Crocker’s Rules were a reaction to the avoidance of direct discussion of topics where some people treat the mere act of discussion in any capacity as offensive. Sacred cows and taboos for which there are social consequences even when asking honest questions. Crocker’s Rules, practically speaking, were a declaration that no good faith discussion was intrinsically offensive ipso facto for the person making the declaration. All taboos were open to good faith arguments and attempts at rigorous intellectual inquiry.
This article is focused too much on communication style and not enough on the subject of communication. The latter was the crux of it. Crocker’s Rules were about being able to rigorously discuss topics that society has deemed to be beyond discussion without taking offense at the fact it is being discussed.
I was present when Crocker’s Rules were “invented”. I see a couple other handles here that may have been as well.
This is why many common idioms are now used in their opposite meaning, and we all understand, and it's fine. As a random example, "It's all downhill from here" can mean either "it gets easier" or "it gets worse". The meaning has changed over time. Also: "I could care less", etc...
> This article is focused too much on communication style and not enough on the subject of communication. The latter was the crux of it. Crocker’s Rules were about being able to rigorously discuss topics that society has deemed to be beyond discussion without taking offense at the fact it is being discussed.
That's a distinction that's not as clear cut as you think.
The problem in the workplace setting is that the subject is the code/system/product/organisation, which has no feelings and hence can't be offended, but many people feel compelled to use an overly verbose style in order to avoid offending the humans charged with the care of the unfeeling object.
There is a certain freedom in treating things as things and calling out their objective properties as is, instead of dancing around the facts.
This is the very same thing as talking plainly and directly about taboo or sensitive subjects. Just do it! It's fine!
> 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.
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.
> Thank you for your careful report, I will attend to it asap.
The response was short and to the point, because no other information was relevant. And, indeed, I have written emails like that in the past. But, from the article:
> 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.
Those things are often all relevant. I beg the author to read a book about system-theoretic process analysis (STPA). Some are freely-available from the MIT PSASS website: https://psas.scripts.mit.edu/home/books-and-handbooks/. Nancy G. Leveson's CAST Handbook is perhaps most directly applicable.
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.
For that reason, reading this is like reading a blog on poker strategies from someone who is only vaguely aware there are different suits in the deck. It's of course fine to ask others to play as if all the cards are diamonds, which is what I take this as. But the way it is written does strongly imply the author has a hard time imagining what the other suits could be for, or how an awareness of them could change their perception of card games.
Honestly, it's refreshing to imagine the lack of "suits" in this sense-- e.g., spending the day with a group of people who not only all claim to couple directness with trustworthiness, but who all earnestly deliver on that claim. I also get the sense that the author is probably not "sticky" in their judgments of others-- perhaps they'd initially judge me as inconsiderate for using niceties but quickly redefine me as trustworthy once I stopped using them.
I would like to know from the author: in the real world, are you aware of the risks of directness without a priori trust or full knowledge of someone else's internal state? I mean, for every one of you, there are probably several dozen people who claim to want unadorned directness but (perhaps unwittingly) end up resenting what they ultimately take as personal, hurtful criticism. And some number of them (again, perhaps unwittingly) retaliate in one way or another. And I haven't even delved into the social hierarchy of jobs-- it's a mess out there!
People learn that lesson then don't stir the pot without reason. Rather than saying "I don't get offended" it is generally better to prove it and push people for feedback from time to time.
There is also a subtle point here in things like "if the design is wrong, say it is wrong" - how is someone supposed to know if the design is "wrong"? Philosophically it isn't possible for a design to be wrong, the idea is nonsense. Designs have trade-offs and people might or might not like the trade offs. But a design can't be wrong because that implies there was already a right solution that people could deploy. If someone is going to be direct that is also a problem they run in to constantly - they're going to be directly saying things that are harsh and garbled. A lot of humans aren't comfortable being that person, there is a more comfortable style of being clear about observations, guarded about making value judgements from them and associating with like-minded people from the get-go rather than pushing to resolve differences. And spending a lot of time playing social games to work out how to organise all that.
I don't think this follows! People are very different, so something can be genuinely true of a subset without generalising to everyone.
Crocker's Rules definitely wouldn't work for me, but it's explicit in them that they can only be self-invoked. Some people seem genuinely to be very thick-skinned (but easily annoyed by indirection and politeness) and able to 'take responsibility for their own feelings' in this sense. I doubt (m)any of them are truly unoffendable... and one could argue that they should be taking responsibility for their own feelings of frustration triggered by normal politeness... but I assume they know themselves well enough to know that they are better off when people try to be as direct as possible when interacting with them.
Where it breaks down is if/when they treat this as an objectively superior state of being and mode of interaction, and use it as an excuse to be rude to others.
Incidentally, this reply.
It shows me:
- there are many communication styles and people tend to think their preferred one is obviously right
- people are often unclear on what they actually value in communication (and might like the opposite of what they say they value)
- people seem also to, at times, confuse other people's different communication style for rudeness, indecisiveness or small-mindedness.
So I guess the reasonable policy is to adopt a hybrid approach. Be tolerant of other people's comms style, try to be concise with enough politeness added in that you don't offend people, even if they say they want you to be ruthlessly direct. When you need to, try to steer the conversation towards your preferred style. Maybe "ok, I understand the background, let's try to distill the facts now", or equally "I feel I need more context before we continue, let's slow down and...".
For example, I have worked in a number of medium sized (50-200) companies that were so proud of being flat structured meritocracies, where anyone can say anything directly to their superiors. Every single time it turned out to be BS, higher ups wanted deference and following chains of command. But that sounds less catchy.
Isn't it quite the opposite? The person invoking Crocker's Rules is saying, in effect, "my feelings about the information and how I might receive it are my problem to manage, not yours, just give me the information."
I can't speak for other parts of the world, but in the US, it's not uncommon for people to walk on eggshells while reporting information to coworkers (and especially managers) because there's absolutely a large cohort who will shoot the messenger. Crocker's Rules are undoubtedly a reaction to the extreme whereby managers in particular fail to receive receive crucial information because their reports are too afraid to pass it along.
In other words, people fail to communicate out of fear born from an assumption on how the person they're communicating with will react. The original quote would have you ignore your own fear and hand over the information, while your modified version would indirectly address your fear by refusing to take responsibility for how the recipient might feel. Whichever way you go with it, you're largely accomplishing the same thing.
For example, I had a job interview a couple years ago where the interviewer showed up fifteen minutes late for a thirty minute interview. Eventually he did show up, and the interview proceeds more or less fine, and near the end he asks if I have any questions. I said "is it common to show up fifteen minutes late for interviews that you schedule? Because it comes off as unprofessional to me".
He started giving me a bunch of excuses about how busy he was and eventually I interject and say "Listen, I don't really care. I'm sure your reasons are valid to you but from my perspective it just looks like you were happy enough to let me waste half the interview just sitting around staring at my watch."
A day later the recruiter tells me that they don't want to move forward. I asked if they gave a reason why and apparently they thought I wasn't a good "culture fit".
I wish I could say I'm above it and that I'm some hyper-stoic who always wants the most direct version of everything, but I'm certainly not immune to wanting some niceties instead of complete blunt directness all the time. I try and be above it, but I'm not.
Well sure, of course we do. We (or at least, a lot of the readers of this who live in a US and similar economic and social system) have learned that it is virtuous and correct to say we value directness. But that's where it stops; it's just a thing that is right to say. Part of the current social interaction protocol. It's then widely understood that many interactions should not be hyper-direct.
What you have observed - people saying they value directness and then not exhibiting it - is the expected behaviour. This isn't a bug.
If most interviewers don't like you, that's something for you to think about. It's not necessarily bad, if you have a very specific personality that most people find disagreeable, then it's a good idea to look out for companies that cater to your personality, and where you will fit in. But it is something to think about.
Of course they didn't want to move forward. That's what you had decided/wanted though right? I can't imagine you hoping for any other outcome with that kind of question and follow up?
The job paid really well so a small part of me still wanted to move forward, but I will admit I was pretty annoyed.
I should provide a bit of context; the recruiter that the company “valued directness” on their copypasted job description.
Regardless, if you show up late halfway through an interview that you scheduled, you shouldn’t be surprised when people are irritated with you.
I’ll admit to a bit of douchiness on my end but I think they should have understood the snarkiness in this situation if they value directness.
It also wasn’t passive aggressive, or at least it wasn’t intended to be. I actually wanted to know if that was just a thing that was common in the company so I could plan accordingly.
This reminds me of a front-page post a little while ago where someone wrote how much it stressed them out when people routinely apologized for delayed responses. Get over it.
I also sometimes wonder if folks writing these articles have had to work closely with people from culturally different places. I've had coworkers that literally could not be direct if their life depended on it for that reason, and I learned to deal with it.
The number of junior engineers I have had to coach out of this way of thinking to get the smallest fragment of value out of a postmortem process... dear Lord. I wonder if this person is similarly new to professional collaboration.
The larger personal site is very aesthetically cool, though – make sure you click around if you haven't!
I've had to work to balance emails like this between "they don't want the nitty gritty, they just want to be satisfied the issue is solved" and "They will definitely want the nitty gritty and think something is up if the details seems suspiciously sparse". Especially if the recipients are technical, and they know that you know that they're technical. what are you hiding, Qaadika? you're usually more verbose than this.
So, to use an example from the original post:
> "I hope this is okay to bring up and sorry for the long message, I just wanted to flag that I've been looking at the latency numbers and I'm not totally sure but it seems like there might be an issue with the caching layer?
There’s a lot of noise in this message. It’s noise because it doesn’t communicate useful engineering information, nor does it show you actually care about the recipients.
Here’s the original post’s suggested rewrite:
> The caching layer is causing a 400ms overhead on cold requests. Here's the trace.
This version communicates some of the essential engineering information, but it loses the important information about uncertainty in the diagnosis. It also lacks any useful human-to-human information.
I’d suggest something like this:
> Heads up: It looks like the caching layer is causing a 400ms overhead on cold requests. Here's the trace. Let me know how I can help. Thanks!
My changes are in italics. Breaking them down:
“Heads up” provides engineering context and human-to-human information: You are trying to help the recipients by alerting them to something they care about.
“It looks like” concisely signals that you have a good faith belief in your diagnosis but are not certain.
“Let me know how I can help” makes clear that you share the recipients’ interest in solving the problem and are not just dumping it at their feet and turning your back on them. You and they are on the same team.
“Thanks!” shows your sincere appreciation to the recipients for looking into the issue. It’s a tiny contribution of emotional fuel from you to them to give them a boost after receiving what might be disappointing news.
In sum, strip the noise and concisely communicate what is important, both engineering information and human information.
The people who try to force everyone else to fit into a specific bucket of communication style, or who refuse to deviate from their own strict communication preferences no matter the audience, those are the people I see struggle to find success relative to their peers.
(Your message is better than the one with a lot of noise, though.)
A lot of people never get past this level of sureness, so the signal is lost (or at least compressed). You can ask them for a number from a digital display and they’ll say it “looks like 54”.
One way to rectify the idea that these messages have signal (which I agree with) and what the article says is that it’s declaring bankruptcy on additional context. The extra text has so little value it’s worth removing as a rule.
"Let me know how I can help" should not be taken for granted as a thing to be offered, though. Some teams have very strict divisions of labor. Some workers (especially anyone whose duties are 'monitor and report' rather than 'creatively solve') are not overtime-exempt and cannot volunteer their time. Some workers (especially anyone who's reached a high-capability tech position from the ground up) are flooded with opportunities to do less of their own job and more of everyone else's and must not preemptively offer their time to an open-ended offer of 'help'. A more focused phrase such as "Let me know if you have questions, need more evidence, etc." provides a layer of defense against that without implicitly denying assistance for help if requested.
"Thanks!" is one of the most mocked request-terminators I've seen in twenty years of business. It is widely abused as "have fun storming the castle, i'm out micdrop" rather than as a sincere expression of gratitude that contains any actual statement of why you're grateful. "Thank you for doing the job the company paid you to do" sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud, even to neurotypicals. Tell people thank you with more than one word if you mean it, and tell them what you're thanking them for, and consider thanking them for what they did rather than lobbing it like a grenade strapped to a problem. If you hand them a problem and they say "got it, I'll look into it", saying "Thanks." to that is completely fine; it serves the exact purpose of courtesy described, and also doubles as a positive-handoff "your plane" reply concluding the problem handoff, so that you can safely mark it as delegated, they can safely assume you didn't miss their message and are continuing to work it, etc.
I don’t know enough about autism to know if that’s the right label for the second category. (I’ve had coworkers who identified as autistic who seemed to deeply care about whether I enjoyed working with them.) I think these two types of people can work together productively, but I don’t think they’ll ever totally understand each other.
Those rules are not meant for everyone.
> When you spend the first third of your message establishing that you are a nice person who means well, you are not being considerate but you are making the recipient wade through noise to get to signal. You are training them to skim your messages, which means that when you actually need them to read carefully, they might not. You are demonstrating that you do not trust the relationship enough to just say the thing and you are signaling a level of insecurity that undermines the technical credibility you are trying to establish. Nobody reads "hope you had a great weekend" and thinks better of the person who wrote it, they probably just being trained to take you less seriously in the future, or at worse, if they're evil loving of Crocker's [sic?] like myself, they just think about the couple of seconds of their life they will never get back.
This very much sounds like the author believes that everyone who doesn't abide by these rules - not just him, not just people who've agreed to them, everyone - is deficient in some way. And it's not just a slip - this attitude is pervasive throughout the post.
I strongly prefer directness in technical communication at work.
But the way the article author phrases his preferences as absolute truth rubs me the wrong way.
Also if I worked with that person then after reading the article I would have perhaps the opposite reaction to the author's intentions.
You still have to walk on eggshells to not offend him by including any bit of information that he might consider not relevant enough.
You also should take care to avoid crossing the line into just being a jerk. This type of thinking is also often used by people who are simply arrogant and rude and are patting themselves on the back for being that way in the name of "directness" or "efficiency".
Your coworkers are under too high a load, documentation is faulty, chain of communication is breaking down, your coworker lacks expertise in something.
All of those are calls to action!!
And no, you can’t tell the other person to “just communicate if it’s actionable” because they might not realise it. There’s lack of seniority, there’s tunnel vision…
You could, also, be wrong or misinformed, so I don't see the big deal about "Hey -- the latency numbers look pretty heavy. Should they be in the 400s?" or "I don't believe this is the best approach, we'll get issues with XYZ".
A proper balance of direct and indirect is the appropriate tack to take.
On my team we all trust each other to be fairly direct. On the flip side, “softening” a remark can signal to the recipient that you’re open minded to other solutions. “We should do X.” and “how would you feel about doing X?” accomplish the same thing but the second one fosters more psychologically safe discussion in my opinion.
I don't want someone to come up to me and say, "Your code is wrong; you should have done ABC". I want them to say "Hey, I ran into a problem with your code. I think here on line 123 you meant to do ABC but you did XYZ by accident. What do you think?"
I'm not a dispassionate, disinterested observer. I do have some attachment to the code I write. I know -- and admire -- people who don't, but I'm just not one of them. I like it when someone is polite when they point out my mistakes.
Why not just
"Communicate clearly"?
- Don't add fluff
- write as plainly as possible
- write as precisely as is reasonable
- Only make reasonable assumptions about the reader
- Do your best to anticipate ambiguity and proactively disambiguate. (Because your readers may assume that if they don't understand you, what you wrote isn't for them.)
- Don't be selfish or self-centered; pay attention to the other humans because a significant amount of communication happens in nuance no matter how hard we try to minimize it.
It's a cultural thing, to be sure, and what you grew up with and are used to tends to dominate how you feel about things.
When I worked a Radboud University in the Netherlands for a summer, they were definitely more direct than I was used to, and kept work more work-focused. But they also combined that with a culture of quitting on time, and going out to socialize a bit before dinner, which I think was vital to sustain interpersonal connections.
I liked that style a lot, but Americans are very bad about quitting on time, which necessitates more socialization at work itself.
Context of whom you are communicating with is also important. That’s the trade off of approaches like these rules. In some situations they are fine. In others not so much.
Wait, what? How does a team habit of bluntly stating facts result in "tribal knowledge"? If anything it should be the opposite. The approach in the article has problems but I don't believe that's one of them.
Crocker's rules - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12881288 - Nov 2016 (54 comments)
This is entirely rational when a relationship is not strong, and a misstep could cause it to sour in a way not easily remedied. If I have to work with you, and can’t fire you, then I don’t want to foul the nest.
As my coworkers get to know me, they will drop the unnecessary politeness automatically, according to Zipf’s law. They will find I react well to straightforward communication once we have established trust.
But if you're a line employee for a corporation, this is the wrong approach, for two reasons. First, you will encounter many people who misinterpret directness as hostility, simply because your feelings toward another person are hard to convey in a chat message unless you include all that social-glue small talk. And if people on average think you're a jerk, they will either avoid you or reflexively push back.
But second... you're not that brilliant. Every now and then, the thing you think is wrong isn't actually wrong, you just don't understand why your solution was rejected beforehand. Maybe there are business requirements you don't know about, maybe things break in a different way if you make the change. Asking "hey, help me understand why this thing is the way it is" is often a better opener than "yo dude, your thing is broken, here's what you need to do, fix it now".
That said, I think throughout the post OP is mixing different dimensions of communicatiom together in a way that confuses the conversation - namely conciseness, directness, and explicitness - which while often overlapping aren't exactly the same.
This is not something that will change within our lifetimes. Learn soft skills, learn how to be indirect. You don’t have to be as verbose with it as some of the examples in this article.
“Gassing them up”, “Letting them down gently”, “Little white lies”, etc - these are all examples of how benign emotional manipulation is essentially the crux of pleasant social interaction in most of the Western world.
It’s not my personal preference but it works because most people have unhandled insecurities.
When someone is overly direct with me I take it as them being upset or confrontational. So I suppose it does influence how I perceive them.
Honestly this is just indicative of a lack of social skills. The "social cushioning" actually has a purpose in that it provides context around the discussion so that neither party gets the wrong idea about the state of mind of the other person. The choice to either engage or not in social niceties is a way of communicating intent. The author complains about a lack of signal, but being completely direct excludes far more.
> Nobody reads "hope you had a great weekend" and thinks better of the person who wrote it, they probably just being trained to take you less seriously in the future, or at worse, if they're evil loving of Crocker's like myself, they just think about the couple of seconds of their life they will never get back.
Wtf? Some people do actually appreciate that if it's genuine. And it often is. I wish the cashier a good day, should I just stay silent and shove my money in their face in order to reduce the signal to noise ratio? Do these people socialise with others on a regular basis?
This reminds me of when my kids declare "I'M HUNGRY". Cool story bro, I'll record it in my journal.
I’m convinced that the root cause is people are afraid to be wrong. Either they’re fearful of being fired, or think people will respect them less if they admit not knowing; the result is that everyone dances around objectivity.
I don’t care if you make an honest mistake. Hell, I don’t even care if you make a careless mistake, as long as you fix yourself. Everyone messes up - it’s how you act afterwards that matters.
> This is a recipe for disaster.
What about Crocker’s Rules, and/or this post’s advice to follow them, do you consider a recipe for disaster?
> Please don’t follow Crocker’s Rules;
What outcome are you hoping will result from granting your request? Do you have personal experiences with Crocker’s Rules underpinning this advice? Do you tend to experience social discomfort typically, atypically, or infrequently / never?
> just get better at communicating than the person who wrote this
Other than the presumed adherence to Crocker’s Rules in writing this, which is addressed by the questions above, do you have other criticisms of their writing to present? What communication ideals do you consider as better models than Crocker’s Rules? Do you consider there to exist appropriate circumstances for Crocker’s Rules?