alt Hacker NewsSome of those examples are genuinely different as they convey different intent and certainty. Also some of the basic small talk level things are also there to gauge someone’s responsiveness right now. To ask directly can mean “I believe my issue is important enough to immediately change what you’re thinking about to my problem without checking first”. You might complain about breaking your flow, which is fine, but an interruption can be a lot less disruptive compared to getting nerd sniped.
> Both messages contain the same information, however one of them respects time.
Unless you’re an incredibly slow reader this is a tiny amount of time.
> The fact that you were stressed, or that you had inherited the config from someone else, or that the documentation was unclear3, or that you asked your lead and they said it was probably fine, none of that is relevant to the incident report. You can document contributing factors if they are actually actionable, meaning if there is something structural that needs to change, name it specifically and attach a proposed fix to it.
Those are absolutely relevant! A lead told you to do it? Documentation unclear? One stressed person unable to hand over the task?
And you don’t have to have a solution there to highlight a problem.
> If the payment service went down because a config value was wrong, the incident report should say: the payment service went down because config value X was set to Y when it needed to be set to Z.
Contains zero useful information as to how this happened. It’d be like saying you don’t want to know what the user did before the crash, just that it crashed but shouldn’t have done because it got into invalid state X.
Replies
> but an interruption can be a lot less disruptive compared to getting nerd sniped.
Theoretically yes. Practically, folks who avoid small talk deliberately usually have enough awareness to not interrupt unless they need your time. But yes, directness without judgment is bad.
Ironically, the author fails to apply that judgment themselves and wastes a ton of words on unnecessary and/or bad examples.
And, more importantly, they miss the core point of Crocker's rule: Invoking it doesn't mean you get to tell other people how to communicate. You just tell them they're not responsible for your emotional/mental state.
If those extra details upset OP, maybe they lack the maturity to invoke that rule.
Yeah, skip the fluff about my having a good weekend if you need me to fix something, but a lot of those uncertainty markers aren't fluff, they're essential to honest, accurate communication.
Similarly, many times when you say a variation on "I know you're the expert on the codebase" or whatever, that's because it's true and important. Something I think is a problem, which this article wants me to phrase as a short, plain declaration, might actually just be a misunderstanding on my part. If I get one of those messages, I'm not going to see my time being respected. I'm going to see an arrogant jerk too lazy to learn what they're talking about before shooting off their mouth.