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Comment by bsenftner | Hacker News Reader

I don't work with John Carmack, but I had a meeting with him once. He is brilliant, no doubt, but he is exactly like every single engineer with no professional communications training. He struggles to make his points in everyday developer language, when he needs to speak more calculated, more measured, and with significantly more audience empathy. Just like 99% of us technologists. We're an industry of weak communicators, and it is hurting all of our careers.

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I think the notion of developers being 'weak communicators' is a bit too simplified. It suggests that if developers were better communicators, then things would move faster & better forward. But the fact is that the audience of non-developers tends to have a completely different mode of thinking, and indeed a different set of targets. Developers would like to see organizations as machines to give instructions to. Non-developers more often see organizations as ladders to climb. It would indeed be a miracle to persuade the latter people into machine-like thinking without a total cultural shift.

I think it's weird that people don't talk about non-developers being weak communicators because they often are as well. I guess it's because if a product manager is a bad communicator then they're just a bad product manager. While a developer can be a bad communicator but still a good developer.

> It suggests that if developers were better communicators, then things would move faster & better forward.

That is exactly what would happen, within developer circles themselves at least. A huge amount of miscommunication and lack of communication routinely takes place within dev teams, and that process knot forming behavior would be eliminated by better communications.

Good analogy. Ideally ladders are designed based on problem type - simple to complex. But in corporate wonderland, the ladder climbers regularly change that ideal to stay on the ladder.

You dont need a miracle. You just need to recognize early, who the most mindlessly ambitious over energetic unimaginative people, in the room are and keep them on leash/direct the energies away from ladder reconfig.

I think developers in my experience are very clear communicators, and PMs & managers tend to be poor communicators or at least communicators who have goals very disaligned from that of the company.

I don't doubt he speaks like an engineer because is basically is THE uber-engineer. He should be treated more as an oracle than an engineer. There aren't many people I would say that about in the world of computing, but Carmack definitely is that.

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