Seven Conversation Hacks | Hacker News Reader

Seven Conversation Hacks

randsinrepose.com

56 pointsmooreds19 comments

8. Don't interrupt someone in the middle of their sentence just because you think your idea is more important than theirs. About 1/4 the engineers I've worked with have this problem.

The last manager I quit had this problem. I kept telling him I didn't like it when he interrupted me while I was speaking, and he continued to do it.

Thankfully I never had any managers who were habitual interrupters. Oh, I've been interrupted before, but only when I start going down an irrelevant train of thought. Which I completely understand and appreciate.

Being interrupted is a pain because it can derail your train of thought. But I think many people interrupt in order to avoid derailing their own train of thought by waiting and/or writing something down, or simply because nobody else will stop talking or pay attention to them.

I've also observed "full duplex" conversations where people overlap periodically but don't seem to have any trouble continuing. And I've been in meetings and zoom calls where you can't get a word in edgewise until the meeting is over.

I've tried to become more tolerant of people who seem to be interrupting to express something important in context.

There's also the full-duplex mode where 2 people are talking, but both seem to be engaged in a different conversation.

Communication is hard, tolerance is important.

I call this bidirectional monologue

While I understand that there are many people whose idea of a conversation seems to be: "I say mine, you say yours". With that idea every interruption is a problem. However conversations are more than that and in my experience there are multiple legitimate reasons for interruptions.

E.g. if I am explaining a point that the other side already knows, it would be good that I read their nonverbal hints and realize they already know before insisting on rambling on for 15 minutes of monologue about a thing they already know. Heck, in that case it would be in my interest for them to interrupt me. And even if they don't know, they might like to say a thing as well, which is kinda a thing in conversions.

Or I am missing a foundational idea or a context clue that helps the other person follow, and you find out after you went into the explaination way to deep. In that case the interruption would help me catch that early on and I could adjust accordingly.

Now I am good at reading cues and knowing when it is time to give other people room to chime in. But I know many people who in a 20 minute conversation will have talked 95% of the duration and insist you keep interrupting, despite you having said 4 full sentences at max.

The point I wanted to make is that with such people, the only way not to interrupt them is by accepting they are holding a monologue and you are meant to be the audience, even if you already know the thing they are telling you. In some situations this can be okay, e.g. a friend who is pouring their heart out — they might need someone to listen. But in many situations this is just aomeone talking to bolster their own ego and convincing themselves of their own importance.

This borders on abusive behavior. If someone insists that in a conversation between equals their ideas are so important that the reaction of the other side doesn't matter and only one side is allowed to steer the conversation, they are forcing that on you.

Not to say there aren't negative interruptions as well. E.g. someone who rarely speaks outlines their perspective and the guy who has to monologue all the time keeps interrupting, because he can't stand to listen etc. Totally hate that.

But in my experience most people who complain about interruption are people who dominate conversations in terms of talking time. Our goal should be to defend those who don't complain and see the nuances of the whole thing.

Couldn't have said it better.

> And I've been in meetings and zoom calls where you can't get a word in edgewise until the meeting is over.

This often triggers the same reaction in me as when I start to write a reply here on HN, only to delete it without posting. "Why bother? No one will care what I say." Meetings where there are no opportunities for me to contribute send the message that my contributions are not wanted. That may not be true, of course, but that is the message I receive.

A habit I picked up from the format of one person preaching to a meeting room.

Take notes, or barring that use fingers or verbal cues (or other memory palace tricks) to keyword myself to remember the multitude of things I want to bringup or am monitoring to see if they're addressed.

I ended up getting a Remarkable for exactly this reason, and all my poorly scrawled notes ended up being very useful to make sure key thoughts and responses were raised at relevant times.

> I've also observed "full duplex" conversations where people overlap periodically but don't seem to have any trouble continuing. And I've been in meetings and zoom calls where you can't get a word in edgewise until the meeting is over.

I call these people "The Uninterruptibles".

Typically they can talk for hours, while still technically on their first sentence (grammatically speaking).

Eventually you have no choice but to interrupt; an opportunity they relish immensely!

Also, I would argue that, if your own train of thought is at risk of being derailed by a person interrupting in order to protect their own train of thought from derailing ... then (assuming you're not aware of it and doing it intentionally) perhaps it may be worth considering if you're being partially "uninterruptible".

A good communicator should communicate no more than 2-3 ideas max, before allowing a gap for counterpoints (i.e. inviting constructive "interruptions") to occur.

If you've branched n times from the original argument and people are still trying to debate the root of the tree, of course they need to interrupt; otherwise they'll be stuck debating the leaf nodes, or worse, appear to be rudely ignoring all n-1 arguments in order to return to the (presumably now largely irrelevant) root node of the conversation.

Meanwhile, you've managed to get n arguments in and managed to get offended at the interruption. win-win /s

- sorry, not a personal attack; just a point I see often, which your comment reminded me of :)

Good point, which really ties back to 6 though. A lot of the people that complain about constantly being interrupted seem to ramble on incessantly and never allow anybody else to speak.

For a good conversation there needs to be a balance here.

Agreed. I have found that people who talk too much are afraid of what others have to say and don’t want to hear it. Also, many of them are control freaks.

You may be right. But in my case, I can tell you for certain that I do not ramble. Not at work, anyway. (Unless you ask me about my hobbies.) I actually tend not to talk much at all because I'm not one of those people who talks just to "be social," or to fill in silence, or to give the appearance of being involved in the conversation. As a rule, I only speak up in meetings when I have something that's actually worth the effort of bringing up.

What I do, however, is talk a bit slower than my peers because my brain seems to process my speech differently from how everyone else seems to process theirs. Most people can just say whatever is on their mind with no delay or hesitation, with perfect grammar and factual accuracy.

I am not like that. I have to write (and edit!) the full sentences out in my head ahead of time and then recite them--as if reading off note cards--instead of letting my brain go on autopilot and say whatever it wants. Otherwise the things I say will turn out to be... let's just say, less than coherent. And it gets far, FAR worse when I'm struggling with insomnia, which is often.

So when someone interrupts me in a meeting, after I recover from the rudeness I have to either stop and re-work everything I was going to say to address what they just said (which was very possibly going to be answered in the second part of the sentence they interrupted), or I just shut up altogether under the assumption that the group doesn't actually care enough about my thoughts on the matter to actually listen to them.

I'm sorry if I came across implying this is the case for you. It was more of an observation that the reverse may happen. If you're rather reserved it might be that people are trying to fill in the pause, because it makes them uncomfortable, but actually interrupting you. I'm not sure what to do about that. Maybe some non-verbal cues that you're not done might help, like using your hands to illustrate your point, and not lowering them during the pause.

A form of communication I encountered a while back, called 3-way communication, helps with this.

Essentially saying back to the person what they tried to communicate with you. You can leverage that to lead in with your own comments, as they're primed to listen by listening to their own words given back.

That would be fine if there was a time limit for monologues, but some people can only be cut off abruptly to avoid them dominating conversations.

Mentioning the other person's name is a personal pet peeve of mine, after having met too many people who seem to think that doing so repeatedly somehow gives them a powerhandle over the conversation.

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