[mjw1007]

The idea that programmers have a poor theory of mind doesn't stand up at all in my experience.

I remember once seeing the inbox of someone working as a sales-ledger clerk. It was full of messages with the subject "accounts query", or a small variation of that. The ones with subjects like "query for account ACME-37" were from technical staff.

Similarly if I ask "when do you need those figures?" and I get the answer "next Wednesday", it isn't when I'm talking to programmers that I feel the need to follow up with "Is that when you want me to give them to you, or when you're going to be making the presentation that includes them?".

[blowski]

For any theory about a common pattern of behaviour, there will be many exceptions that don’t fit the theory. Without hard data, both sides are giving a subjective opinion based on their experience, and both sides are probably right in part.

[slillibri]

I suppose, but as someone in infrastructure I have had developers ask very, very specific questions without ever actually providing the context or what they were actually trying to solve. Seems to me to be a variation on the same problem. Just because a question is specific doesn't mean it's the right question.

[mjw1007]

My view is that, whatever is causing developers to often be bad at filling in context, it isn't a deficiency in their theory of mind.

(Similarly, someone elsethread is talking about how their non-developer colleagues neglected to tell them about an upcoming release. One possible explanation is that their colleagues were bad at "theory of mind", and believed that as they knew about the release, so did everybody else. But I think it's more likely that they were too disorganised to make sure that it was somebody's job to tell everyone who needed to know.)

[BurningFrog]

> My view is that, whatever is causing developers to often be bad at filling in context, it isn't a deficiency in their theory of mind.

The "theory of mind" explanation is that those developers don't understand what context other people are probably missing.

I agree that there are of course other possible reasons.

[antod]

I've had the same experience. It was kinda jarring as I expected devs to not fall into the same trap they complain about with questions/requests from their users.

[fsckboy]

> The ones with subjects like "query for account ACME-37" were from technical staff.

if you get an email from me, and when you want to follow up you're thinking "what was that phone number I should call?", don't worry, I have already put it in the subject line along with the person's name and the deadline

[aussieshibe]

It's above-and-beyond of you to follow up at all in that situation, IMHO.

Taking "I need X next Wednesday" at face value to mean "as long as I have X by 5pm Wednesday I'm happy" is completely reasonable.