Comment by gtowey
3 days ago
I disagree.
I've worked on honing my communication skills for 20 years in this industry. Every time I have failed to get the desired result, I have gone back to the drawing board to understand how I can change how I'm communicating to better convey meaning, urgency, and all that.
After all that I've finally had an epiphany. They simply don't care. They don't care about quality, about efficiency, about security. They don't care about their users, their employees, they don't care about the long term health of the company. None of it. Engineers who do care will burn out trying to "do their job" in the face of management that doesn't care.
It's getting worse in the tech industry. We've reached the stage where leaders are in it only for themselves. The company is just the vehicle. Calls for quality fall on deaf ears these days.
yes, so situational awareness is even more fundamental than communication
especially because people hired by people hired by people (....) hired by founders (or delegated by some board that's voted by successful business people) did not get there by being engineering minded.
and this is inconceivable for most engineering minded people!
they don't care because their world, their life, their problems and their solutions are completely devoid of that mindset.
some very convincing founder types try to imitate it, some dropouts who spent a few years around people who have this mindset can also imitate it for a while, but their for them it's just a thing like the government, history, or geography, it's just there, if there's a hill they just go around, they don't want to understand why it's there, what's there, what's under it, what geological processes formed it, why, how, how long it will be there ...
This will explain it too you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs&list=PLInW-j_Odl...
Yeah, uhh:
> I've worked on honing my communication skills for 20 years in this industry.
That's because the skills weren't good enough.
So the takeaway isn't how good or bad I may be at communicating, it's that I was fundamentally speaking a language that was wholly orthogonal to the interests of leadership. No matter how good I became at making persuasive arguments about fixing technical debt and preventing outages, the management simply didn't care about those things. They say they they do, because it would sound insane to say otherwise, but they largely keep their goals and motivations clandestine.
Which for many engineers who got into this industry because they loved solving problems, it can be quite a shocking realization.
Which is why you both listen to what they say, and pay attention to what they do, and what they prioritise. You use the actions to figure out where they were coming from with the message, and then you adapt your message to suit that.
> Which for many engineers who got into this industry because they loved solving problems, it can be quite a shocking realization.
It's just another problem to solve, based on the same foundational skill set you develop as an engineer: Observation, interpretation, analysis, experimentation, and implementation.
All-hands meetings are boring as hell, but they'll give me all sorts of signal about various managers up the line. I'll also take any opportunity I can get to be "in the room where it happens" when decisions are made (or speak to people who were in the room) while I'm building up a mental picture of what motivates someone.
If they're glory hunters, I'll figure out how to pitch my thing as something they can brag about. If they're people oriented (rare, but it happens), I'll pitch the human impact angle. If they're money pinchers, it's all about that $/month savings figure, put it front and centre in the opening sentence.
Everyone has an angle, a bias of some description. If you watch what projects do and don't get approved, and what language was used in them, you'll be successful too.
If I am using a service, I do not care about your communicating...I want reliability...