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> For example, if someone asked: "can you unbatch those 1k RPCs?"

"Can we do _________?" is the worst question to ask me as an engineer. Like, yes, we probably _can_ do literally almost anything, with enough hours and money. But what's the budget? What really is _______?

Eg: If it's "analytics to a page", what do we want to track? Where does the data go? How do people view the data? I need to know the answer to those questions, plus the "budget", before even entertaining a yes or no answer. Which I think sounds like I'm beating around the bush by asking, but I'm not! :)

One thing I love at my current job is people embracing the X/Y question terms. People will frequently ask on Slack, "How do I do X?" and immediately follow up with "I'm asking because in implementing process Y, it seems like I need an X."

Helps so much getting to the root of the issue.

omg yes. state the underlying goal to achieve and detail how you intend to go about it and seek help. i dont know how many problems i helped solve only to find out the underlying problem was already solved in another way.

ive learned to ask that as my first follow up question for random requests for help: is this the real problem or are you trying to solve a different higher level problem

This problem is as old as time and was really prevalent in IRC channels relating to software a few decades ago.

Some friendly individual put up a site to explain the issue to newbies: https://xyproblem.info

Yup, questions like those are a trap. A direct answer is going to lead to being asked to build some backwards solution to a problem.

My response to that type of question tends to be along the lines of "what are you hoping to achieve?"

On top of that, sometimes the question cannot be answered as asked. If the question contradicts itself, even if only slightly, no direct answer would be correct.

Verbal communication is a different skill apart from engineering and written communication.

People have to plan how to break subjects down before and during speaking. Not everyone has adequate practice.

Some people have trouble with eye contact and might be fighting subconscious social anxiety while simultaneously scrambling to put their thoughts into words. If an audience wasn't present, it would be easier for them.

Some truly brilliant engineers struggle with this.

Edit: If you don't intuit this or perhaps struggle, I strongly recommend taking an improv class. It should be a fun and safe environment where you'll experience your brain lighting up all the communication pathways at once. If you want to go more subtle and read people's body language and tone, take a Meisner class. These both help tremendously for people that don't get in the daily "exercise" as a part of their normal day to day. I've also heard good things about Toastmasters.

> - don't directly address the point of your question / provide a much complex answer (or even worse, a non-answer) to a simple question

If you ask me "how do I foo the bars?" 2 days ago, "how do I foo the bazs?" yesterday and now are asking "How do I foo the foobars?", it is easier for me to explain the information you need to handle that question rather than handle each time you need it incidentally.

> You yourself are missing words in your communication like the word "have" in the quote above. Also, I don't know enough linguistic rules to correct you, but colloquially at least your title is better understood if you write it as "Why do some people not communicate clearly?"

Thanks, corrected the mistakes.

However, I wasn't referring to missing words (which can be inferred) or bad grammar. Actually I wasn't referring to written speech in particular. I was referring mostly to the way one structures their thought and expresses it to someone else.

Also, the question was referring to native speakers (I'm not an English native speaker myself).

> I was referring mostly to the way one structures their thought and expresses it to someone else.

1. it's still relevant in spoken language. Perhaps more so -- inflection, intonation, volume, and speed add a lot of subtlety to vocal communication that is even more difficult to pick up on than written communication. Pauses indicate punctuation. Tone can indicate something is less important. Volume and speed can be used in place of parentheses or even footnotes. Those are just the obvious things. There is so much information that is very difficult for non-native speakers to pick up on. Or at least is very difficult for me to pick up on.

2. They might be speaking in a way that parses well to a native ear but is deeply confusing to a non-native speaker.

> Also, the question was referring to native speakers (I'm not an English native speaker myself).

Here's a really important question: do other native speakers in your group express the same frustration about these SWEs?

Communication is a two-way street.

If they are 3/5 on communicating ideas and you are 3/5 on understanding ideas, then you may have issues that a person who is 5/5 on understanding ideas does not have.

I want to stress that even if you were a 1/5 (you're not!!!), the onus would still on BOTH you and your team mates to communicate well. It's not just your job to get better at understanding their mediocre communication; it's also their job to be empathetic and learn how to communicate better with you.

Example: I communicate a bit differently with non-native speakers in spoken communication. I slow my speech just a bit (not excessively -- I talk very fast naturally, so my slow is others' normal). I avoid complex wandering sentences with clauses that resolve on different sides of the sentence. I try to add more roadmaps and use more explicit communication. I rely less on intonation, inflection, and pauses to convey meaning when speaking. I made these changes after I worked in a country with a different language and realized how damn hard it was to understand that last 20% of information that everyone else seemed to be catching.

People who can introspect as you are doing here are rarely the problem.

It's the people who never think about other people's mental models (or even their own!) that are frequently hard to communicate with.

> However, I wasn't referring to missing words (which can be inferred) or bad grammar. Actually I wasn't referring to written speech in particular. I was referring mostly to the way one structures their thought and expresses it to someone else.

It would appear that your initial post failed to communicate that clearly to awb.

It's also possible for a person to poorly apply their reading comprehension skills. FWIW, I did get the intended meaning from OP's post.

As did everyone else, this thread is more about a couple of contrarians acting smart.

OP never claimed perfection, nor was it ever implied.

Sure, my point was that communication is hard. I'm not saying it's necessarily OP's mistake.

The way people communicate verbally often reflects the way they think, which differs between people. Writing forces people to structure their thoughts more.

Also, efficient communication requires knowing what your audience already knows.

The best way I have to describe the way I think is “spatially”, I can’t really say more than that except to say it’s different to “visually”. The problem is that the best way to explain something is basically do a topological sort of the DAG representing what needs to be explained, some people are uncannily good at this and appear able to do it in real-time. I… cannot.

My own way of thinking is both spatially and visually. I encode all my understanding into visual concepts (which may be very abstract), and link them to each other. That makes it difficult for me to do direct recall if I'm not given sufficient context. But makes it easy to connect things and do pattern matching. When I'm explaining, I found myself wandering down a particular path that I think the other person may not understand well, but can backtrack to the main conversation.

Everyone is running a complex neural network, that was formed by trial and error, to express complex and often abstract notions for which we may not even share a common context or concept. People think differently, and someone trying to express a concept is essentially walking through the mental model that they made for themselves. It may not work for you for a variety of reasons. Having acquired language via another culture might be enough to make it more difficult or frustrating to understand someone from a different background, even if you both now share the same language.

> I'm not an English native speaker myself

So your posts don't really give this away to me, except for the dropped "have"/"has" that GP pointed out (I've seen this a lot from people who learned English as a second language, though I'm not confident enough to guess what your first language is). But it does give me two additional ideas that from a quick scroll downwards I don't think others have suggested: Language or culture.

Language is unlikely but I do want to mention it as a possibility because I have a concrete example in English speakers learning Japanese: Implied subject. It's a common point of confusion with beginners that usually doesn't get a whole lot of explanation, other than "you have to infer it from the context" [0]. Maybe something similar is going on here, a piece of context that would be made more explicit in your first language that we usually skip or just imply in English?

Culture is a possibility because I've seen it mentioned on here many times in the past, and I'm guessing if English isn't your first language and English speakers are confusing, you probably grew up in a (slightly?) different culture than you work in now, in addition to the language difference. I don't have good examples here, but what I remember is people talking about how people from some countries are very direct and in other countries that comes off as rude, and in the opposite direction the people trying to be polite sound like they're trying to avoid direct answers and it's hard to get them to say what they mean. That second one kind-of sounds like what you're describing here.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/japanese/comments/b8bae7/questions_...

Edit: Some people are posting links to culture-style differences further down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33657314

Early in my career I had an issue with some Indian colleagues who were using a little head wiggle that means "yes" or "go on" in that context, but to me at the time seemed more like a shrug or a "maybe". An observing colleague later explained to me - he said he enjoyed seeing me nod more and more vigorously and explaining my point in more and more detail as I unconsciously tried to elicit the expected "missing" nod of agreement/understanding from them...

We live and learn.

I have had to make a conscious effort to remember this with Indian colleagues.

I observed the same thing. I wonder however, who should adapt? Because now we are referring to Indian colleagues. In todays work environments, it’s multi cultural. So we cant expect everyone to know the quirks of everybody else’s cultural edge cases.

I recommend trying to be the one who adapts. Because you can easily make the decision to change yourself, but you're outnumbered if you want to change everyone else.

I think you are reading this from the perspective of somebody who does communicate clearly who occasionally gets misunderstood.

While it's possible the fault is with the OP, I think what the OP is complaining about is probably not that.

Sure, some people are not native English speakers, but in OP's case that didn't affect the clarity of their question, even with a couple inferred missing words.

Even grammatically correct text leaves tons and tons of room for misunderstanding. English is not my first language either, and I make tons of mistakes... but because of my experience with more than one language I really do see the importance of grammar.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that the way we interface with each other (the API of language) is purely stylistic and of little consequence. Every little aspect of language shapes our thoughts and impacts our ability to think clearly... Let alone our ability to transmit thoughts to each other through speech or text (conversion to and from which is very lossy).