Hello, I am a senior developer with 11 years of experience. Over my journey so far I have witnessed and suffered through different communication issues more commonly seen in the (programming) workplace and I would like to call them out to raise awareness and hopefully help people who struggles with this specific aspect of career growth.
If anything, this helps with interviewing too.
1.) Being too verbose, there is no minimal word count requirement anymore.
Seriously, one of the things that drains my brain power the most is that someone will talk for 10 sentences, but it really is just one sentence of content decorated with too much loosely related context.
Workplace isn't a tv show, the amount of air time given to you speaking isn't a metric elevating you above others. In fact, if people start noticing that you are talking too much nonsense, they'll either cut you off prematurely or just tune out completely.
Especially if your accent is heavy, the more you speak the less people can understand you unfortunately. Less words = less possibilities of confusion = actually communication.
this also true for writing.
2.) Jumping to solutions and not explore your assumptions first.
This is extremely crucial in interviewing rounds, but also in everyday work interaction. Discussion is important because we have differing concerns and perspective. However, frequently discussions happen because someone does not know an important information, making someone's concern is an non-issue to others. So instead of initiating a full blown discussion on a topic, ask/verify your basic assumptions/understandings first.
I'll give a concrete example:
I was leading a project to migrate to a new time series database. One day a team member wrote out multiple pages on how we should bring down & up services and run the migration script with specific timestamps to avoid time overlap between migration script data and new database data.
he probably spent half an hour thinking, an hour writing the document, then asked each team member to spend time read through it, and called for an hour meeting.
The issue though, the new database has deduplication built in; so multiple inputs of the exact same information is only stored once. In other words, none of his proposals mattered because we could run the migration script overlapping the entire time range if we want and the database will simply resolve duplication.
This means, instead of sinking so many hours of his and our time, he could've simply asked "is duplication in this database a potential issue?" and a simple "no" ends the entire process.
like leetcode and system design, don't jump to solutions at work.
faults like this is damaging to your reputation and it'd be hard to comeback from this, because if you just made a stupid mistake then people will understand, shit happens. For blunders like this, people actually question your competency because habits are like personality traits, amendable, but hard to and not worth the time/investment in workplace.
3.) Listen to MEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Some people just want to talk. They don't want to actually have an exchange of information, dissecting trade off and differences, and come to a consensus. They just want to talk. They want YOU to understand and if YOU understand their point of view then everything will align perfectly.
that is the antithesis of communication.
We are in programming industry. Maybe your IQ is 160, but basically no one is just actually dumb. People DO understand you and miscommunication usually is a key point or two away from resolving.
trying to keep asserting your points without listening to others prolongs the discussion unnecessarily, makes people feel unheard (thus frustrated), and is a red flag to others that you are difficult to work with because of your personality defect, which is DAMAGING.
this type of behavior is also blatant in interviews, just listen for 10 seconds.
4.) Why write when you can talk?!
This is the pain point in my current job. Everyone wants to talk about everything, whether it's a small clarification or a small message to relay. It doesn't matter, everything has to be spoken.
the issue is spoken words can be forgotten the next second another person grabs my attention.
additionally, you never know whether someone is in the middle of a task and that sudden zoom invite (walk to cubicle) completely breaks the flow and forces context switch.
It is more often an action that soothes your anxiety on getting immediate response and shifting responsibility (so you can say "I talked and confirmed with you already, don't you remember?" during meeting) than working out difficult issues (honestly the more complex an issue, the more I believe it should be written instead).
Write it down! So decision is unforgettable, so others may get the context too, and so that the receiving person can get to it when timing is better for him.
of course there are people who ignore text messages, that is a big issue as well.
honorable mention: OH THE NERVES!
honestly albeit how much shit I talk about these faults, what it comes to frequently is not really personality defect but anxiety and lacking confidence. People are afraid they aren't communicating, their nervous talk adds too much context/words/is too fast, or they just want to hear confirmations from others. While being nervous is completely normal, don't let it define who you are and dictate how you behave.
feel free to let me know I am full of it, happy to discuss anything :)
