When to Overcommunicate | Hacker News Reader

When to Overcommunicate

blog.glowforge.com

146 pointsdanshapiro48 comments

I personally find overcommunication annoying and don't like to hear constant status updates from people; just handle the work and let me know when it's done unless you have any blockers.

That said, I've received feedback from multiple people that they never know how my work is progressing, are surprised when it's completed, and would like more status updates along the way, so I think it's safe to say that my preferences are an anomaly and you should probably follow the article's advice instead.

Those people you don't want to hear updates from, are they people whose work your work depend on?

I think the article have a good point, but it is also important to only "overcommunicate" to people who depend on you. Otherwise it's just noise.

Too much isn’t useful. For bosses or those we produce for there is as opportunity for a short regular summary (like once a week). Can take like 5 minutes to create

Over communication is shallow work. We should limit that. There is a useful amount.

It’s all about balance.

And about the situations, scenarios and environments.

The overriding thing is to "take care of each other". If they want more updates, send more updates. If they want less updates, send less updates. How do you know what they prefer? Ask them.

Communicating about communicating is underrated.

> If they want more updates, send more updates.

Then comes the adage 'under promise over deliver'.

If you send out an update saying you're working on cool X module/technology/idea to solve a problem, and then it turns out you couldn't, it's a bummer across the table.

Even if it succeeds, you don't get much credit for it because everyone 'pitched in' with their ideas/tweaks at the beginning, so now the entire team feels like you were just the implementer of the team's design/strategy.

Call me a lone-wolf cowboy if you will, but it's a plain truth that no amount of 'team-players' can deny.

And if companies do not want to work with such under-communicators, no big deal. Not everyone meshes with everyone else. There's plenty of other candidates in the sea, and plenty of other companies in the sea.

I don't know that your preferences are that much of an anomaly.

For example, I would say I get too much email so I really don't want more: likewise IMs or other forms of interruption. Like everyone else, I have things I actually need to get done, so constantly fielding incoming communication can become pretty frustrating.

What I do need are timely and relevant updates, not constant updates and over-communication. I prefer dealing with these updates in a structured fashion, whether I'm giving or receiving them - e.g., weekly 1:1s and other scheduled meetings - rather than ad hoc.

Thinking in more general terms, I prefer behaviour and action that is considered rather than reactive. This goes beyond personal preference though: I don't believe it's possible to effectively scale by being reactive or ad hoc in your actions and communications. I also don't believe that people who cannot (or will not) structure their behaviour are suitable for management or leadership in a growing organisation.

Sometimes events require a more reactive approach but I don't believe this should be the norm.

Managers should definitely be structured, however the more senior you get the more random curveballs you get. Ultimately the single broadest trait that makes someone suited for senior leadership is judgement: When to be structured vs reactive, when to step in quickly vs when to let subordinates figure things out, what people’s strengths, weaknesses and preferences are, and ultimately how orchestrate all these things to maximize business success. Ultimately at the executive level these things are extremely contextual and rules of thumb won’t get you far if they’re not backed by relevant experience.

A lot of times in the development world ppl are basically asking you for status updates b/c their boss has pressure on them for things to be complete.

I am a big fan of 'under promise. over deliver'.

A lot of communication (what I'm going to work on next week) falls under promise. So I don't tell what I'm doing until I've already done it. Or when I'm unable to do it.

In other words, I let success or failure be known only after I've made sure of either using my best efforts. This usually takes ~2 weeks of isolated/concentrated effort to find out.

Then as a consultant at Big Tech working with different customers, I found out they are not big fans.

'promise. deliver or not' - is what they seem to prefer.

Obviously none likes shocks. But they also don't like surprises.

Source - got fired despite extra-mile technical achievements.

I find it amusing to see this come from Glowforge, a company known for its poor communication with customers. They sell $6000 lasers to consumers but have no phone number to talk to them. You order, give them your money, and then you'll hear nothing from them from over 30 days while you wait for your purchase: often customers don't get so much as a shipping confirmation before their order finally shows up at their door. If you email them, you get an auto-reply saying they hope to get back to you within 3 business days, which means troubleshooting an issue with their products can mean multiple 3-day round-trips back and forth to get resolved under warranty. And they have a habit of introducing and pulling software features without any advanced notice, when many of their customers rely on their $6000 lasers as production equipment for their small businesses, so these unannounced changes can be disruptive to say the least. All issues that could be fixed with some better communication. And it's too bad, because I think they easily have the best product in their niche of consumer-targeted laser engravers (ping me if you'd like a $500 discount... I own one).

Anecdotal experience - I've noticed that shipping late by 2 weeks with advance notice to stakeholders is taken way more positively than shipping late by 1 week but informing people late.

This seems like plain common sense and required courtesy but I've been on the wrong side of this from both approaches enough times from both sides of the table - people somehow have a block in sharing the bad news (also because in unhealthy places the messenger is shot - just makes me realize that I'm in a good place).

(In any case the blog actually talks more of sharing the context you are in and not just about sharing bad news early - sharing context is definitely safer and a better approach)

I don't remember where I heard it but "It is OK to disappoint but not OK to surprise" rings so true. Also, the earlier you know you'll be late the bigger the chance is that additional help can avoid the late delivery.

As long as one is careful to head off the "here are 10 entirely new people to help you make up the time" trap (with credit to Mythical Man Month of course).

I've never heard that saying btw but it's a great one, I'll definitely remember it for future use!

That's my experience too: as long as you keep people up to date and your updates follow some sort of schedule, late delivery is generally tolerated, especially when it can be seen coming from a reasonably long way off.

I always try to front-load the riskiest and most difficult work on projects for this reason: that way you're never in the situation where everything looks fine until it all goes off the rails at the last minute.

Say you're shipping 3 weeks late, then ship only 2 weeks late. Now you've shipped 1 week early.

This is solid advice, also because if you think you’ll be 2 weeks late it is likely that you’ll eventually be 3 weeks late anyway. Delays have a habit of piling up.

What if somebody wishes to cancel after hearing the 3 weeks as opposed to 2 weeks?

For e.g. if they're travelling, etc. Could result in loss of revenue as well.

I'd actually see that as a positive thing; too much money is wasted on the sunk cost fallacy, and having the guts to cancel a project if it goes too far over time / budget is rare enough.

I would argue that it is impossible to form any conclusions here without knowing what the exact specific situation is, but of course what you described is plausible.

slow is smooth and smooth is fast

One of my favorites.

Well you let them know that they might need to change their plans. They have time to prepare and mitigate any issues caused by slip in schedule.

This was one of my first real work life "lessons" after college and something that a good manager can really help drive home with junior employees.

Coming from college where deadlines were immutable and professors didn't really care to hear about why some long research paper was taking longer than expected, the idea of telling a boss that you're behind schedule doesn't necessarily come naturally.

Yup, and it's a tragedy. A boss cares about the work being delivered, and wants the end product as a valuable piece of the business.

It's not like school where if one is late, one might as well not even turn it in; even if it's late, it's still valuable, and school doesn't teach that.

I wish there were more articles like this about communications, organizational psychology, effective coordination, etc.

But mostly, I wish there were ways to recognize, navigate, negotiate people's different styles.

TMI from recent my turn at the woodshed:

Noob manager (Jane) is unhappy with my communication. Wants more detail. Her prerogative, so I try. So in addition to adjacent desks, always on Skype, standups, status reports, very verbose commit messages, novels added to JIRA tickets, I start writing daily status reports.

Months of "improvement", no change in satisfaction.

So us chickens are sitting around trying to troubleshoot something. Me (Bob) and another coworker (Stan) casually noticed that a third (Steve) seems to have a great working relationship with manager (Jane).

Stan and I are astonished (gobsmacked) to learn that Steve is privately texting (via Skype) Jane 15-20 times per day. The smallest updates. "Just committed changes for JIRA 123". "PR 303 approved and merged." "Build successful!" All sorts of emoji.

I would have NEVER thought to spam my manager all day every day. But that's apparently what Jane wants.

The weird part in all this, like most miscommunication, is Jane couldn't say what she wants. Nor did it occur to her to tell Stan and me to be more like Steve.

Same: I struggle with finding a balance between too much and too little information for different people. For a while I wrote detailed, (and in my opinion, clear) status reports for my higher-ups, but nobody ever read them, so I stopped.

There was a line in an old TV show that stuck with me: one of the characters asks, “When’s the date of that dinner again?” The other character says, “It’s Saturday, I just told you that.” The first character replies, “Yeah, but I only listen when I ask.”

In my experience, each person has their own way of listening, and it’s a challenge to keep straight who consumes information in which way:

* Person A only reads the first line of any email, so you have to ask each question or offer each nugget of information in a separate email and there can only be a maximum of two sentences in the message

* Person B only wants to be told the information verbally in the hallway or in a meeting or over lunch, not in written form

* Person C has a lot going on and only has mental RAM, no long-term storage, so they want to be reminded of everything repeatedly: “Just a reminder, I’m out Feb. 15th.” Then “Just a reminder, I’m out next week.” Then, “Just a reminder, I’m out later this week.” then, “Just a reminder, I’m out tomorrow.”

* Person D needs quantified data, charts, and graphs

Etc. I’m not complaining – it’s the human condition, it is what it is – but personally I find it challenging to thread the needle.

Thanks. Really good reply.

My response is that I will now be on the lookout for new strategies, ideas.

I imagine some kind of HR, team building, skill training exercises where everyone discovers each other's communication style(s). Most of it will be hooey, but there will certainly be some kernels of truth.

It also now occurs to me that UX & ethnography types could observe users to infer what works. Eye gaze, like buttons, time spent, etc. Imagine building "emotional intelligence" like feedback tools into Skype.

I know it's creepy. But brainstorming might lead to something useful.

Anyway, thanks again.

Good lord. I couldn't imagine that level of communication; it strikes me as horrifyingly unprofessional. More like the way I texted my wife when we had just started dating than anything I would ever consider in the office.

If that's what was really wanted by management, I'd have to spend a half day writing some git hooks or toss in a notification rule on the CI server to auto-generate cutesy micro-status updates.

Any long lived project (that doesn't want to end as legacy code) is a performance art piece.

If you've ever seen five minutes of an opera (go to YouTube if not), they move their mouths in an almost comical exaggeration so the people farther away can see what's going on.

Early on when I relied on subtlety, I'd find repeatedly that someone has grossly mistaken my intention and undone a bunch of work that I put time into. The bigger the gesture the harder it is for them to either misunderstand or feign confusion (easier to ask forgiveness... unless forgiveness involves admitting you're an idiot).

George Bernard Shaw probably didn't say that, "The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place." https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/31/illusion/

The source of that aphorism is probably William H Whyte and is better understood with its context about listening.

"LET US RECAPITULATE A BIT: The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it. We have talked enough; but we have not listened. And by not listening we have failed to concede the immense complexity of our society–and thus the great gaps between ourselves and those with whom we seek understanding."

I do a lot of ops-ish work, and in addition to all the nice declarative configuration-as-code things where infrastructure changes are reviewed and applied in pull-request form, there's a lot of ad-hoc debugging/diagnosing and one-off changes that get done.

I totally over-communicate on everything where I'm debugging or mutating the actual shared infrastructure. In some places, this is literally in the form of displaying all `sudo` logs in-line in the IRC channel. If I'm debugging some issue, I'll be copy-pasting links to google results, screenshots of the the monitoring graphs and any diagnostic command output into that slack thread. Once I figure it out and either run some one-off commands or make a PR to fix it, I'll include those in the the chat. If I typo some command and (almost) make a mistake, I'll certainly mention that as well.

It's a real-time log/diary of the investigative process and any changes. These slack threads are typically solo threads, with just me replying to myself. This is fine. Occasionally other people will comment on something, occasionally I'll be searching for and referring to those threads later on.

Stuff that I'm working on solo and isn't leaving my laptop outside of a `git push`? Not necessarily worth mentioning before it hits GitHub, but please spend some time and write a useful PR summary.

Both have advantages, from my experience.

Communicating useful everyday things with coworkers brings in a more friendly atmosphere, which lets people trust you with work.

Going on full communication blackout helps in focusing on actually getting said work done.

The article is a fluff and mixes a few concepts. Quality over quantity. Quantity is a bad proxy. Not in any particular order but some things more important than quantity: availability, clarity, accuracy, transparency, traceability. Too many people love to listen to their own voice and opinions a bit too much anyway. If I had more time I would have written a shorter comment.

Near the bottom of the article:

> And of course, overcommunicating can be taken too far. If you are taking 4 hours to write up a detailed status on a 2-day project, that is obviously not the right return on investment! Get in the habit of writing status that is honest, relevant, and respectful, and also concise.

So? It is still missing the point. Volume is not a good indicator of good communication. Case in point, this is probably just a run of the mill PR piece without much depth to generate some clicks, I came away with a bad taste for wasting my time.

I came here to say this more or less. Overcommunicating is when you communicate things that don't matter. Recognize the value in what you say or don't say properly, and it will follow that it's the right amount. That may mean talking to other people to find out what's valuable to them.

The example given for negative feedback is kind of at odds with the point of the article itself.

Seems like, in that case, the managers themselves didn't communicate until they had to, and even though they were seeing a problem, they didn't communicate earlier. Now it's in the onus of the employee to give constant updates else he risks losing his job, even though he wasn't given constant updates from the other direction in the first place.

In general, the article seems to be saying "tell everything to the managers, make their jobs easier", and here I thought one of the responsibilities of management was making work easier for the employees.

Sure, communicate, but it should be in both directions.

> I thought one of the responsibilities of management was making work easier for the employees.

Every place I've worked, it's management's job to enforce status hierarchies on their subordinates, and making people's jobs easier is directly in conflict with that primary objective.

You may work in a different culture than I do though, the vast majority of work here no matter the industry is of the "no excuses" variety stated in the article.

I've worked in pretty much the same kind of companies as you have and I completely agree with you.

I was being deliberately overly idealistic in my first comment (and it was perhaps a bit of a reassertion of how I would handle management in my hypothetical own company).

I want people to be capable and independent, they should be up front and honest about things but if someone is too stuck on the minutia of "how and how much" in terms of communication then what's the point?

On top of which, to be perfectly honest, the people I work with are barely a step above strangers to me, so the last thing I want is to hear about their personal life. I certainly don't know or trust these people enough to trust with anything more than "I've got personal/family/medical issues, can you work with me while I handle these things?" and quite frankly I don't want or expect anything more from my coworkers than that.

I started communicating more by giving end of day updates to my managers after I started falling behind on projects. It didn’t just help them—it helped me. It kept me on track and I could more easily see when/if I was falling behind.

> The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

I've found that usually when a conversation is going on, particularly in text format, much less information is conveyed than you think at the time.

An interesting thing I've done before is to go back through old conversations where I thought I really "bared my soul" about a particular topic.

Often there is next to no information actually exchanged. What I was actually doing was feeling strong emotions. They were in no way conveyed over to the other person.

There is one aspect of communication. Asking questions. Sometimes I wonder if I am not asking enough. I will always try to figure out myself rather than ask. I am afraid if I ask about something and it is actually findable I am perceived as lazy, stupid or incapable of finding the answer myself so I have to waste others time and ruin their workflow.

I wonder if I am hurting myself with it and is it good or bad for my career and life.

I suppose there is a balance there somewhere, but I am not sure whether I am underasking or overasking etc

We don't need any more arms races, thank you. It doesn't take much to work slightly less hard (or less publically), communicate in a way that's efficient with other people's attention and time, and stop humblebragging on social media about your lifestyle and material goods.

It's not good to wear training wheels all the time. Worrying about the minutia of communication makes you less able to see what is being said, and makes you look for confirmation of your predictions/worries instead.

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