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Interesting PoV! Thanks for sharing :)

There are different kinds of interrupters

1 - people who want to let you know they know what you're about to say - might save everyone time.

2 - people who aren't interested in what's being said and want to say what they want to say.

3 - people who know better than the person who's talking.

4 - a tangent/aside (when I tangent interrupt I always try when I'm done to ask the person I interrupted to continue).

5 - rephrasing things ("do you mean this?"), asking for confirmation that stuff was understood. If I feel someone's monologuing excessively and losing me because of it (and being bad enough at reading body language to not realise it), I tend to do this (which can turn into a kind of interrogation scenario where I lead by questions, which isn't great, but it's better than having my eyes glaze).

5b - Asking for information about things I don't understand.

On the other side I know some people can speak very slowly, with lots of filler words - it's like they're monopolising the air with...'hmmmm' 'uuuh'...basically nothing, and that can be as annoying as being interrupted. And then you have giant wind-bags.

Conversational dynamics can be tricky things. I don't want anyone getting bummed out if I'm talking to them, and I don't want to lose them. Sometimes my conversation partner isn't so finely attuned to these things so I have to try steer things, and I'm sure people do that with me sometimes as well.

4 and 5 don't really seem interruption in the sense the article refers to. Yes, they're not letting you say right away what you had in mind to say, but they have every intention to eventually let you make your point.

The reality is that Grace is smart but that doesn't mean everyone else in the room is wrong. To interject and argue a "better" perspective requires a certain level of arrogance that not everyone has. People like Grace, who don't have this arrogance, will instead just let the louder more arrogant people run the show because at the end of the day it probably doesn't matter.

Moreover, this arrogance can easily mark you as "problematic" and "argumentative" by other arrogant people. I'm sure having quiet people speak up sounds great to you until you realize this means getting into more arguments over everything. We need people like Grace that are competent but let louder, more arrogant people run the show because at the end of the day, we'll be more productive that way.

> To interject and argue a "better" perspective requires a certain level of arrogance that not everyone has.

That's one way of looking at it. Another perspective would be "we're all here trying to solve this problem that we're talking about, so obviously if someone has a solution they think would work, they'd say it. No one is, so I'll offer my thoughts since it's better than nothing"

Because you’re the aggressor. It’s as simple as that. If you’re hanging out with buddies who like to playfully shove, that’s fine, but it’s on you if you don’t respect someone who doesn’t want to be shoved. You’re welcome to not hangout with people who don’t like being shoved, but that’s on you.

Your completely ignored their point and then responded violently towards awillen. There is more to polite conversation than just interruptions.

Perhaps I’ve seen too many quiet engineers rudely interrupted to be objective. Many of them happen to be women as well.

The self proclaimed interrupters become surprisingly polite when speaking to the CEO. What an interesting phenomenon ;)

If anything I expect people higher up in the hierarchy to be less sensitive about being interrupted, and more on board with optimizing information flow. On the other hand, with people who are more junior/less confident you are more at risk of discouraging them from sharing useful information if you interrupt too often, so it can be counterproductive.

One thing that I find tends to help is interrupting with questions rather than statements as that sort of keeps the ball in the other person’s court.

I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to treat senior leaders differently from peers.

More on topic, if we're talking about a business context here, and I think we are, it's important to consider the actual implications. If the team that is willing to shove and be shoved is more effective than the other team, it seems reasonable to expect those who join the team to get their shoving gloves on, fast, if they want to contribute at a high level.

Lots of assumptions baked in there, and I'm not saying it's the only valid way to run a good business, by any stretch.

What is your point of repeating the obvious?

You basically accused awillen of being that type of engineer, even though awillen wrote against being that type of interruptive arsehole. awillen is asking “how do we convert people to church of interruption”, they are not saying to interrupt.

Your reply to my comment is tangential, without connecting to the point I made (perhaps because my own comment was rude: I do reread the https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html regularly and I try to follow them . . .).

Different cultural styles sometimes conflict.

I liked Deborah Tannen's "You Just Don't Understand".

She describes this pro-interruption style as "competitive", whereas pro-taking-turns is "collaborative".

Of course, if you have some people whose ruleset is "compete/joust", and some whose ruleset is "collaborate/defer", there'll be tension.

Overall, Tannen reckoned that those who get the short end of the stick would benefit from different cultural styles being acknowledged, and why it might lead to conflict.

I think that there’s a third way in a meeting, and that’s to have a skilful chair of the meeting ensuring that there’s not one unnecessary dominating voice.

I say this as an interrupter who has been kindly made aware that other people have yet to speak.

The issue that I don't know how to deal with is the folks that will expound at length--for minutes at a time--without yielding the floor unless they're interrupted. And sometimes not even then. I'm already on board, let's move on to the part where we solve the problem!

I've attempted to make it more conditional. People I know who are meek I'll damned well hold my tongue. People I know who are Barkers I'll damned well interrupt. Everyone else...ends up being a bit of column A and a bit of column B and I'm sure I'm not navigating it correctly.

I think you could ask for permission to interrupt. From what I can grasp of the example:

Get attention from the speaker, raising hand or whatever

- "Can I interrupt you for a second?"

- "Yes."

- "I think we all understand most of this... Does everyone understand?"

Look for confirmation from others

- "Could we skip to the next item/solving the problem?"

In the happy path your peers (some of them meeks) are glad someone interrupted the monologue. Of course outcomes will be different all the time. Same with tangents. "I think we have drifted a bit from the topic, or is there a point?" It's easy to get carried away. But being polite there should rarely be an issue.

Speaking from my experience:

The problem isn’t interruption, it’s how someone interrupts. I have been in many meetings over my career where the loudest person speaks very authoritatively about something they don’t understand, resulting in the meeting becoming completely derailed: invariants and laws are needlessly questioned, and important design parameters are overlooked.

An example taken from real world experience: loud interrupter asks for input on how we can ensure messages arrive in-order over a TCP connection. I speak up and, after verifying that I interpreted the question correctly, state that we don’t have to worry about that — in-order delivery is guaranteed by TCP itself. Interrupter cuts me off to say “that’s an interesting theory, but it’s really important that we know messages will be delivered in order. Jason, or Susan, what do you know of, oh, what’s that called… Raft? Paxos? I think there things called state machines?” This general pattern continues: I try to assert that we’re getting caught up trying to solve <insert non-issue here>, I get cut off mid sentence, and interrupter spouts off buzzwords that they don’t understand hoping that something will stick.

At some point I then have to raise my voice: “hey, hey, HEY! You’re not hearing me. This is a non-issue. It is simply a fact that TCP guarantees in order delivery. That’s not a theory of mine, it’s not something I’m feeling. It’s fact. Do you understand that, or do you believe that the TCP specification is broken in some way, and that every book on TCP is somehow wrong? Also, please, please stop cutting me off.”

It’s not people speaking up regularly or occasionally interrupting that’s an issue — the issue is when I have to raise my voice and become confrontational to have an interrupter let me speak and raise concerns of my own, when I have to consistently push back against attempts at silencing me. Or when I raise a point, and interrupter (seemingly to keep an air of authority) cuts me off after I raise a concern for which I would like to offer guidance, turns to someone else, and says “so what do you think of that?”

These individuals usually ascend the org chart rapidly, as they seem incredibly engaged, and their domination of meetings is usually conflated with good leadership skills (after all, it looks like everyone is following their lead). If they’re working with junior level developers, their ignorance goes unnoticed, and by the time these interrupters are several tiers up the org chart, their peers are too far removed from the technical side to realize that the interrupter doesn’t know which end is up — but the interrupter has strong opinions, “so surely they know what they are talking about.”

Fortunately, such people are pretty rare (at least in my experience).

Just reading this stressed me out.

> But if it's reasonable for me to change my behavior, why can't we expect the non-interrupters to do their part a bit and... interrupt?

I'm not an interrupter. When I feel the need to interrupt (like when I'm being monologued at and need to bring up a point or ask for clarification), it doesn't work, because interrupters ignore interruptions and don't even listen to what other people say. The other half of the conversation is just their time to think up the next monologue. I'd rather leave than have to scream to get my point heard.

First, not everybody is the same. If you extrapolate behavior like that, you'll incorrectly label some people.

I'm not sure you fully grasped the article. Some people are Barkers like you describe, but others are waiting and wanting to be interrupted. It shows that you are interested and care.

What makes you sure that your reserved counterpart isn’t asked to change their behavior as well?

In a healthy work environment, suggestions made to both types of people are usually done privately.

100% guaranteed that quiet employees will be told to "speak up" at every performance review.

There are easy, non-offensive, non-interrupting methods of communicating while another person is talking. Signal yes/no, dissent, agreement? Thumbs up or down, Nod or shake head. Applause? Deaf people's clap (raise both hands, oscillate quickly around z-axis). Want to say something? Raise one hand. Want the speaker to get on with it? Circular motion with the tip of the index finger around the y-axis. Strongly disagree with speaker and intend to insult? Show middle finger (ok, that one is offensive, intentionally).

There is a rich repertoire of non-verbal communication available to us that most people will understand. And if you use them, the problem instantly vanishes.

That people don't use them is imho not a problem of not knowing or not understanding. It is a problem of lacking civility. Of the desire to assert dominance by interrupting. Of asserting dominance by talking for a long time. And of the myopic concentration on verbal communication.

Now if you are on the phone, there isn't much else you can do, of course...

The problem vanishes—assuming the speaker has plenty of free mental capacity to keep track of the audience (which is also small enough to keep track of, ≤ 15 people or so if meeting in person).

If I am lecturing on a familliar subject with 1:1 or greater preparation time : lecture time ratio, maybe I do.

If, on the other hand, I’m retelling a paper I’ve banged my head against for the last couple of days and probably still don’t get a good part of, then sorry—I’m barely holding on here, I have to sort dependencies and not miss anything and remember to bring attention onto subtle points or the whole thing will apart and I have to backtrack and lose everyone because nobody can apply a verbal diff that goes half an hour back.

Again, I’m so sorry, but I don’t have the brain time to process your visual cues. Wait for the nearest syntactic boundary and shout over me. Please. I can suspend my flow—I can’t work out of it.

(From the other end, the problem vanishes assuming I’m either taking prodigious notes or already know half of what you’re saying, because people only poll for nonverbal interrupt requests once per logical point, so 2—7 minutes, and at best I’ll forget half of what I wanted to ask, at worst you lost me at the very beginning and you’ll have to spend the 5 minutes all over again, in addition to the two or so minutes it’s going to take us to negotiate an understanding of the question. And how do I deal with a presenter who mistook my simple question for a similarly-sounding advanced question? Interrupt their long advanced explanation?.. Right.)

> Want the speaker to get on with it? Circular motion with the tip of the index finger around the y-axis.

If someone did this to me I'd find it pretty offensive, much more so than being interrupted. Unless that person was explicitly asked to help keep time beforehand.

Details aside, all of these examples are basically substitutes for 1-3 words. Hardly anyone is interrupting to say just a word or two, and such interruptions aren't really disruptive anyway.

As usual, different cultures. It's better to not jump to conclusions that somebody is trying to offend you.

In what culture is it acceptable to make a "wrap it up" motion to your peer when they're speaking? I'm genuinely curious because in US culture that would be seen as condescending.