Hacker News Reader

Comment by askafriend | Hacker News Reader

> not to mention it’s ableist

Recognizing the immense value of effective communication is ableist?

Coding is the easy part. Deciding what to code or how to code it with a team is the hard part and that requires effective communication, there's simply no way around it. That's what separates junior engineers from senior engineers who see the bigger picture.

View on HN

Assuming that what's perceived as "communication" is actually "effective" is begging the question.

Yes, sometimes not everyone's communication style works for every culture or group of people.

That's just how it works. Humans are messy like that.

If we just shrug our shoulders about that then that opens the door to all kinds of discrimination. People generally find it easier to commuicate with people from the same culture, for example.

you're right, we should actively work to remove the advantages that those elites that can communicate clearly and effectively have. There should be quotas for positions that are dominated by the best performing communicators, as determined by 360 reviews. Additionally, those identified as such should be forced to work remotely, on a 5 second delay and throttled bandwith connection.

Can't get around those pesky face to face interactions. Better to implant an equality-enforcing device under the skull to zap the brain every few seconds.

At some point being able to convey what is in your brain to another human and use that to influence their actions is a fundamental human skill. If you're bad at it you'll be at a disadvantage, simple as that.

Effective communication is very easy to identify. Either it produces the required results (everyone understanding the problem and cooperating to produce and implement as close to an optimal solution as possible given resource constraints) or it doesn't.

> Either it produces the required results (everyone understanding the problem and cooperating to produce and implement as close to an optimal solution as possible given resource constraints) or it doesn't.

And how can you tell? If a project fails, is that because people didn't have a shared understanding of the problem, or did they understand it fine and just weren't able to find a solution?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com