TOO LOUD?! Is Overcommunicating Hurting Me As A Developer?

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Hey folks, we're going to the experience devs subreddit and this is going to be about not AI today. Wow. Um about communication and so this I thought this was an interesting question and a lot of uh interesting responses but uh someone was saying they want to understand from others the distribution of verbal communication on a team. And I was like, "This is such a weird title, but I'm curious already." Uh, and then I I read their post and uh it's really not that weird. Uh, so their context is they're saying they feel concerned that um they might be like uh sort of quote unquote too loud of a communicator on their team. And they they said they believe that, you know, from their perspective that a really effective team member is one that is trying to overcommunicate things to keep people like in the loop, right?

So, here's status updates. Here's um I don't even know like like everything. uh your status updates like where I'm where I'm blocked or what I'm getting complete or what's upcoming or uh like helping people understand like if there's a related bug or issue going on just like being the person who's jumping in to try and communicate a lot. And so, um, I thought that this was really interesting because they're using the word loud when they're kind of describing this. And it was really making me think about situations where um where we might perceive more or less communication as beneficial or not. And so like uh part of me just for for context from my perspective is that I I tend to agree that I really do like overcommunication. Like I would lean generally more that way.

But I was thinking about it, especially from reading comments, and I'm like, that's it's very um un unqualified of a statement because I think it's way too easy for someone to hear that and be like, well, dude, like in all these situations, I would hate that. And I could sit there agreeing. And so I I wanted to talk about like when he's he or she, I can't recall, is is saying like this idea of being too loud. I I think that I have some different flavors of what that means and and I would change my perspective a little bit. So, uh let me start trying to explain some of this. And I want to give you the, you know, the disclaimer in case you're new to the channel. Um all of what I talk about is obviously going to be from my perspective, my lived experiences.

So there is always going to be that bias coming up. But my intention is never to tell you that this is the only way or the one right way or you know uh that some way is always wrong or always right kind of thing. It's it's never my intention. So uh just keep that in mind as I chat and I will try to make sure that I I look at different angles as much as I can. That's the thing I need to practice and we'll do my best. So when it comes to overcommunication, uh let's talk about the parts of this that I really do like. Um especially with a lot of people moving to, you know, remote work or global work. I want to be careful when I say remote work. I don't just mean like, oh, we don't have to go into the office like, yep, there's lots of that.

There's unfortunately lots of like being forced back to the office. At Microsoft, we're going back uh 3 days a week. Um, which for me is not really a big deal. I was already going in two days a week, so and no one was forcing me, so not not a not a huge deal. But I think the flexibility of being able to work fully remote is awesome. So there's a lot more, I would say, compared to a few years back, um, like before the, uh, before the dark times where we had everyone in office. Now there's a a larger distribution of people working remote. But not only just to work from home, it's because there's like you have global teams, right? So for example, I have uh on my team I have I'm not going to give you their names or anything like that, but I have employees in Mexico.

I have employees in Costa Rica. I have employees in Brazil, uh North America, right? I work with people in China. Um so when I say remote, I don't just mean work from home. I mean like literally teams that are geographically dispersed. And so I find that when you have that compared to being physically colllocated, this person is crazy tailgating me. I just realized what are you doing, sir? There's a police officer in front of me, too. I hope you have a very bad day sitting in traffic. That's what I hope for you. When you have all these teams that are geodispersed compared to being in the office that you're forced to communicate, you know, over chat, over email, um that's scheduling calls at times that maybe aren't effective. And the the natural side effect is that there is just less communication and the communication is going to be um sort of less less rich, right?

Uh and that's just because you don't have this luxury of being able to turn in a chair and talk to someone with full like resolution, right? Of like you get their body language, you like there's no delay in them. You can ask them for clarification like right away. You're having real human face tof face conversations. It's really hard to beat that. Don't get me wrong, lots of benefits to async communication, but in terms of clarity of information, um, you know, getting it right from a human is uh like from their face is it's hard to beat the clarity of that. So, the reason I really like overcommunication is that it helps to close some of the gaps where we're making assumptions that people got to hear, right? So, for example, if I needed to communicate something to the whole team, I would try not to do it just once.

I wouldn't just send a message in teams to the whole team or one email like it would be a team's message or two or three depending on the timing and the context and the the criticality and it would be an email so that if people aren't checking their teams like you get the email too and vice versa, right? Um when I see people in person I would be trying to communicate it. So, like trying to overcommunicate certain things I think is incredibly helpful because like I was saying, it's just too easy to miss out on on these other opportunities. And if you want to capture the attention of everyone on the team, uh, or even just making sure you're getting a subset of people and making sure they're getting whatever information you need to convey, like overcommunicating is helpful. Um, I realize that probably sounds a little bit too much maybe from an engineering manager's perspective.

So, uh, I'll share my observations on one of the we call them feature crews, like a sub team. I have a particular sub team that I think does a really good job with their communication. Um, not that the other crews I have do a poor job, but this team, um, I would say a lot of the time does overcommunicate and I think it works extremely well for them. So, little bit of context for the team composition. There are a couple of uh principal engineers that operate in this team and then uh there is uh the distribution is quite skewed. So you have uh a lot of people shouldn't say a lot, sorry. You have a couple of engineers that are the the principal band. So you know they're higher much higher in level and then uh the rest of the engineers uh have kind of started like very early in career and uh little bit in the middle.

So very heavily skewed to either side. And um especially even with the the people that are in the middle, like the people that have been on the team the longest happen to also be the the highest in seniority in terms of level. So you have a lot of lower level people that are new to the team. And I would say from like a learning and understanding perspective, when you're coming into a team that's not like brand new to begin with, there's a lot of stuff to learn, a lot of stuff to understand. And this team does a really awesome job. Uh like our teams chat works really well. And they will take to teams and they will ask questions. They will instead of direct messaging each other for everything, they'll go to our team chat and they ask the questions there. They answer the questions there.

they'll share like, "Hey, did you see that there's this ongoing issue in some other area or I'm looking at an issue that might be for our area and like kind of using this as a a small community chat for our our sub team." And I really really do think that uh that has been like a tremendous thing for them. the status updates and stuff they'll take to the chat as well. Like, you know, if they need people to to jump on uh poll requests and code reviews, if they have design docs and stuff, it's not um like they they will regularly jump in to try and remind people, hey, can you check this out for me? and you can see the other people on the team and I would say especially the more junior engineers jumping in to react and and respond and stuff like very quickly.

So there is a lot of communication going on. So at least in this context I find it's extremely valuable. And uh the other piece that I'll share on this is that in particular before I was at Microsoft uh when I was at a digital forensics company, we weren't working remote. Uh the teams that I had were were in person. And when it came to the benefit of overcommunication, the the working dynamic, I don't know if like I'll ever have this again in my life, uh just because of how a lot of people are structured to work, but we could we literally didn't have to rely on like daily standups to know what was going on. even with our product owner. We still did them with our product owner uh because that was the probably the the most removed from our direct team even though they were heavily involved.

But standups for us would have been a complete waste of time because we all already knew what we were doing because we were always talking about what we were building, what we're working on. It was just always happening. And it's because we were number one, we were coll-located physically, like literally arms like the way and just always talking about what we were building, right? So, you know, the feature I'm working on or the bug fix I'm doing, but throughout the day, like we're chatting about like how we're approaching the code or what we got stuck on or, you know, a silly test we found or, you know, we're hitting a roadblock refactoring something and here's what our strategy is. It was just nonstop that our team was discussing this stuff and I I think that that was one of the most highly collaborative environments uh that I've I've ever seen and it was extremely helpful.

So from my experience overcommunication has been really good. Now, some of the comments in this Reddit thread were talking about uh like, hey, like, you know, software engineers don't don't care about some information like it's actually noise. You're distracting them. And um you know, so this part I don't necessarily agree with. Someone was like they only care about like uh what's coming up next if it only if it like affects them directly in their direct work. And I was like, I don't I actually think that's objectively false to make a blanket statement like that for what it's worth. But uh what I do agree with is that there is stuff that is absolutely just noise. So when I'm talking about overcommunication, I do think that you need to be somewhat selective. And I got to move lanes here. One sec. I sometimes get into this situation on this part of the highway where I'm like trapped.

One sec. One more. Okay. So, especially and I'll share this again from an engineering manager perspective. I always will tell people on my teams like I uh I try to let people know like as soon as I have information that I I think is going to be helpful or relevant, I will share. Like my goal is never to hide things. I very much want to lean into being transparent, open, honest about as much as I can. And that often puts me in situations where maybe I hear something and I'm like, "Ah, I don't know if I like I fully agree with this, right? I I have to get aligned, but I will try to share as early as I can." And that often means that I I have these scenarios where I'm like, I need to figure out my own alignment on this uh and how I'm going to navigate it.

But I do try to make sure I can get people information early, right? So just to think of an example like I already mentioned our return to office stuff. Uh so it's still hybrid but you know when they were communicating back to office for me I'm like I I don't really agree with that at all personally. I don't I can't think of a a good reason why you wouldn't allow people to remain in whatever hybrid form they're doing. I just I don't agree with it. But I have to make sure that I'm communicating with the team on the strategy, what's going to be happening, answering their questions, and that's just the reality of it. I have to make sure that I'm communicating those things very early and being part of the conversation with them, right? So, that's something that's super important to get done early.

But there's other stuff that if you're just making noise about it, you're going to distract people or there's like levels of the communication like going into the weeds on things depending on what the topic is. Sometimes you can confuse people. Sometimes you communicate those things and they have more questions and it's like not really from a good place. It's like because you're literally getting them to ask things and now they're becoming nervous about it and it's just based on whatever the information is. So there is filtering that I do, but it's not to hide things. There's filtering I do because based on someone's level or where they're what they're working on and stuff like that, I have situations where I'm like, "This is just going to be distracting." But when it comes to larger forums, I try my best at least to to try and overcommunicate things like um like what is actively going on for work and uh especially like incidents and things like that.

Try my best to do that. So definitely agree that you can overcommunicate the uh sort of like the wrong things or make too much noise about details that might be confusing for people. And I think that kind of I will always bring things back to like communication in general and like like situational leadership. You don't have to think about it from like a a leading perspective, but the situational leadership part is like reminding yourself that people are individual and not everyone is going to benefit from the same types of things. Okay, I went way too long on some parts of that. I wanted to talk about this other idea of being loud and I need a whole other talk on this cuz Crossroad's only like a minute away. But the type of communication that I wanted to go over that I don't think is good because this also came up in the comments a lot.

It's not to do with like overcommunicating information. It's about being the loud one that doesn't shut up, that doesn't give people the opportunity to speak up. And I think that this is extremely challenging. It's not a good spot. It's not a good set of qualities and uh it actually gets other people on the team to shut up, which is exactly what you don't want. So, I do think it's very problematic when you have this kind of person. Now, I think a lot of the time where I've seen this happen is more senior people on a team because they have the confidence of being there for a while. It doesn't have to be a more senior person, but generally speaking, I I noticed this. Um, they're more senior. They have more information about the domain. They have more confidence in the domain. They're often the person that people have been asking questions to, so they can answer things.

So, they're positioned well, but when you have certain people that do this kind of thing and they're the loud one, it almost means that they steamroll people and it means that other people don't have the chance to talk and other people often give up on trying to Come on. Parking spots. Oh, one left. Yeah. Um, so like I said, I need a whole other conversation on this, but just to kind of wrap up that thought, when you have the loud person on the team, to me, it's not about overcommunicating information. It's about um the only information that gets communicated is the one person's and it is overwhelming. It means other people can't communicate things. Uh so it it has like this opposite effect. Instead of broadcasting what could be helpful information, it is the only information that gets conveyed to you is one person's opinion and it's loud and there's no opportunity.

Loud as in literally could be in meetings where people are being loud to speak over others or not giving them a chance to talk. uh or loud uh like metaphorically where someone's communicating even in chat and they're like you know it's it's only my opinion and if anyone does have the audacity to speak up and and share their opinion it's kind of like no it's shut down. So loud can be um not just audibly loud but um like an overwhelming kind of uh perspective or voice that's being it's being shared. So, that kind of thing is is really problematic and um yeah, it'll need a whole other video, but I wanted you to think about that if you stayed to the end of this one because I do think they mean different things. And I think that when people on this Reddit thread were responding, you were getting some of both, which is why I think it's valuable that we also talk about the other one.

So, keep that in mind. I'll make another video and I'll see you in the next one. Take care.