Yesterday, I was talking to a product manager friend who used to be a country head for revenue at a B2B company. He went off on a rant about how annoying and dispiriting it was to talk to tech people.<p>According to him, this sentiment that tech people are unpleasant to deal with is quite pervasive at executive levels across multiple industry verticals.<p>As a tech person myself, I knew many of us were opinionated and brash but this was eye opening.<p>Does my friend's opinion align with your experience as well? What goes wrong when talking to tech people? How can this be improved?
As someone who has been in both tech IC (individual contributor) and higher management levels, this is often a relatively simple result of impedance mismatch (excluding bad faith individuals for now):<p>ICs and lower level managers are all about inputs and outputs, blocking and tackling, getting shit done.<p>At the higher management levels it is all about setting direction, setting the "tone", "getting the culture right".<p>There is just so little concerns that intersect between these groups, that communication becomes a challenge.
Two different worlds. When I speak to a non-tech folks I try to re-adjust myself in a way so that I don't make them feel intimidated. Engineers tend to ask many questions, try to find illogical sequences in what is being discussed, raise doubts, propose alternatives etc. etc.<p>We're trained to act in that way and I find that this is what is most irritating to non-tech people. Non-tech people don't know nor they _need_ to know how to communicate in that way. That's not how they get their stuff done, they are focused and equiped with totally different skills.<p>Also, my experience tells me that we suffer more than other people in having a good social intelligence.
I believe many CXOs are insecure about not knowing what’s going on and not being able to judge what’s being said. It’s easier for most to have an opinion on product, marketing, hiring… not so much on the technical areas.<p>On the other hand, tech people have a tendency to spend disproportionate effort worrying about programming languages, frameworks, monads, etc… compared to understanding the business - and I somehow understand that, because when job hopping it’s more useful to have experience in certain tech than in certain domains, most SWEs positions are “fungible”.
Because there's usually a huge gap in people skills.<p>Most high level management is about meeting others and creating teams and motivating people to work together.<p>High level tech teams are about focusing on one thing and excluding the world around them. And in my experience, quite a lot of skilled programmers aren't comfortable being around too many strangers.<p>When programmers are concentrated on work, some people persons will misinterpret that as shunning them. Also, so many tech people treat management as a waste of money, that I'd say the disdain for each other is mutual.
I’ve talked to multiple C-level execs in my career.<p>There are many different leadership and communication styles but at that level you need to be succinct, direct, and know at least something about the business challenges they have.<p>A lot of technical employees want to jump right into technical problem solving - and sometimes that’s fine given context and audience or if you already have a relationship with the audience - but in my experience you need to understand their world and how what what you bring to the table is relating to the business and their direct care abouts.
Depends on the tech people, speaking as current product management. Some were wonderful, interested in customers and business, and added a lot to my knowledge (and I hope theirs too). Some were horrible, seeming only to care about their language/tool cult de jour and to hell with the resultant product/business.
From my experience, big part of that comes from worrying about completely different things.<p>To illustrate – my personal background is in sales/marketing (branching into tech), so that naturally (1) gives me a relatively wide view into our startup, and (2) forced me to develop people skills.<p>And despite that, I still often found myself on calls where both our CEO and I were frustrated and felt we're talking past each other.<p>In my case what worked was just getting more exposure to the executive side of things. After we had a few discussions about the wider ramifications of my ideas (e.g. Does our dev team has enough spare capacity to work on this extra thing I want? Is it going to impact our trial conversion down the line? etc. etc.), we started having much more productive meetings, because I was able to think about these concerns in advance. Eventually, many of our meetings turned from "should we do X?" to "I think we should do X because of A. B is a concern, but I think benefits outweigh the cost."<p>Obviously I'm super lucky, because our founders invested a crazy amount of effort into training.<p>For someone without that bigger picture, I think a useful starting point might be asking "how is that going to impact the entire business?" – both to yourself when you're preparing for a meeting, and to the actual CXO, if only to show them you're not just considering your own walled garden.
CXOs are bullshitters. They deal exclusively in bullshit. Tech guys are stuck cleaning up the bullshit those CXOs spew. Do you want to talk to your janitor? Sure he knows how a toilet works but fuck that.
I don't think that MBTI is the be-all, end-all explanation of all human interaction, but I think it's a good lens to partially think about the world through. You're going to find a significant overrepresentation of INTPs in the tech field. (citation: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=946249" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=946249</a>)<p>And this type basically perceives and interacts with the world in a very different way than people who tend to gravitate to management positions: (it can be anybody, but I think ESTJs have more of a tendency to seek out management roles)<p>You basically have 2 different ways of looking at the world forced to interact. It can be uncomfortable for everybody.
It's a function of how both accumulate influence/respect/trust/power.<p>The paths taken are (generally) very different.<p>So what each thinks is possible or not is based on different paths travelled.<p>For certain types of problems the paths will diverge. Some people handle this well and some people don't.
All of the comments here about engineering being too focused on frameworks/languages/etc can be absolutely true, but I could say similar things about any functional area in every business because each area is driven by their specific incentive structure.<p>For example, <Functional Area> is difficult to talk to because:<p>-Sales - All they are focused on is driving sales and numbers against the multipliers and metrics the head of sales has set for the time period they believe they will be around. They have no sense for the long term.<p>-Marketing - Only focused on the top of the funnel and give little thought to whether those customers will ever convert or be retained without proper guardrails in place.<p>-Finance/Legal - Only focused on risk minimization, not necessarily on the cost of the risk minimization.<p>All that said, regarding Engineering, there is a feedback loop that I've seen that <i>can</i> make these conversations more difficult than need be.<p>Non-Tech Perspective - Tech people are difficult to work with because they are more likely to say "no" to new ideas.<p>Tech Perspective - Tech people are hesitant to say yes to ideas that are not fully fleshed out because as soon as they say yes to a <i>component</i> of an idea, they will be held accountable for the implementation of the <i>entire</i> idea at the originally discussed timeline.<p>I've seen this "bait and switch" happen enough times that I now specifically begin the conversation with "Let's discuss how long this <i>specific version</i> of the idea might take" or "What are your thoughts on <i>this component</i> in terms of difficulty" with the addendum that "If the scope on this new idea changes, I won't hold you accountable for your original estimate, we're just brainstorming".<p>You can also start the conversation with "I'd just like to brainstorm and understand your perspective on new ideas, we are not talking about prioritization or implementation." The challenge is you actually have to mean it, and not backtrack, which is all about building trust. I also believe this loop happens unintentionally without malice, but it is done implicitly in a way that can rub engineering the wrong way.
Maybe because the CXO is interrupting the tech people and don’t understand how important concentration is to puzzle solving, so the CXO feels that tech people are unnecessarily hostile.
I can only talk about my experience. I've been a dev but mostly done support and implication roles. I'm usually the the guy who uses the n-word with execs: "No".<p>Execs hate that word. It ruins thier day.<p>Sales, legal, compliance, product (and HR and finance) all say yes to whatever an exec says. They might think it's a bad idea but they can just do it anyway.<p>Only tech people will give a hard no and say, up front, that X is not just dumb but not possible.<p>Sometimes this is worsened as, by concentrating on technical skills, we can lack interpersonal skills. I never start by saying "No". I start by trying to understand if we can achieve the same result another way, or steering the conversation away, or saying I will look into it and never getting back to them. This is much better. But occasionally I get cornered and have to say that word.<p>I follow it with some carefully dumbed down but still unwelcome explaination. Tech people usually make another mistake here: they think that an explaination is helpful, but it isn't. People want their widget. Explaining why they cannot have it just add insult to injury.<p>Because if my "nonconfrontational" style, I am much more popular than my (more able, smarter, harder working) tech colleagues. I am seen as more of a team player maddeningly.<p>This is covered in How to Win Friends and Influence People. No one thanks you for telling them an inconvenient truth. Except in tech where other people actually will thank you for educating them and saving them time. Sadly that does not translate the the real world (including the C-suite).<p>Disclaimer: you may get lucky and find one or two managers who do appreciate getting a straight answer fast. Value them.<p>A few examples:<p>* An exec wanted a VWAP Algo in crypto. He'd sold it to a client who was very impressed we'd managed to make one. But to run a VWAP you need reliable volume profiles and volume profiles on crypto (last I checked) are not at all reliable. I managed to steer the client into accepting a Percentage of Volume Algo. It's not the same bit it's similar.<p>* A client needed Transaction Cost Analysis which we did not do. I managed to turn that into them specing out TCA for us to build with a 6 month lead time. I was very pleased with that achievement. No one else was happy about that though. Product were pissed because it broke their roadmap (no mercy for them, they said yes when the exec "checked" it was already done). The exec would not understand why we couldn't "just do it". And I became the bad guy.<p>* I lost the support of the CTO because I came back from a client with 32 smart, sensible, necessary improvements to our algos and he thought it was not my place to bring. I had the client rename and send the same list and it was forwarded company wide as great input and much appreciated and rushed to engineering for immediate execution.<p>Yes, I am a little bitter sometimes :) but it's better to play the game and win...
I think there is knowledge to be had in the confusion itself, given this was asked on HN.<p>Read a HN comment section, versus a Reddit comment or YouTube comment section, and take some notes on the difference in communicative styles.<p>The latter are what people on average like to be around: it's got political stuff and the like, sure, but most comments that rise to the top are jokes and generally uplifting comments.<p>A HN comment section is more like a series of bitter black-white 0-100 swings on who is right or not about something. Relatively, it's scathing and stammering. Sometimes it feels like the author had their fists clenched and was stomping their feet on the ground as they wrote it.<p>"Normal" people just really don't like that way of communicating. It's not pleasant, and they don't want to be around it.<p>But that's how tech people tend to be, relatively speaking, especially at senior levels. Much like the computers they work with: empathy only if you're 100% right, otherwise a surly rebuke.<p>Also it's a fairly open secret that this profession has a lot of people "on the spectrum", which is jarring for others who are not used to interacting with such people.<p>The solution lies in putting in solid work so develop understanding of each other. And it only takes reading a few books.<p>The two groups are necessarily different. Many manager types would go nuts dealing with the daily inanity of machines breaking in new and creative ways. Many engineer types would hate having to deal with directly with customers, investors, marketers, sales reps and all that "people stuff". They need each other and "othering" each other doesn't achieve anything in the long run.<p>The managers need to do more to understand the daily experience of the engineer and what they value or dislike and why, and engineers need to zoom out and try to understand or at least mimic the perspective and social needs of managers.<p>Everybody's busy and no one wants to do this, but they just have to. They can at least start with recognizing each other's experiences. A manager saying "we need to pay down technical debt so we can speed up future development", or "we won't add more devs to the project because it will slow it down" will go a long way towards respect. That's "empathy" to an engineer.<p>Likewise, an engineer will do well to say things like "this task will improve lifetime customer value" or "reduce churn" or even hold your nose and say "synergise" if you have to, and hold your tongue on the technical matters. And above all else: ask questions! Actually try to understand their needs, so you can find new ways to meet in the middle. That's empathy for a manager.
An aspect that no one here has mentioned but absolutely is a major reason:<p>Tech teams are littered with chronically online SJWs. When something as innocuous as an email about Domain Driven Design [0] can quickly go off the rails and be derided as misogynistic, it's tough to communicate. Executives are not used to dealing with groups that have such thin skin. You constantly have to walk on eggshells around tech teams, and even then something/anything may still trigger them.<p>[0] <a href="https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/1073234104311734273" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/1073234104311734273</a>