A brief example of tailoring words for listeners: engineers and managers

If this is over email, I always start with the &quot;ask&quot; first and then follow up with the most important information:<p>&quot;I&#x27;d like your approval to move the validation job to a new server. It will only take one hour but will save Dave many hours a week cleaning up the jobs.&quot; Then go on to explain the details.<p>Nobody wants to read a long email to understand what it is you want them to do. 9 times out of 10, they&#x27;ll provide the ask and only read the details if they need to.

If you have to ask for permission to do an hour long QoL task to fix some insane thing that stresses everyone out, you need a new job.

It may just be a fake scenario but the actual solution there would be to implement the 1 hour fix without a single discussion or email.<p>Sometimes the best way to tailor words for both engineers and managers is to 1) solve the problem then 2) if the solution was actually difficult, explain how you solved it in simple terms.

Is it common for people to describe servers as &quot;weak&quot; and &quot;strong&quot;?<p>I haven&#x27;t heard this before, and when I was reading this initially I thought this example was going to be the example of tailoring words for non-technical managers.

The &quot;for engineers&quot; version doesn&#x27;t seem to mention the lost time of the people waiting on the failed jobs, only the time of the person fixing them.

So in other words managers are big toddlers that have to be talked into making good decisions using cheap emotional manipulation tactics.<p>Honestly that kind of checks out