something, or they don't know and don't want you to know, or it may simply be a cultural or mental inability. In our case, it's the humble engineer interacting with other people who may not be so humble. You are not alone and I am glad I am not alone. I feel this way time-and-time again through my professional career and personal life.

Thanks for bringing up this topic up. It was good to talk about it with other who feel the same way.

FWIW, I found this kind of question to be much less frustrating when I remember that communication is a 2+ player activity. If poor communication is happening, it is the responsibility of all parties involved to remedy the problem. That is, it's not that "Joe is bad at communication": it's more along the lines of "Joe and I do not communicate well". There are always hurdles, but if you're motivated to communicate with somebody, work with them to overcome those hurdles. This is not pointlessly-spent energy: software engineering is primarily a communication-oriented profession (either with other people or communicating your exact intent via code). It's part of the job.

Some strategies to employ that I've picked up from professors and colleagues over the years:

* If you ask a question and you feel that the answer does not adequately address it, ask for further clarification. The person answering may feel that they've answered based on the knowledge that they have but if you're missing some critical bit of context, what they've said might not make sense to you. Canned phrases: "I'm sorry, I'm still not understanding. Can you help get me caught up?" or "I might be missing something: [specific followup question about their answer here]" or "I'm not sure, but we might be talking about different things. When you say ___, do you mean ___ or ___?".

* If the conversation wanders, focus on what they're saying and let them finish. Once they've completed their thought, if you're still pretty sure that it's tangential to what you were asking/talking about before, ask a question that refocuses the conversation. Canned phrases: "I think we may be getting slightly off track here. We were talking about xyz, but now we're talking about ___ and I'm a little confused at the relation between the two." or "I'd really like to talk with you more about ____, but before we move on, can we quickly wrap up about the xyz question -- [repeat your original question]".

* If team discussions go off the rails frequently, bring that up in a retro sometime. If everyone agrees that's actually happening (remember that your perception of the conversation might be different from others), try to get people to agree on a strategy for noticing tangential discussions and then refocus the conversation to the topic at hand. A team I was on picked a random word that anyone could say or drop in the zoom chat during a meeting and everyone was supposed to stop talking about whatever they were talking about and come back to the topic at hand or justify how it was relevant. We had one team member who often hijacked the discussion with stream-of-consciousness style talking that started relevant and then wandered. Eventually, somebody just dropped "Objection. Relevance?" in the chat, everyone had a laugh, and then we talked about it in retro. This isn't something that there are really canned phrases for -- it's a team dynamic thing.

* Lack of clarity in speech is usually lack of clarity in thought in my experience. This is an opportunity for you to help them clarify their own thinking as well as yours. This takes a lot of practice and it can be tiring for introverts especially, but it's really valuable time spent -- especially on a technical team. Canned phrases: "I'm not super clear on the details of ____. Do you have a few minutes and can we dive into that a bit?" (then continue to ask probing questions until they get to either a question or an "i don't know"). This works best if you already have a bit of context about the topic of conversation/problem domain.

* Over-complicating can either be an indicator of lack of clarity on their part or that it's actually a really complicated topic and that the question isn't valid as stated. For instance, "How does the internet work?" is a question that can have different answers depending on your audience. For non-technical people, it might be as simple as "You plug these cables in, make sure these lights are on, here's your wifi network name and password. I've already set up your devices for you and now Netflix works". For technical people, there are varying levels of depth that you can go into. If the answer is not at the level of complexity that you're expecting, you can request a different level of complexity. Canned phrases: "I see that there is a ton of detail to go into here and that you know a lot about it, but I think I need to understand the big picture before we dive into the details. Can you give me the sparknotes version of what ___ is/does? Explain it like I'm five." or in the other direction "Cool, that really helps me understand the big picture. As I understand, part of the problem entails [some slice of the problem domain]. Can we talk about the overall goal of that part of the system and then a bit of detail about how it works/what it does?"

My experience, personal and observed, of 30+ years as software engineer:

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

Simple or easy? For once, a lot of time the question oversimplified the problem that is been asked about, and reality is very nuanced. The fact that the person asking assumes that the question is simple and, on top of that, gets frustrated when it is not leads me to believe that doesn't know what is asking or that does not have the emotional maturity to manage his/her feeling. As the person provided the answer, my obligation is to give all the information necessary to understand the answer. This means removing assumptions; specially the assumptions that make believe that the question is easy. If you don't want to hear it, that is on you, not the person answering. What I don't want is later on to get "I asked you and you told me X", without me been able to say "true, within the context I explained, and the context changed"

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

Deflection is a good technique that a lot of people uses when trying to tell bad news to power. Other times, maybe what you are asking has origins on other places that you think are unrelated, put attention. In short, if you want to get shot accurate answers, then foster an environment around you where people feels that they can trust you with bad news, and that you are knowledgeable enough to know that what you don't know might be important. Fostering such environment is up to you, and ranting on HN is not going to help you

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

Or maybe it takes time to formulate an answer that can cross the listener's emotional state and reach with the piece of knowledge that is been asked for. When I see that, I need to consider if I stablish a relationship were people is confident that telling things by their name will not result in retaliation, including but not limiting to your personal frustrations.

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

Ufff... 2 red flags here: "Over-complicate matters" and "other RELATED subjects". Yeah... if people feels that need to walk around you in tiptoes, and measuring what they can or cannot say to you, or how to say it, then that is you not creating trusting relationships, and venting your frustration in HN is not going to fix it.

Work at gaining people trust and feeling safe around you, then you can remove your potential lack of soft skills out of the equation, and will allow you to discover what people need to communicate more clearly with you

Yes

> Is it an intentional choice to communicate like this, is it lack of some skill (on theirs or on my part) or something else?

The short answer here is that other people are not you, and by default they communicate to you in the manner they wish to be communicated to. This is a mistake.

Your problem is broad enough that there's a myriad of explanations, but I will narrow and rephrase it as "other people don't answer my questions as directly and succinctly as I expect."

Phrased like that, you can see there's two parts of the equation: other people, but also you. Manager Tools[1] uses a DISC model that I think works well here -- so lets analyze this interpersonal business relationship with it. it's not quite the "big 5" model that psych researchers use but pretty close[2]. It offers 2 dimensions to model personality, and labels for each extreme:

D – Dominance: the tendency to exert power and assertiveness

I – Influence: the tendency to assert oneself socially and interpersonally

S – Steadiness: the tendency to engage in reserved and personable behavior

C – Conscientiousness: the tendency to be reserved and analytical.

Within that model, you land on one of those labels to some degree, and your conversant does as well. Based on your question, I will put you down as a D. You want short and concise answers, and are probably already pissed at how long this answer is. Assuming you are even still reading.

But your conversant isn't a high D. Engineering personalities tend to cluster around Conscientiousness. They want to know the answer and understand the details behind it, and probe the logic for weakness. When asked a question they provide the details _because when they ask questions they expect to be provided the details_. In fact, they hate off the cuff conversations because they want time to analyze and give a correct and defensible answer. They'd much rather write an email with charts and graphs, or at least a two by two matrix[3].

So this is fundamentally a mismatch of expectations, and personality preferences. Personality cant usually do a complete 180 but with deliberate practice most people can move their behavior a few points closer to their conversational parter. So its a skill that _all_ of us have to learn, to accommodate others as they wish, rather than how we would want. It's a scenario where the golden rule simply isn't sufficient.

[1]: https://www.manager-tools.com [2]: DISC doesn't have some of the drawbacks of trying to describe disorders within the model. Seems useful for researchers and practitioners, but dangerous for laypeople if they go wrong. [3]: yes, DISC is often shown as one https://united-partners.com/how-disc-personality-assessment-...