This so obvious I'm amazed that it isn't discussed every time this topic comes up. Programmers seem to think that there is something "dirty" about adjusting your language according to audience.
Yes. I am struggling with this right now, myself. I mean, not specifically that, but this general idea that putting effort into social bullshit that has little to do with my actual competence is dirty. It really /does/ feel dirty, and I have a difficult time articulating why.
The problem is that I have moved myself more towards management, and so getting people to do what I want really is part of 'competence' now.
A big part of this is that humility (false or not) is so absolutely core to getting along with other engineers, and so absolutely terrible when dealing with business types; behavior I have put a lot of effort into training out of myself now needs to come to the fore.
I don't know. One track is to view social nonverbal communication as ethically neutral, but eh, that... might have other problems, too. As this is an active problem for me, I clearly don't have the correct solution.
A piece of advice I've seen in a couple places is to focus on service, whether that's service to your organization or to the team you manage, or the customer. The idea is that it takes your focus off you and your communication skills, and lets you argue from what the company or team needs.
a big part of the problem is that I don't even know what most of these words I'm using mean - And honestly? I think it's "confidence[1]" that other people say they do. Of course, I know I'm not competent enough in that area to know that for sure.
>I've recently found myself in a leadership role as well, and I don't think it has to do with whether people are business types or not. Humility is necessary to fit in with peers and to get along with superiors. Confidence is necessary to influence people (be they peers, superiors, or subordinates), and you can't manage without influence.
But when you are dealing with less-experienced Engineers, your accomplishments are that influence. And when you are dealing with more-experienced Engineers, well, you should be giving them requirements, and listening to them tell you what should be done. I mean, yeah, sometimes emotional bullshit intervenes, but it's bullshit I can mostly deal with.
As an example, I came in conflict with my apprentice a while back... I am fairly certain the conflict was caused by the fact that he had learned enough that he was, well, better than me for some of the parts of his job, and that wasn't the deal when he hired on. (I mean, it also wasn't true when he hired on; he worked here for a while, and he learned a lot.) I don't know how much of it was him not adjusting to our new roles and how much of it was me not adjusting to our new roles (and how much of it was me just not being able to pay him what he was worth; he ended up getting a much better job elsewhere.)
I mean, I didn't understand how to /fix/ the emotional bullshit, but I had a pretty good idea of what it was about. that's the thing about dealing with people who are primarily engineers; I'm not saying that I am good at managing Engineers? but when I screw it up, I usually have a pretty good idea of how or why I did so.
The problem is that when you deal with normal folks, they are influenced by what looks to me like empty arrogance. It's like they have no way of judging actual skill, so they say "Why don't we do what the tall guy says?" you know, they focus on things like posture and voice and how you dress... which really have nothing to do with anything that matters.
My other problem is that I've always been way better at managing down than managing /up/ - that's the primary reason I started my own company. If you always focus on what you think is best for the company and/or the customer? you are going to come into serious conflict with the management above you. [2]
>A piece of advice I've seen in a couple places is to focus on service, whether that's service to your organization or to the team you manage, or the customer. The idea is that it takes your focus off you and your communication skills, and lets you argue from what the company or team needs.
Yeah, well, it's my company, so I think I do keep my 'eyes on the prize' as it were. But that doesn't really help when it comes time to negotiate that big new bandwidth contract (or get them to interpret that contract in my favor, after it's signed.)
I mean, that's the thing. when you are negotiating with professionals, it's their job to take as much of the surplus value out of a deal as possible. It is, by definition, 'surplus value' - the difference between the highest price I'm willing to pay and the lowest price they are willing to give me.
(the other thing about negotiating with professionals that is not fun is that they usually don't have the attention span or the knowledge of their product offerings to negotiate other than in the emotional manipulation way. I'm very flexible, and very willing to line up what I buy to what they have surplus. I'm also very willing to share what I would like, and what I can be flexible on. A professional? generally speaking, wants to collapse that down to a linear type deal, where we pick a product and hammer eachother on price until someone is exhausted. Their secrecy destroys any possible gain in value from negotiation.)
Of course, now I'm conflating negotiation with influence in general, while I probably ought to think of those things separately.
[1]Confidence as in "a confidence game" - I don't think anyone understands human interaction the way you can understand, say, how a program works. The meaning of a word someone used early in a conversation changes towards the end of that conversation. This is where I'm lost with verbal communication. The line between "saying nice things to give someone a good feeling" and "outright lying" is... I don't even see it. I have no idea where that line is or if it even exists. Does a professional think it's even possible to lie in a medium that isn't recorded?
[2]some of the things my apprentice and I disagreed about would have fallen under this. The really funny thing, for me? was that I remember having nearly exactly the same fight with my boss when I was his age, and was working in a similar role. Things... look different when you have to balance the business end. But, fundamentally, I think I can learn to deal with those conflicts, because I understood where the guy was coming from.
With negotiation, my understanding is that the real negotiation starts weeks beforehand, because the game is about getting an information advantage, enough to make the other side's shady tactics irrelevant. All the nonverbal skills are just used to hide the math layer of the exchange. Assuming you can't dump the shady opponent for one who thinks win-win, but even then having more information can't hurt.
You say 'shady' - I say 'professional' because this is what the big guys do. the bullshit isn't nearly as thick when you are dealing with a smaller company, generally speaking. They are less interested in wasting time.
Even when dealing with professionals, information is essential, but it doesn't make the emotional bullshit irrelevant. It's irritating, as first? I don't know if I want to do something unless I know what it costs. The negotiated price is generally 30% to 50% of the list price (but that varies a /lot/ both by vendor and by industry.) And the only real way to get prices is to negotiate with a vendor. So, yeah, I'm looking at a /lot/ of work to just find out if a business that, say, requires more bandwidth makes any sense at all.
So yeah, for co-lo? it makes all the difference in the world.
Other things, like VPSs? it's just a matter of profitability... the margins on VPSs are pretty good if you don't count labor, so it'd be a matter of just not raising my bandwidth quotas like I ought and maybe spending more money on hardware.
Sometimes, there are two substitute products, one where it's traditional to negotiate, and one where it isn't... for instance, if you buy pre-assembled servers? if you aren't getting 50% off list price, you are getting it in the shorts. But, if you are buying the parts used to build said servers? generally speaking, the lowest price on the internet is pretty close to the real lowest price.
This is the primary reason why I do my own assembly; assembling computers is way easier than negotiating Dell down to a reasonable price.
So yeah; this is starting to shape what businesses I want to get into. I mean, co-location only has margin if you own the building. (I'm working on that part, but I don't have an ETA.) - so yeah, if the 'owning the building' deal doesn't work out... well, I'm not going to dump existing customers, but I am not taking more at the moment.
I dono. my experience has been that the emotional bullshit comes and goes, like the tide. Part of that is, well, it's not a closed system, but part of it is that social bullshit, in my experience, mostly goes away when you rationalize it;
By 'rationalize it' I don't mean 'make it rational' I mean make up some (mostly bullshit) rational explanation for the emotional bullshit. I say mostly bullshit because, well, emotions are not logical, and all logical models for explaining emotions that I know of are really terrible (I mean, not very predictive) models.
But still, assigning a believable logical explanation to a difficult feeling, in my experience, makes that feeling not so difficult anymore. It makes me feel like I'm in control of myself, and this... makes me feel vastly better. If I feel like I'm in control, or even that it's /possible/ to control, I find that letting go and focusing on something else is way easier. If I don't feel like I have control, it's really hard not to obsess. (which seems like the opposite of what I would do if I was designing the system; why should I spend effort on something I can't effect? I want to spend effort where that effort has effect. Fuck you, limbic system.)
I think the other reason it seems to come and go in waves is that there are at least two people involved. If I am in good emotional shape, I can act as a buffer for the other person's emotional bullshit, and the total amount of bullshit in the system is much less than it would be otherwise. On the other hand, if I am feeling the effects of the social bullshit at the same time as the other person, the effect is almost multiplicative.
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1290271...]
not everyone agrees on the above model, but I think its safe to say that the part of the brain that deals with leadership existed before we invented civilization .. wolves have leadership, apes have leadership. So much of social nonverbal communication probably comes from the primitive, instinctive part of our brain, not the logical, planning part.
I think if in the past you had to deal with some really irrational people, and you were intelligent enough to be able to use logic to figure out their bullshit, at some point in your life it was probably really helpful to just reject all irrational bullshit. At one point in my life it was really helpful to me to suppress all instinct and rely solely on logic. But since then, seeing how some completely illogical people can in many situations be more efficient than me in navigating life's obstacles, I have had to learn from my mistakes and revise my behavior. I do think social nonverbal communication is ethically neutral. It's not the smartest behavior, but it is faster than the smartest behavior, and there are many situations where that ends up being more important. Not all. Unfortunately at this time I do not know of any better way to figure out which is which other than experience.
And it's different for everybody. For me, saying you're "in the movie business" when you're doing special effects is this side of the line. Saying you're a consultant when you're not has your toes slowly creeping across - because the set of skills for each is actually different.
How much we're willing to "adjust" depends a lot on our tolerance for stories vs. facts.