I agree with the sentiment that gratuitous happy-talk adds noise to what ought to be clear, bottom-line-up-front engineering communications. But the recipients of those communications are people, and most people have feelings. So a good engineer ought to optimize those communications for overall success, and that means treating the intended recipients as if they matter. Some human-level communication is usually beneficial.

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.

I agree with your point about human level communication and treating the recipients like they matter. I generally tend to prefer communication that is more on the blunt/direct side, but if there's one thing about communication that I've learned throughout my career, it is that the people who do best are adept at communicating well with a wide variety of people with different communication styles and preferences.

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.

I agree it makes sense to specify that it is not certain, by adding "it looks like" (or "it seems like", or other wording that would not be too long; as another comment mentions, "looks" can sometimes be wrong). The other stuff might be unnecessary, although it might depend if it is implied or expected according to the context (in many contexts I would expect it to be unnecessary; another comment mentions how it can even be wrong sometimes).

(Your message is better than the one with a lot of noise, though.)

> “It looks like” concisely signals that you have a good faith belief in your diagnosis but are not certain.

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.

"seems to be causing" is also an excellent alternative to "it looks like" that doesn't hinge on visual-sensory primacy, and tends to translate slightly less ambiguously across language-familiarity boundaries due to 'seems' having more precise meaning re: uncertainty than 'looks', 'feels', 'sounds'. Or you could abbreviate to "could be" / "may be" / "might be" (non-high certainty), "is probably" (high certainty) if that sort of nuance is your thing. Noteworthy point: it is neurotypical to treat "is" as 100% certain rather than 99.9% certain when someone says it confidently, but as 80% certain rather than 99.9% certain when someone says it uncertainly, based solely on non-verbal nuance; this can be infuriating and I tend to recommend saying "I am certain" at 99.9% in combination with courteous handling of the slight but eternal possibility of being wrong.

"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.