The idea that how your audience receives the communication is their problem and not yours is entirely why some engineers are shit communicators and seem lost when facing the realities of human culture and politics. You might wish the world would all just think exactly like you but the moods, interest, and preferences of the people around you are YOUR PROBLEM and you need to engage with them if you want to accomplish anything unless you're some kind of prodigy who will be accommodated because of your unique capabilities (almost no one who thinks they are this are).
”What it means in practice is that your colleague can write "this approach is wrong, here's why" instead of "hey, hope you're doing well, I had some time to look at your PR and I just wanted to shared a few small thoughts, please take these as just one perspective, and of course you know the codebase better than I do, but I was wondering if maybe we could potentially consider [useful thing here]" and then bury the actual point six paragraphs deep. Both messages contain the same information, however one of them respects time.”
The author argues brevity is more efficient even if it is rude so he argues for brevity. This is why engineers suck at politics and relationships. Brevity and efficiency is a false mantra to live by. It is better to be effective and get what you want without pissing off everyone. The authors’s example is a non starter. When he writes this approach is wrong…, he is starting a flame war even if he argues he isn’t. It would be better to say something like I disagree with this approach, then give your assumptions and reasoning. Even if you don’t get your way, you got it off your chest and came across as professional.
There are even practical ways to allow this type of exchange. However, they require a truly egalitarian business relationship, mutual respect, and signaling mechanism to note when to be blunt and when to be decent.
If these conditions aren't met, then a subordinate could trivially get fired because they're superior hadn't had breakfast or lunch that day and was just hangry.
This is the key to this whole topic. It doesn’t matter what should be. It matters what is. Humans are emotional in nature and ignoring that is not effective.
Also the undertone of this topic is always “I want you to be blunt to the point of rudeness (so I can be too).”
> Also the undertone of this topic is always “I want you to be blunt to the point of rudeness (so I can be too).”
No, it's not. I've met multiple people who subscribe to Crocker's Rules and none of them are intentionally rude. One of them is one of the more polite people I've met.
Don't malicious ascribe false motives to others because you're offended at the idea that they're proposing. That's extremely bad form.
That's not even what Crocker's Rules are. If you had read the article, you would know that.
> Literally doing what you accuse me of in the same sentence.
Factually incorrect. Did you forget what you wrote in your own comment?
>> Also the undertone of this topic is always “I want you to be blunt to the point of rudeness (so I can be too).”
You are claiming to speak for everyone who supports Crocker's Rules. You are asserting that you can read the minds and motives of the few people you've met who've talked about this and hundreds or thousands of others that you've never met and will never meet. You are engaging in a blatantly bad-faith and indefensible mindset on a mass scale.
I, am not. I merely read your comment and what you wrote, and pointed it out. That's not ascribing false motives, that's just reading comprehension, which is something you appear to lack, given your failure to read the original article, Crocker's Rules, or my comments.
> This article isn’t really about Crocker’s rules. It links to them but rather misunderstands the point.
You failed to correctly characterize (or argue against) either the author's points or Crocker's Rules, so this isn't really relevant.
Factually you ascribed false motives to me because you're offended at the idea that I proposed. You are upset because I said that this is topic is generally broached by people who wish they could be blunt and rude, so you're mischaracterizing both my words and intent.
> You are engaging in a blatantly bad-faith and indefensible mindset on a mass scale.
You could just disagree and say I'm wrong instead of pretending like I'm committing a war crime with a comment on HN. "Mass scale" is some over the top dramatic nonsense.
> You are claiming to speak for everyone who supports Crocker's Rules.
You think I was making a claim that literally, 100% of cases fit into this?
It's poor taste to insult others' reading comprehension. Just in general it's a childish ad hominem. But also if you can't understand nuance and you read basic statements as "literally this applies in 100% of situations", you live in a glass house. (I don't think your house is literally made of glass.)
See also: "BOCTAOE"
> You failed to correctly characterize (or argue against) either the author's points or Crocker's Rules
The very fact that the author is "begging" others to "follow Crocker's rules" in their communication says the author doesn't understand Crocker's rules.
Crockers rules are specifically an obligation to the person operating under Crocker's rules. NOT an obligation to anyone else. No one else is obligated to forgo politeness because the author says the follow Crocker's rules.
"Please follow Crocker's rules when you send me messages!"
"I am dumbass, and I hope you had a great weekend."
> so this isn't really relevant.
Disingenuous nonsense on a discussion forum. "I don't agree with your perspective so it's not relevant."
To be fair, while the motives for falsely claiming that you can read thousands of peoples' minds are pretty limited, there are other motives than just because you're offended. Do you think that you're a psychic, instead?
> because you're offended at the idea that I proposed. You are upset because I said that this is topic is generally broached by people who wish they could be blunt and rude, so you're mischaracterizing both my words and intent.
Still incorrect. I described the words that you wrote in your comments. No amount of (now blatant and intentional) lies will change that. You claim here that you said it is "generally" broached - no, you didn't, you said always, and you know that very well.
> You could just disagree and say I'm wrong instead of pretending like I'm committing a war crime with a comment on HN. "Mass scale" is some over the top dramatic nonsense.
Still lying. You know I'm not pretending you're committing a war crime, and that I used "mass scale" to point out that, as egregious as it is to claim that you can read others' minds and intents, it's even worse to pretend that you can do that for hundreds or thousands of people.
> You think I was making a claim that literally, 100% of cases fit into this?
>> Also the undertone of this topic is always “I want you to be blunt to the point of rudeness (so I can be too).”
Even if you meant 90% of the time (which you very clearly did not say), you're still making the clinically insane claim that you are able to read the minds and intentions of a huge number of people.
> It's poor taste to insult others' reading comprehension.
It's far worse taste to respond to comments without actually reading them first, as you have repeatedly now.
> But also if you can't understand nuance and you read basic statements as "literally this applies in 100% of situations"
Again, let me quote you your own words:
> Also the undertone of this topic is always “I want you to be blunt to the point of rudeness (so I can be too).”
Note the "always". Admit it - you said something insane because you thought you wouldn't get called out on it.
> The very fact that the author is "begging" others to "follow Crocker's rules" in their communication says the author doesn't understand Crocker's rules.
>> so this isn't really relevant.
> Disingenuous nonsense on a discussion forum.
No, it's factually true. If you make an irrelevant response because you're not responding to someone's points, your response is not relevant. This is tautologically true.
> "I don't agree with your perspective so it's not relevant."
Are you one of those people that can't tell the different between opinion and fact/reason? Because it sure seems like it - it doesn't look like you're capable of understanding that, because you badly misunderstood the author's points and argued against a strawman, your response is not relevant. It's not an opinion - it's just fact.
At this point, because it's clear you cannot tell the difference between perspective/opinion and fact/logic, and because you've lied about your own words that are written above, there isn't much of a point to continuing the conversation - if you write more lies, I'll point them out so that future HN readers browsing this thread about Crocker's Rules won't be misled, but I know that I cannot convince someone who is operating emotionally, not intellectually, and is willing to lie about their own words despite them being less than a page above in the same thread.
If I described someone as always smiling, would you suppose this is an assertion that they literally never make a non-smiling facial expression? If I said "The phone calls I receive are always SPAM", would this mean I've literally never received a non-spam call? Do you truly not understand the phrasing here or are you just pretending not to?
> If you make an irrelevant response because you're not responding to someone's points
I have responded thoroughly to your weird nitpicking and I responded directly to your claim that I mischaracterized the author's point by showing how they misunderstand Crocker's rules. You even quoted it but you apparently didn't read it.
You're very self righteous in your indignation, so much so that you would rather repeat the same thing over and over rather than actually converse.
Even if we pretend, for the sake of argument, that "always" doesn't mean "always", and that they didn't mean it like that in the first place and then changed the goalposts when they were called out on it, they're still making an insane claim - either out of malice, or clinical insanity (e.g. you think that you can read others' minds).
> I have responded thoroughly to your weird nitpicking
They very clearly have not. They still haven't admitted to either insanity or malice in their statement
>>> Also the undertone of this topic is always “I want you to be blunt to the point of rudeness (so I can be too).”
Note also the repeated attempts to distract from this wild claim with fallacies, misdirection, and emotional manipulation:
> You're very self righteous in your indignation, so much so that you would rather repeat the same thing over and over rather than actually converse.
...and then, of course, the root of the whole argument was their failure to read and understand either Crocker's Rules or the author's point:
>> This is the key to this whole topic. It doesn’t matter what should be. It matters what is. Humans are emotional in nature and ignoring that is not effective.
...which is, of course, factually an incorrect understanding or response to either the author or Crocker.
> I responded directly to your claim that I mischaracterized the author's point by showing how they misunderstand Crocker's rules.
And yet again we see that they're incapable of using logic, and are just operating emotionally, because...
> You even quoted it but you apparently didn't read it.
Failure of reading comprehension strikes again - I already responded to this point, and they completely missed it:
> You failed to correctly characterize (or argue against) either the author's points or Crocker's Rules, so this isn't really relevant.
This is factually true. Their comment "This is the key to this whole topic. It doesn’t matter what should be. It matters what is. Humans are emotional in nature and ignoring that is not effective." is wrong and irrelevant regardless of whether they're responding to the author or Crocker.
It does not matter whether the author got Crocker right or not. The objective truth is that this user's arguments are irrelevant to both.
We've already gone over each of these points at least once above, so if we keep looping, this is probably a bot, and I'll just stop responding after another marker for future readers.
While “perception is reality” is indeed a thing in life so is respecting diversity. If this person prefers to be spoken to in a certain way then it is polite to respect their wishes. You can have your own preference and they should likewise respect yours.
It's polite to try and meet somebody half way, but I've dealt with people who want to lay out all the rules for communication and it typically boils down to a one-sided arrangement where the world is supposed to work for them, but they're unwilling to do the same for the world. Unless somebody has a real limitation (like ESL or a mental handicap), I just ignore these kinds of requests. Make a good faith effort to not be an asshole, but don't give an inch to petty dictators; they have damaged egos and get satisfaction from having people comply with arbitrary requests or demands, and asking for changes to your language is often just the beginning.
The author is saying something different here - that in this mode, the speaker’s feelings about how the recipient will receive a blunt message are the speaker’s problem.
In this case the recipient has already reassured the speaker they can handle their own feelings, but still meets resistance from speakers who are guilty or worried about how they will come across if they are too direct.
Eh, I think the author is also exaggerating the problem significantly.
“I hope this is okay to bring up and sorry for the long message, I just wanted to flag that I've been looking at the latency numbers and I'm not totally sure but it seems like there might be an issue with the caching layer?”
This isn’t a problem of overpoliteness. It’s a problem of almost nonsensical rambling. I’ve never worked with anyone who actually communicated like this and if they did, they would get pretty direct feedback that they need to stop this. This isn’t polite, it’s dithering. Professor Quirrell level lack of confidence.
> Eh, I think the author is also exaggerating the problem significantly.
> “I hope this is okay to bring up and sorry for the long message, I just wanted to flag that I've been looking at the latency numbers and I'm not totally sure but it seems like there might be an issue with the caching layer?”
You're cherry-picking the most extreme example out of the bunch as a way of discrediting the argument. If you actual read the other examples given:
> The Slack message that starts with "Hey! Hope you had a great weekend :)"before asking a technical question or the PR comment that opens with "I'm not sure if I'm missing something here and sorry if this is a dumb question but" before raising a completely valid concern, or that incident text that spends two full paragraphs explaining that the author was sleep-deprived and had a lot on their plate and the monitoring tool had a weird quirk that they didn't know about and their lead had told them something ambiguous three weeks ago, before finally getting around to saying what actually broke and why.
There's no exaggeration going on here. This is the norm for the majority of Slack conversations I've seen online, including my own job - out of the hundreds of people I've interacted with at my job, well over half of them do this.
It absolutely does have relevance to Crocker's Rules. People exchange pleasantries because there's a cultural tendency to treat a direct, to-the-point message/request out of nowhere without the phatic rituals as off-putting and mildly offensive/insensitive.
This is pretty universally understood in most software engineering cultures in the West, which the author (and certainly the vast majority of HN) appear to reside in. It seems like you probably just don't exist in the same culture - but there's nothing wrong with that, you just have to be aware that that's how we do it.
Crocker's rules are about not burying honesty beneath politeness.
Someone can maybe squint real hard and see the word "Hey", in "Hey, the site is down" as politeness obstructing communication. But at that point, I hope the person seeing it this way operates under Crocker's Rules, because I would say they are a moron. There is a world of difference between basic human pleasantries and niceness that actually obscures communication.
Crocker's rules also explicitly state that others are allowed to disregard niceness, not that they are obligated to. Indeed, if you are offended or bothered by someone being polite, then under Crocker's rules, that would be your problem.
Are you implying other people's emotional immaturity is exclusively my problem to solve?
Also when you state an absolute like the word of God, how do you expect it to be received?
The article seems to imply to me: form relationships where direct truth is welcomed while acknowledging that people do have emotions.
Facts can be true and the feelings can be strong at the sam time. Attaching emotions to facts intentionally is intentionally adding a non-factual dimension to the conversation.
If you consider emotions as facts, and are communicating with me, I prefer if you express them as directly and honestly as possible so they can be included in the discussion.
Intentionally not expressing emotions clearly while using them to communicate is inherently without integrity. Specifically the words are not aligned with the emotions. The lack of integrity is structural (as opposed to some ambiguous moral ideal.)
> Are you implying other people's emotional immaturity is exclusively my problem to solve?
Emotional maturity (from most standpoints) does not mean being completely emotionally unaffected by other people's communication. Insofar as it is emotional immaturity that gives rise to a particular emotional response it might be ethically that person's duty to work on it, if that's how your personal ethics works. But from a pragmatic perspective if you want to get something done that involves that person as a colleague or collaborator it's probably not going to be productive to continually bash your head on their psychological quirks until they go to therapy. You'll have much more luck adapting your own communication to be more aligned with their needs, regardless of how reasonable you personally think those needs are.
If you can't or don't want to put in the effort to do that your other option is to make sure you surround yourself with people who can already communicate effectively and relatively comfortably in the communication style you consider natural. You can cut off relationships, move jobs, or fire people to purge everyone else from the circle of people you have to interact with. But you'll be missing out on all the positive contributions of those people, who probably bring viewpoints alien to you, and you run the risk of sycophancy. Plus you'll have a harder time finding people to date/collaborate with/employ/… if you restrict your pool that way.
In practice I think people tend to end up somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. They'll decide a maximum investment of energy they're willing or capable of putting into accommodating other people's needs, and make sure that work × time doesn't exceed that threshold.
I agree with the pragmatism. I think pragmatically yes, it is my responsibility. In a very real sense, I am able to respond, being aware of the emotions, even if perhaps the person I am speaking to is not.
I guess I have a hard time viewing this as anything but intentional emotional manipulation.
Adapting your communication doesn't have to imply deception or even insincerity, it just means understanding what's important to your target audience and making sure to address it. Sometimes that's something like financial impact or user focus; sometimes it's emotional reassurance or intellectual challenge.
> Are you implying other people's emotional immaturity is exclusively my problem to solve?
Ignoring others emotions is not a sign of emotional maturity.
The inability to empathize with others and make meaningful predictions about how their emotions will affect communications is specifically a lack of emotional maturity.
This kind of sentiment comes up every time this topic is raised. This idea that we should be able to treat people mostly like logical robots is not grounded in fact. The fact is that human emotions have a huge impact on the way they communicate and receive communications.
> Also when you state an absolute like the word of God, how do you expect it to be received?
Case in point. You had an emotional reaction to the parent comment, and you responded with an attempt to shame the communication style rather than address the factual content of the communication.
Your emotions dictated your response here, not the facts, and your response was emotional in content as much as factual. Hyperbole is specifically an appeal to emotion.
> Ignoring others emotions is not a sign of emotional maturity.
I completely agree.
> The inability to empathize with others and make meaningful predictions about how their emotions will affect communications is specifically a lack of emotional maturity.
I completely agree.
> Case in point. You had an emotional reaction to the parent comment, and you responded with an attempt to shame the communication style rather than address the factual content of the communication.
Yes I did. I am still curious how OP expects that to be received.
> Your emotions dictated your response here, not the facts, and your response was emotional in content as much as factual. Hyperbole is specifically an appeal to emotion.
> Yes I did. I am still curious how OP expects that to be received.
I’m curious why you perceive their statement to be made as if it’s a pronouncement from God and not a simply a statement of their view on the issue.
> I think I agree here too. What do you mean?
I mean that you both responded emotionally and communicated with an emotional appeal. You exaggerated what OP actually said and called it a mandate from God. This isn’t factual engagement. It’s emotional.
It’s not a case of “try harder”. My only point was that emotions run through all human interactions. That’s how it actually is. People very, very frequently make decisions based entirely on emotion and then produce a logical argument post hoc for the decision.
It’s valuable to be aware of how humans actually act.
