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Comment by drewbug01 | Hacker News Reader

> Extract the kernel

If you follow the link within the article, he goes on to say:

> The most frequent issue I see is when a literal communicator insists on engaging in the details with a less literal executive. I call the remedy, “extracting the kernel.”

Most engineers I’ve worked with have been “literal communicators.” Of course, both parties can always improve. But part of being a good leader is having excellent communication skills, and that includes anticipating how your audience will receive your message. The bulk of the responsibility is, and should be, on the leader to avoid misunderstandings in the first place.

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> The bulk of the responsibility is, and should be, on the leader to avoid misunderstandings in the first place.

How do you avoid misunderstandings as an executive when you sometimes literally should hide the information?

I heard many many executives (probably, that's why I am not an executive), a lot of them try to hide information for different reasons. Even the technical one's are trying to keep doors open for interpretation, so that anytime they can change their mind and blame team for the failure, then label them for layoffs

Good leaders don't do that? There is a difference between legitimately confidential information, and keeping your cards close to your chest to protect yourself. If you have confidential information, you can explain the reason it's confidential and everyone can move past.

I've worked with two teams where layoffs had to happen. The people weren't happy, but they were at least satisfied that the results were fair and honest. They appreciated my transparency, and worked to train up other members of the group to prepare for their own departure.

If you spend your time building trust and relationships when times are good, and weed out the toxic personalities during those times, then it's better (not easy or good at all) when times are tough. Allowing even the slightest amount of toxicity is completely unacceptable.

If your boss hides information or is intentionally vague to provide an out for themselves, they shouldn't be in a leadership role. They shouldn't be employed at the company.

Being a boss means that 99.999% of your actual job is communicating clearly and openly.

I have yet to see fully transparent leadership who can immediately tell us that this information is confidential and unfortunately they can't share it.

In my humble experience ranging from startups to Big Tech, they are vague with words they use, inspirational in nature, but tries to hide the systematic issues.

For example: I believe our team is now stronger than ever before. How should I interpret it? You were B-player, and hired bunch of C-players, you have just laid off them or did you get rid of bunch of corporate empire builders and now we are indeed in a better position with less bureaucracy?

It's about telling the truth while being an actual human.

When I had to lay people off the first time, we had very clear criteria for the layoffs and published them. Anyone who was obviously trying to game the system was immediately dismissed.

Afterwards, I had an all hands meeting to let people know that what we were going through sucks, but that we're in a safer position financially because of it. I then explained all of the financials to keep people from panicking that we were actually broke when we weren't; we had just lost a huge contract to a company that went out of business.

Bad leaders use vapid feel good phrases from Maxwell and Sinek and others like them. Bad leaders use leadership books as a guide to interacting with their employees instead of using the concepts to modify their existing, real personalities. They think those things are a script instead of a series of metaphor.

I agree with everything that you say here, but I think it is important to differentiate "good leaders" (which you have described) with "successful leaders" whose motives are often far more self-serving.

There are "good, successful leaders" but in my experience they are few and far between, and often the "successful" aspect is forced to plateau by the "good" part.

> The bulk of the responsibility is, and should be, on the leader to avoid misunderstandings in the first place.

This can be both true and unhelpful at the same time. “Extracting the kernel” is about putting agency back into your own hands when someone else is less-than-perfect. How do you read beyond the utterance to understand the intent? Will that lead to better outcomes?

Since you sadly cannot force leaders to improve, and sadly cannot usually also pick for yourself perfect leadership, what power do you have to make things better?

So I think you are scratching at something interesting here - as a (senior) engineer who values communication intensely, I also try to “read between the lines” and extract what someone meant and not just what they said.

And so in that sense, I agree with you - from the perspective of the engineer in this example, yes: try to figure out what they meant and don’t get lost in the details. It’s a good example of not trying to control things that are fundamentally out of your hands.

But the other side is: this blog post (and the linked one explaining the “kernel” idea more deeply) is written from the perspective of the CTO! And it’s framed as a strategy - “encourage your engineers to learn how to intuit what you mean, and not what you say” (paraphrasing, of course).

I think that’s where it rubs me the wrong way. It subtly puts the responsibility for effective communication the receiving end. If we are considering it from a pragmatic standpoint, it’s just far more efficient for the CTO to say what he means from the get-go.

I mean, honestly even with the example: how much harder would it have been for the CTO to say “is it possible to go faster with something off-the-shelf rather than build our own?”

Communication doesn't scale and there are many examples of that. It's not possible to convey complex topics to a large audience, well, at all times. The audience has to do some work too.

I don’t disagree with you, but I don’t really think I implied that all the effort should be entirely on one party or the other.

In any case though, you’ve managed to nicely illustrate both of our points, so kudos on that.

> The bulk of the responsibility is, and should be, on the leader to avoid misunderstandings in the first place.

That's just laziness on the part of the engineer who says that - it's not only unrealistic, it's intellectually lazy not to understand communication better, and it's going to apply to everyone they talk to, not just executives. It's highly unproductive. It's not serious to say 'I'll communicate how I want, and it's up to other people to understand me'.

> It's not serious to say 'I'll communicate how I want, and it's up to other people to understand me'.

And yet, this is fundamentally the position the CTO took.

> That's just laziness on the part of the engineer who says that - it's not only unrealistic, it's intellectually lazy not to understand communication better, and it's going to apply to everyone they talk to, not just executives.

Of course all sides should try to understand better. But one side has a much bigger impact by putting in a little more effort.

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