[aught]

The focus on communication over skills, capabilities, and curiosity has opened a door for fraudulent executives, not to mention it’s ableist.

There is an unaddressed problem of jargon spew, florid business speech which has become pervasive at executive levels inherently destructive to goals.

Particularly in startup and scientific organizations where every dollar matters. Persons who appear productive by volunteering for basic tasks which should be done by an administrative assistant. Productivity by empty volume not relevance or need. Passing on or delegating even basic technical tasks, advocating against fundamental safeguards simply because they do not want to deal with them.

I am not against learning as you go and this is not what i am referring to. These executives and managers are not ones who just have gaps, they are ones that don’t know and refuse to learn even basic concepts well known by high school students or college freshmen. Concepts which would take less than a minute to look up and understand.

They micromanage, take credit for work they have not done, and ultimately will cause your best talent to leave.

This article and those like them self-help fluff. We need to get back to our roots, allowing the fluff of executive culture to pervade instead of fostering creative tinkering has set us so far back. When did handicapping ourselves become the norm?

[alkonaut]

> The focus on communication over skills, capabilities, and curiosity has opened a door for fraudulent executives, not to mention it’s ableist. There is an unaddressed problem of jargon spew, florid business speech which has become pervasive at executive levels inherently destructive to goals.

Being able to sound like a good communicator doesn't mean you are one. Recognizing that someone is spewing jargon without actually concisely delivering something valuable is also part of being good at communication. An equal amount of blame should go to those who nod in response to a jargon stream instead of interrupting, asking the right questions and clarifying what's communicated.

[askafriend]

> not to mention it’s ableist

Recognizing the immense value of effective communication is ableist?

Coding is the easy part. Deciding what to code or how to code it with a team is the hard part and that requires effective communication, there's simply no way around it. That's what separates junior engineers from senior engineers who see the bigger picture.

[lmm]

Assuming that what's perceived as "communication" is actually "effective" is begging the question.

[askafriend]

Yes, sometimes not everyone's communication style works for every culture or group of people.

That's just how it works. Humans are messy like that.

[lmm]

If we just shrug our shoulders about that then that opens the door to all kinds of discrimination. People generally find it easier to commuicate with people from the same culture, for example.

[idiotsecant]

At some point being able to convey what is in your brain to another human and use that to influence their actions is a fundamental human skill. If you're bad at it you'll be at a disadvantage, simple as that.

[robbiep]

you're right, we should actively work to remove the advantages that those elites that can communicate clearly and effectively have. There should be quotas for positions that are dominated by the best performing communicators, as determined by 360 reviews. Additionally, those identified as such should be forced to work remotely, on a 5 second delay and throttled bandwith connection.

[MrPatan]

Can't get around those pesky face to face interactions. Better to implant an equality-enforcing device under the skull to zap the brain every few seconds.

[idiotsecant]

Effective communication is very easy to identify. Either it produces the required results (everyone understanding the problem and cooperating to produce and implement as close to an optimal solution as possible given resource constraints) or it doesn't.

[lmm]

> Either it produces the required results (everyone understanding the problem and cooperating to produce and implement as close to an optimal solution as possible given resource constraints) or it doesn't.

And how can you tell? If a project fails, is that because people didn't have a shared understanding of the problem, or did they understand it fine and just weren't able to find a solution?

[mjx0]

> not to mention it’s ableist.

Thank you! Seeing someone recognize this is wonderful.

I have a disability that has resulted in me being screwed over by the idea that communication, “emotional intelligence”, and other “soft skills” are somehow more important than my ability to do the job. I often feel that I’m alone when I acknowledge that I’m bad at those things, and that I do not intend to change that by constantly fighting my biology (“masking”).

[ethanbond]

It’s unfortunate for many people but the reality is “the job” is often not what it appears to be. Building software in a large org has little to do with writing code and everything to do with maintaining shared understanding of very complex systems among dozens or thousands of people.

Communication is the fundamental problem of doing anything at scale, and lots of valuable things are only valuable at scale.

[oscillonoscope]

I think there's a wide difference between actual effective communication and what people call effective communication. The former is characterized by getting to the heart of the problem and finding a resolution quickly while the latter is usually characterized by following social conventions to show deference to titles and individuals. I'm a bit biased here but I find autistic people tend to be competent at actual effective by saying the quiet part loud or addressing the elephant in the room even if people find it a little off-putting. That's not to say that's a good thing in every situation

[RandomLensman]

This is assuming that there is no "selling" required. In a lot of cases some selling is required and then just being some sort of blunt isn't necessarily helpful.

[robertlagrant]

I agree, but it's also easy to build up a clique along some lines, be they socioeconomic, or what politeness rules we decide are important, or whatever else, and those can easily exclude people who want to be kind, but also just tell the truth and make progress.

I think it's wise to be on the lookout for people and groups employing strategies, conscious or otherwise, that de facto degrade simple communication.

[GoToRO]

That reality was created by managers that only care about themselves and that see any capable individual as a threat. It doesn't have to be this way.

[xyzelement]

// not to mention it’s ableist.

A lot of work happens in teams. A lot of team work requires frequent communication/ synchronization.

Is saying "for jobs that require communication, you and your team will succeed more if you communicate well" abelist?

[ravagat]

Oh boy, this is true and unfortunately this has been the result of over-delegation that rose in prominence over some, give or take, +-70 years.

And I don't mean effective communication but specifically:

> the focus on communication OVER skills, capabilities, and curiosity

There was, are , and will be a lot of folks who get overlooked because of this and that sucks. But communication has, is, and will be a very important part of life and people. I guess the lesson in this is, if you are lacking in your communication don't handicap yourself unintentionally.

[signaru]

Perhaps the kind of communication needs to be clarified. There is communication with your teammates that gets the actual work done. Then there's communication with "higher ups" or management or the general public where there are opportunities for stealing credit and/or manipulation.