This article really frustrated me the last time it was posted, but now I think I have a clear enough idea why to put it into words.
You absolutely can tell people things! But to tell someone something, you need to do three things:
- Establish enough shared context that they can understand you
- Speak about something they actually care about (or convince them to care)
- Use a format that works for what you're trying to communicate
I've told people about technical topics in conversation or presentation plenty of times. I don't really understand how you can be an engineer and not tell people things.
The article is frustrating because it puts the blame onto the listener. But that's not how communication works! You don't have the right to just "tell people things" - you have to put in the work to be understood and to show people it's worth their time to pay attention. Communicating well is part of the job.
The author does this even in this piece. He says: "For example, with just a few magic HTML tags we could stick avatars on a web page — pretty much any web page. For months Randy kept getting up at management meetings and saying, “We’ll be able to put avatars on web pages. Start thinking about what you might do with that.”
Well yeah - if someone stood up in a management meeting and told me to think about what I might do with an avatar, my first thought would be "What's an avatar" and my second thought would be "I'm already busy with other things". He hasn't said what an avatar is or why anyone should care about them. So people pay no attention.
Then the demo shows what an avatar is and lets people see immediately how it might be useful, in a format that works regardless of the skill of the communicator. And so of course now they understand!
And maybe the thing you're trying to communicate is so novel that you can't establish context or convince people to care without showing them a demo. But at least take the time to understand why you can't tell people about it.
Whoever wrote this piece is a bad communicator who thinks he's a good communicator, and then goes through life getting confused about why no one understands him.
For example, in the story about the Japanese, he assumes some context from the reader: "What are they building? What is Fujitsu and what is Habitat and why does Japan need their own special version of it?" It's not even clear they're building anything technical, so I wondered, "Why do they need a client and server? And also, didn't you ever think to check their internal technical details before? What did you think would be the result?"
> “who’s going to pay to make all those links?” or “why would anyone want to put documents online?”
These are good questions and you better have a well-worded answer! In fact, it is easy to answer these if you have prepared for them. Did you just assume that the potential customer would already have familiar with the technicals of your product? If that was the case, they would have bought it from someone else already. Your target demo is the uninformed.
> Whoever wrote this piece is a bad communicator who thinks he's a good communicator, and then goes through life getting confused about why no one understands him.
As much as I appreciate the author writing this piece, I have to agree with your comment. I was half wondering if the entire article was an exercise in “this is how you don’t communicate, here’s the final para which explains everything I wrote!”. Reading the comments on the article and here on HN helped.
Habitat [1] was a massively multi-player online role-playing game, or perhaps one of the first ones, by LucasArts.
It was first released in 1986, and awarded at Game Developers Choice Awards in 2001. So, pretty old-school stuff. The site is about that game, and stories around it, so perhaps one can assume that readers know at least that much context.
> For example, in the story about the Japanese, he assumes some context from the reader: "What are they building? What is Fujitsu and what is Habitat and why does Japan need their own special version of it?" It's not even clear they're building anything technical, so I wondered, "Why do they need a client and server? And also, didn't you ever think to check their internal technical details before? What did you think would be the result?"
None of those details are important to the story. Leaving out extraneous detail is good communication.
Yeah it was a very confusing read, and when I finally understood the point of the writer I wondered if he wrote a confusing article on purpose to create a "Aha!" moment when you finally understand what he's saying, to illustrate his point through this article.
It's also ... if not absolutely necessary, then tremendously helpful to the process ... to observe the subjects' expressed understanding and see if that matches the lesson or message you're trying to convey.
This distinction to me is what distinguishes various informational approaches, in which delivery is one-way, from instructional approaches, in which the teacher closely observes and monitors students to see what understanding they're forming, and to bring them back on course if they're straying from it.
This is challenging at scale, or at distance, or over time (e.g., in writing a book that's used passively in instruction). It's a chief reason I suspect that various methods of scaling instruction perform poorly. It's why even generative-AI approaches to machine-guided instruction are likely to perform poorly --- such tools can explain material or respond to prompts, but it seems don't of themselves address the monitoring-and-guidance approach.
That said, in technical contexts whether in school-based teaching, professional training, or marketing support / vendor-based instruction, efficacy can be hugely improved by adding this step.
"...you have to put in the work to be understood and to show people it's worth their time to pay attention. Communicating well is part of the job."
That's fine and I don't disagree but the problem is that there are very few truly good communicators out there (there is just not enough to go around).
Communication is difficult and really effective communication is very difficult. I'll use myself as an example, When I post to HN I usually know what I want to say and I generally make myself clear—in fact I go considerable lengths ensure I'm not misinterpreted or misconstrued.
To ensure this does not happen I'll often restate what I've said in a different way and or provide examples. This makes my comments long, prolix and boring so few bother to read them.
I don't have a Shakespeare-like talent to be short, pithy and simultaneously convey what I'm saying both succinctly and accurately, and I believe that not many people do.
OK, so when people have some talent, skill or knowledge that needs to be conveyed to the world and they can't get their point across effectively then what are they to do?
> OK, so when people have some talent, skill or knowledge that needs to be conveyed to the world and they can't get their point across effectively then what are they to do?
Try, and try again.
Put yourself in the shoes of your audience. What do they know already? What will they think when you say this or that? Is that what you want them to think?
Trying again is often not an option. For instance, comments on HN are often only 'alive' for hours, by the next day the story is usually dead.
Whilst I used myself as a example I'm not really concerned about my own communication skills to the extent that I worry about them. I know I'm a reasonable or adequate communicator, it's just that I'm not an excellent one. Also I'll often just comment to straighten out my thoughts on a matter not expecting others to take much note.
Putting oneself in the shoes of one's audience is easy when there's general agreement with what one is saying but as so often happens there are two sides arguing who have diametrically opposing views. One can say something innocuous which is essentially to say nothing or one takes a strong stand and alienates half the audience which is usually my situation. (I've noticed during heated debates on HN that the total of my votes can fluctuate wildly in both directions and finally end up close to zero.)
What I have to say doesn't count for much as I don't post widely outside HN, rather what's important is the wider public debate—political, scientific, environmental, etc. What I've noticed in recent decades is a general decline in the standard of debate—of discussion and discourse. I've been around long enough to recall talking heads like Bertrand Russell and A.J.P. Taylor who could not only captivate and hold an audience—whether they were for or against the proposition being put—but do so succinctly and with great precision. They were so good they would spellbind their audiences. (It's worth watching old TV footage of these two and others of the era on YouTube just to be reminded of how good the public discourse was back then.)
In my opinion, the reason for why we are witnessing a decline in the standard of the public discourse and that communications have become so dysfunctional is that formal argument in the public arena has all but died. Not only do we no longer have speakers who can clearly articulate arguments but also audiences no longer have sufficient patience and perseverance to listen.
The quest for an understanding of the need for good communication skills in developers, as well as everyone else, has become my personal vocation. I've been working in tech for four decades, and my vantage sees weak and poor communications as the underlying factor of all this chaos, this absurd reliance on extreme tooling, the overly complicated tech stacks, and the industry failure of resorting to "leet testing" to gain employment.
I'm an example of failed communications: I'm the idiot who went bankrupt trying to create Personalized Advertising, which is now known as Deep Fakes. I had a feature film quality system working in '08! But I could not convince investors how placing consumers into the video advertising of products with a celebrity commending their purchase would be a viable business. Granted, the global financial crisis had making new tech investments difficult to impossible to land. However, despite my placing VCs into film clips right in front of their eyes, they still did not get it. And inevitable one of them would have the "ah ha!" moment and declare "we should make porn!" and then that would be all they could conceive. I spent 5 years pitching, I took communications courses, hired marketing firms to critique my message. Still to this day, I cannot get people to realize the advertising value of placing consumers directly into the advertising. It is the ultimate "show them what this is", but I can't get people to grasp the value of that.
Oh how I agree with your first paragraph. And there's nothing like experience and hindsight to provide such wisdom.
This is subject I could discuss for days but I've spent too much time here already. Perhaps you could read my last reply to krisoft, it's perhaps a bit tangential but it enlarges on my earlier comment.
"Placing consumers into the video advertising of products with a celebrity commending their purchase" would have made intriguing dystopian fiction 40 years ago. Today it sounds like a bad parody.
Life is an iterative game. You fail one day, you pick yourself up and try again the next one. The very act of trying makes you better at it. (For example by having a better internal model of what other people might think of a given text.)
> I know I'm a reasonable or adequate communicator, it's just that I'm not an excellent one.
For whatever it is worth I find what you write perfectly clear.
> I've noticed during heated debates on HN that the total of my votes can fluctuate wildly in both directions and finally end up close to zero.
Oh i see! Controversial subjects be controversial. I don't think aiming for "non-controversialness" is a worthy goal in itself. Of course one should pick their battles, but I wouldn't take that as a sign that there is anything wrong with how you communicate. You are not going to convince everyone, every time about everything. If you could, we would probably call that geas not communication anyway. :)
> They were so good they would spellbind their audiences.
I'm not familiar with the names you mention, but I will check them out. Thank you for the recommendation.
I still think we have spellbinding orators who discuss current public issues. I would count Adam Conover or Jordan Peterson as such for example. (and here I intentionally picked ones ideologically far from each other.) Now of course since I don't know your examples I can't judge how they measure up to them.
"Oh i see! Controversial subjects be controversial. I don't think aiming for "non-controversialness" is a worthy goal in itself."
First, thank you for your reply.
See, your comment clearly shows that there was a significant communications failure on my part because I failed to get my message across with accuracy. In fact, my failure was so bad that it deserves to be awarded close to 0/10 because you interpreted the opposite meaning to my intent.
As an old phil. student I make a clear distinction between formal argument as found in say Book I of Plato's Republic and that which now goes for general debate on say HN or Twitter. My point had nothing to do with being non-controvertial, in fact formal argument is usually just the opposite, subjects are often very controversial indeed.
Both Russell and Taylor would never have let an error of misjudging their audience to that extent slip through, they would have prefaced their discussions with explanations to avoid confusion. Here, I failed to do that by assuming that everyone was on my 'wavelength' and had the same understandings (definitions) as I have.
"I'm not familiar with the names you mention, but I will check them out. Thank you for the recommendation."
There's also part 3 and many more like them if you wish.
"I still think we have spellbinding orators who discuss current public issues. I would count Adam Conover or Jordan Peterson as such for example."
No doubt there are but they aren't as widely known nor as well respected by friend and foe
alike as those who've I've mentioned. They were intellectual superstars before intellectual became a dirty word, they were known to everyone as well as we know the name 'Einstein' today.
Re windy comments, I sympathize, but I've learned it's ok to be terse. You will never get across to 100% of your readers. Make your prose worth reading for those whom you reach.
So all this article is really trying to communicate is that you can't get people on board with your product/software without them seeing/using it first. It's the general idea behind the MVP strategy that ycombinator teaches.
>The article is frustrating because it puts the blame onto the listener
That wasn't the impression I got from the article - I think the title was a tongue in cheek way of saying quite the opposite: telling people isn't enough, it's your job as the explainer to guide people through the full path to understanding.
That's more or less what you described in the rest of your post, so I sense you're in concordance with the author
If it's a management meeting at a company developing a massively online multiplayer game as one of their main projects, perhaps you would assume people to know what an avatar is, in that context.
That still doesn't make it sound or feel like a good idea, to me. :)
The whole point is that to create the demo in the first place someone has to approve it, so if they cannot understand the thing then it doesn't get approved.
> Well yeah - if someone stood up in a management meeting and told me to think about what I might do with an avatar, my first thought would be "What's an avatar" and my second thought would be "I'm already busy with other things". He hasn't said what an avatar is or why anyone should care about them. So people pay no attention
> And maybe the thing you're trying to communicate is so novel that you can't establish context or convince people to care without showing them a demo. But at least take the time to understand why you can't tell people about it
Forget novel ideas, even relatively simple ideas within your domain are hard to communicate to other people especially if they are outside your domain.
Add people being busy and you having limited time to explain things on top of that and it becomes extremely difficult to get anything done unless someone trusts you and does not require a full explanation.
Stack ambiguity on top of that (E.g. "we think there's something here but can't pinpoint it) and there's a 0% chance of it happening.
I'm surprised this guy's management actually let him build the thing given the way he recounts how things went down.
You absolutely can tell people things! But to tell someone something, you need to do three things:
I've told people about technical topics in conversation or presentation plenty of times. I don't really understand how you can be an engineer and not tell people things.The article is frustrating because it puts the blame onto the listener. But that's not how communication works! You don't have the right to just "tell people things" - you have to put in the work to be understood and to show people it's worth their time to pay attention. Communicating well is part of the job.
The author does this even in this piece. He says: "For example, with just a few magic HTML tags we could stick avatars on a web page — pretty much any web page. For months Randy kept getting up at management meetings and saying, “We’ll be able to put avatars on web pages. Start thinking about what you might do with that.”
Well yeah - if someone stood up in a management meeting and told me to think about what I might do with an avatar, my first thought would be "What's an avatar" and my second thought would be "I'm already busy with other things". He hasn't said what an avatar is or why anyone should care about them. So people pay no attention.
Then the demo shows what an avatar is and lets people see immediately how it might be useful, in a format that works regardless of the skill of the communicator. And so of course now they understand!
And maybe the thing you're trying to communicate is so novel that you can't establish context or convince people to care without showing them a demo. But at least take the time to understand why you can't tell people about it.