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Cultures vary and only words can bridge the gap.

It took me years to figure out that “It’s not my favorite” is Californian for “I hate this”. At least months to realize that “We should do X” means “You should do X” and that “Would you mind checking Y” is a direct request with expectations attached.

And yet, your examples are when words did not bridge the gap. You think "You should do X" is more clear, but to the Californian in question, that framing would sound very harsh. If they gave you "feedback", the manager would think they expressed dissatisfaction, while you'd come out of the same meeting thinking things are great. Human language is not computer code and an employee that takes years to understand that while they are not meeting expectations is not worth it.

Also, your examples are still fairly isolated - ultimately it was almost like using an outdated dictionary where words map to different things. Once you had the right "translation", the issue was fixed. That's not typical for employer feedback scenarios. Often the manager just wants the employee to be more diligent, attentive, have better Pareto 80/20 judgment, etc. You can't teach that to someone who doesn't get it.

Yes and the quickest way to solve that problem was to have a conversation about it. Not by ignoring the issue and hoping things magically work out.

“Hey it looks like we’re miscommunicating, what do you hear when I say X?” is a great way to start. Much much better than thinking quietly to yourself something like “Gosh that engineer is so dumb why don’t they ever do what I ask???” and never telling the employee that there’s a problem.

Ultimately people can’t fix a problem they don’t know exists. And despite their best efforts, they can’t read your mind.

"never telling the employee that there’s a problem" is almost never the case. Your comment mentioned years of miscommunication. If they never expect an update or ever ask you about that thing you were supposed to do, I guess that's one thing, but it's highly unusual. Usually the manager will check in several times "so where's project X at?" and your response would easily clear up the confusion. 'I don't think that's on my plate, I thought you said X' would lead to a quick conversation where the problem is solved, and mappings are updated. This doesn't take more than 2-3 weeks of coworking to figure out, not years.

If the manager asks you repeatedly about project X, and you repeatedly say "I haven't looked at that yet" or some other thing that accepts responsibility but clings to the original phrasing as an excuse to get yourself off the hook, the manager is correct about thinking "why don't they do what I ask". This indicates a judgment problem.

> would lead to a quick conversation where the problem is solved, and mappings are updated

That sounds a lot like feedback to me. Your earlier comment said you don’t believe in that

Perhaps we have different definitions of “feedback”

I cannot see how, if the issue was a simple mapping update like this, it would have taken years to come up.

No this isn't right. "You should do X" is clear to everyone. You're right that it will sound more or less harsh to different people, but the meaning is not unclear as it is when using obtuse language.

Harshness is absolutely a metadata of language, at least as important as the dry content. If I say "pass me the salt", but do so with a loud and angry voice, far more is being communicated than the simple request to pass a salt. Phrasiology is part of communicating harshness. Failure to read language metadata is a judgment problem. With good employees, no matter the background, it almost never takes more than a few weeks to accurately interpret metadata. If they don't and they constantly fall back to "well, actually, a robot might not have understood it" and constantly expect disambiguation, this is an insurmountable issue.

You're overthinking it. You're being too clever by half, or maybe too clever by more like 9/10. A good manager really does just give clear feedback, and it's helpful. It doesn't solve all problems for all people, but it's the place to start, not all this mumbo jumbo about metadata or whatever.

Depends on the culture, cf. The Culture Map from Erin Meyer

One of the worst books I have ever had the "pleasure" to read.

What if your colleague is autistic and struggles to understand indirect and nonverbal communication?

It it’s a colleague, I’d limit my exposure. If I am manager, I wouldn’t hire such a person or fire asap. Inability to process indirect and nonverbal communication - aka 90% of human communication - is a major energy sap and drag to anyone interacting with this person. The thing that only responds to explicit verbal instruction is called a robot. When hiring, people expect to be hiring a human with good (albeit ineffable) judgment, not a robot with blank slate.

Sometimes people don't understand there is a problem unless is very clear. Culture also plays into the issue, I work with international teams, and the English needs to be very direct.

Like another comment says people from California are more subtle. OTOH my experience working with people from Eastern Europe is that in their culture there are not many nuances in conversation, they don't give it, so they don't expect it as well.

When an employee doesn't work out, it is virtually never because, had you used different words, the issue would have been fixed.

I get it, there are other cultures, some say "why don't you look into X" while others say "do X" - but if it takes years to calibrate while projects are not done and deadlines get missed, there is a much bigger problem.

> When an employee doesn't work out, it is virtually never because, had you used different words, the issue would have been fixed.

[citation needed]

I'm very curious what your experiences are that lead you to this conclusion. It just seems wrong to me. If someone is spending too much time coordinating and not enough time coding or vice versa, you should tell them that explicitly so that they can switch their priorities. If someone is spending too much time writing well factored code and not enough time shipping or vice versa, you should tell them that so that they can change their approach. If someone needs to up their level expertise on your toolset in order to be productive, you should tell them that and point them to the right literature so that they can learn.

In none of these situations is it better to ... what are you even suggesting doing? like winking at them or something? awkward shifting in your seat? the silent treatment? using obtuse jargon?

Just tell people how you think they're doing and how you think they could improve! It may be awkward but you'll get over it...

You can take things on/off someone's plate, but you cannot improve them into good judgment. If you are letting someone go, it is almost never the case that, had you given a different set of tasks, they would have been a good employee.

Again, I think this just isn't accurate. Many issues really are due to unclear expectations. Maybe because a lot of people have bad managers who are scared to just give clear feedback...

You expect something from me, tell me. I don't like to guess and I am no telepath, so withou you telling me there is no way for me to know. Left to my own devices, I do what I consider the "right" thing. And without contrary feedback, I will continue to consider this to be right thing. People usually do not do wrong things, or behave like a*holes, intentionally.

Not giving feedback is just lazy, and borderline cowardize because it is an easy way to avoid conflicts.

Not getting into pointless conflicts is not cowardice; it is prudence. I am not conflict avoidant, but I’m not going to hand hold someone - double checking their work and giving feedback takes a huge amount of effort. It can only really be done a few times, at the beginning of a person’s employment.

Ideally, the employee’s “right thing” and the manager’s “right thing” are already well-aligned and “feedback” is more like “finetuning”.

If there is a large gap between the “right thing”s - aka what is considered good judgment, this situation is incorrigible with verbal feedback.

None of this is to imply malice (behave like a-holes), just that there are so few hours in a day, and trying to get an employee to pick up on everything through individualized verbal feedback is very taxing.

You seem to be ignoring the importance of centuries of concern and acquired wisdom on how important good communication is, by emperors, CEOs, managers, ... etc., for maximizing the value of any relationship.

People are not interchangeable, with regard to any skill. This is even more so for communication which is a meta-skill over many skills.

The upside to greater communication effectiveness is higher performance with regard to skills downstream from communication (almost all of them, almost all the time).

Dismissing the job of adapting communication styles or substance to one side of any relationship just leaves upside potential on the table, or locks in unnecessary downside. This seems antithetical to what management is about - maximizing the value returned by those being managed.

This honestly sounds like cowardice to me. Maybe you're right that explicit feedback is overrated; I don't know. But what is the drawback to providing it? Is there one, besides a fear of awkwardness? Even if the upside isn't strong, there is no real downside, so it's worth doing.

The drawback is that most of the time, words are highly reductive and inferior to indirect and nonverbal communication. They are only useful if the issue is extremely isolated or about adding/removing things off someone's plate.

Virtually every time when an employee doesn't work out, it's because they used bad judgment. Feedback is useless for that.

So for example, you will ask them to write documentation and they might technically write documentation, but maybe they write it unclear and don't even recognize it as such. Now, do you want to teach someone the concept of "clarity" like an English teacher? No! If they can't understand what level of clarity is needed based on other code in the company or other cues, it is a manifestation of a judgment problem.

Of course working together won't be instantly smooth like a Swiss watch movement, and you can make adjustments, but there cannot be a big judgement gap. The employee has to be able to recognize what you mean by "clear" without a full blown multi-year English lesson. If they consistently think their work as a "first draft", to be double-checked always by you and given specific feedback over, that is a judgment problem. Massive time-waste.

> So for example, you will ask them to write documentation and they might technically write documentation, but maybe they write it unclear and don't even recognize it as such. Now, do you want to teach someone the concept of "clarity" like an English teacher?

Yep, if you're that person's manager, what you do is you tell them, unambiguously, that the documentation they wrote was not clear, and you tell them why, and you direct them to examples of clear documentation and other resources that can help improve their ability to write documentation. That's the job! If you don't want to do the job of a good manager, that's fine, but you're doing a disservice to the people who work for you. And, weirdly, you seem to be patting yourself on the back for it. But make no mistake: being unwilling to mentor and teach is actually just bad management.

There are lots of books you can read to improve your management skills!

1) You cannot mentor and teach good judgment. 2) Management has virtually nothing to do with mentorship and teaching. It is more akin to having a garden. You have a particular type of soil and sunshine and rainfall (tasks, company culture, pre-existing teammates, etc) and you pick the right seeds that will flourish in this environment. 3) Books will teach you nothing useful, because they are almost always a) written by psychologists who couldn't manage a group of chickens let alone humans b) written by competent managers for the purpose of having a feel-good career capstone, not transmit actual advice. What they would tell you behind closed doors is virtually diametrically opposed to the platitudes in management books.

You and the other poster are discussing different things.

OP said that subtle clues are inferior, and even useless, compare to direct communication.

In your response, you said indirect, subtle communication is better, but your reason is that it is pointless.

You claim people can never improve, or, that helping them is pointless.

In this scenario, you are not arguing that subtly is better, you are arguing that nothing is better.

Yet by your metric, there is no logic in pointing this out...

Do you have children?

You don't need to answer that. It is a rhetorical question. But consider what you wrote relative to good parenting, regardless of ages.

Nobody stops learning. On any measure, hopefully as long as we live, we are all still children relative to where we will be in a decade or two.

Mentoring, books, feedback, encouragement are valuable to give and receive throughout our lives because there is always another level of skill and wisdom to be achieved.

> You cannot mentor and teach good judgment.

Obviously you can. People are not born with good judgment. Every single person with good judgment was mentored and taught it by different people throughout their lives.

Perhaps you mean that you can't mentor or teach adults good judgment? This is slightly more plausible but also wrong. People are capable of learning new tricks their entire life.

But especially if we're talking about the people I think we're talking about - entry level ish employees, probably in their 20s - no, this is silly, these are exactly the people you can mentor and teach good judgement. They are hungry for someone capable of doing so!

> Management has virtually nothing to do with mentorship and teaching.

I'm telling you, you need to read a book on management. You don't seem to know anything about it, but are nonetheless opining on it very confidently.

> Books will teach you nothing useful

Hahahaha no wonder you're so ill informed. You're wrong, books are great. If you go through life trying to reinvent the world from within the bubble of your own mind alone, you are doomed to fail.

I guess this gives me some insight that some people over the course of my life will want me to read non-verbal cues instead of using words to communicate.

*most people

So you suggest great devs not only do great coding but are also mind readers?

No. “Mind reader” implies someone is reaching into deep dark corners of your mind and figuring out things that are never externalized. There is enormous communication that is completely clear and unambiguous, but not verbal in the incredibly direct and explicit, almost like a legal contract-y way people pushing back seem to want. You are expected to pick up on those. An employee who constantly needs you collapse all these dimensions into the verbal sphere is almost never worth it.

Could you give an example maybe? I really struggle to understand what you mean