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by shalmanese 1529 days ago
Importantly, learn to modulate the level of technical detail at which you describe things and establish trust with your intended audience that your level of technical detail matches the nature of the problem. This gives your audience a clue that when you throw around jargon, it's because there's a subtlety in the implementation detail that breaks the abstraction and they need to care about it.

There's a difference between "This is a problem with our search indexing and we need to..." and "This a problem with Lucerne which is a search indexer. The tricky thing is, Lucerne implements search differently and because of that, ... and so we need to ... instead of ...".
3 comments
unfocussed_mike 1529 days ago
Right.

You can't hide the detail with a wave of the hand, you can definitely overcommunicate detail that is unnecessary, but the art of it is finding a way to explain the bit that matters in a way that makes it clear to the users that you're eliding detail that isn't important, without misleading them.

There is a very fine example of this in cinema -- the senior partners meeting in Margin Call, where Zachary Quinto's character has to explain why the firm needs to sell all of a particular asset class:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hhy7JUinlu0

One day I will use the line Jeremy Irons uses in this clip. I don't want to spoil it by quoting it.

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nthj 1529 days ago
That’s a great scene. For anyone who hasn’t seen the movie, I might recommend skipping the clip and watching the full film! If you’re on HN, odds are you would enjoy it, and it has an impressive cast.
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unfocussed_mike 1529 days ago
It is an outstanding movie. But I think this particular scene is one of the finest scenes in any movie ever made. It could stand alone as a short.
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ColinWright 1529 days ago
Outstanding film, outstanding cast, outstanding performances.

I initially watched it because Stanley Tucci is in it ... I stayed for the drama, and then Jeremy Irons stole it.

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rzzzt 1529 days ago
My mind immediately jumped to cows and Switzerland reading this.
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greggsy 1529 days ago
as a security professional, there is nothing more frustrating than reading a report that completely misses the mark in terms of audience, and the overuse of industry jargon.
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