
What it feels like to have poor communication skills in a meeting - andrewhubbs
http://hub.bs/2014/04/what-is-feels-like-to-have-poor-communication-skills-in-a-meeting/
======
cessor
I strongly disagree with the article. The engineer (in the video) shows good
skills in communicating with the other people and takes their obviously silly
requests seriously. At one point he has to explain that geometry itself is
rendering the request impossible. Many problems could be resolved if
businesspeople were forced to understand some technical aspects of what they
are in control of, rather than forcing engineers to dumb-down complex
technical solutions for people who don't really care what is behind it.

Being a software developer in an enterprise is often like being Top Gear's
James May when he has to explain something to Jeremy.

------
snowwrestler
The video is funny because the requests are obviously logical impossibilities.

But what usually happens when these meetings go bad is that the client is just
not very good at expressing what they really want, but try to use technical
terms anyway. The engineer gets hung up reacting to and debating the literal
possibility of what they heard, instead of treating it as an exercise in
translating from an alien tongue.

Edit to add: This is where agile/rapid prototyping can help too. Imagine
coming back to this client a couple days later with a red cross on a piece of
paper and saying, "The 3rd line is pointing straight at you, so you just see
the end--this point here in the middle. And you can't see the other lines
because they've been deployed into the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th dimensions to
maintain perpendicularity. Now let's test some business scenarios." It might
turn out those other lines were not needed at all. Or some user testing might
show that the color actually does not matter. Etc. (I love to play with bad
metaphors.)

------
hunterloftis
"relishing in having squirreled away knowledge from your coworkers isn’t
productive or healthy."

Did we watch the same video? In what way did you interpret the character's
behavior as trying to "squirrel away knowledge?"

~~~
pohl
Maybe he feels that the protagonist was hoarding the secrets of geometry and
color, and that if only he had better communication skills everyone else in
the room would suddenly realize the internal inconsistencies of their
specification.

------
csense
Yesterday's HN discussion of the original video:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7513182](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7513182)

------
RickS
Here's the video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg)

