Human communication
lastmod 2021-10-26created 2021-10-264 edits
Communication, or human communication (also anthroposemiotics), is the exchange of a person's thoughts or feelings. It carries the meaning of "the thoughts or intentions one has being mutually understood," and it is the most essential ability humans must have to live in society. The media used for mutual communication include not only spoken and written language but also nonverbal elements such as gestures, posture, facial expressions, intonation, song, and dance. Many tools and therapies have been developed for people who cannot communicate through the behaviors above, and they have almost no problems with ordinary communication. Animals that have not developed linguistic ability communicate through hormones, the smell of feces and urine, or calls. In modern times, with the development of the Internet, beyond direct communication, people can also communicate with an unspecified large number of others through portal sites such as Naver, Daum, and Nate, and social network services such as Facebook and Twitter.
Communication is understood to have the following domains.
- "Intrapersonal communication" with oneself
- "Interpersonal exchange" with other people
- "Group behavior" within a group
- "Intra-organizational exchange" within an organization
- "Intercultural exchange" across cultures
How to get useful answers to your questions
If you ask a vague or unclear question, the other person
- explains something you already know, or
- explains something you don't know but that is unrelated to your problem, or
- is on the related topic but uses terms you don't understand, so you stay confused
When this happens, you need to stop them appropriately and steer toward the answer you want
Two important questioning strategies before talking about how to interrupt an answer
- Ask yes/no questions
- Y/N questions are quite possible even on complex topics
- Some of these questions are "questions that check my understanding"
- You can get answers quickly without drifting to other topics
- Example: questions about a Database
- How often do you expect a DB Failover to happen? Every week?
- Do you Scale Up manually?
- Does Facebook have its own MySQL management software?
- Is Orchestrator a Proxy?
- Is the goal of the Replica you're talking about performance?
- Do you route queries to shards based on the ID being looked up?
- Explain your goal,
- say what you currently understand,
- and make a guess about the goal so the person answering can say right/wrong
- The process of writing down what you understand itself helps clarify your thinking
- Stating what you understand is a kind of yes/no question
- This is how I understand X to be working. Is that right?
Interrupting
- Be willing to interrupt
- If they are explaining an unrelated topic at length, you should interrupt
- It may feel rude, but ultimately it is efficient for everyone. Letting it continue wastes both sides' time
- Usually you interrupt by asking a more specific question. An unrelated answer is probably because the question was vague
- Don't accept answers that don't answer your question
- If they finish with something that isn't an answer to your question, it's important to ask more
- Steer toward what you want to know with more detailed questions (such as Yes/No)
- Ask for explanations of terms you didn't understand (What is X?)
- When you ask people questions, you sometimes hear surprising things you had no idea about
- When that happens, you need time to combine this information with what you already know
- Then say something like "Wait, that's surprising. Let me think for a moment," integrate it with your knowledge, and think of new questions
- Interrupting / not accepting non-answers / taking a moment to think, as above, all require "some confidence"
- When I lacked confidence, I would think "Ah, this explanation seems good, I probably just don't understand because I'm not smart enough" and accept the answer
- It helps to remember these
- People usually want to help (even if their first explanation is full of terms you can't understand)
- If you get even one useful piece of information by the end of the conversation, it's a success (even a single answer to a Yes/No question, if it's something you didn't know before)
- Keep checking as you talk: "does that make sense?"
- Other important checks
- Say that you have never explained this concept before (since the first explanation probably won't be good)
- That you don't know the other person well (because you will make wrong assumptions about what they know/don't know)
Being good at extracting information is a Superpower
- Some developers know a lot but aren't good at explaining what they know
- Instead of getting annoyed that they explain poorly, it's more effective to ask questions that get you the answers you need
- This widens the range of people you can learn from
- Instead of looking for someone who explains things easily, find someone who has the information you want and ask specific questions until you learn what you want