Agree with the problem but this list reads like a vent.

Communicating effectively is the central problem of all humanity!

This vent criticizes developers for not knowing how to listen. that's why it comes off condescending. The root problem is that people don't know what they don't know.

The best communicators are translators. People listen because the message becomes self evident in their understanding.

It's hardly a breakdown because everyone is acting like a toddler with their fingers in their ears.

This is ironically why we reach for systems and engineering. The system can build in gap detection and frameworks for translation. It's not perfect and creates its own problems but scolding each unit human to listen better does nothing for the collective environment: the team, the company… the system.

Passing on what an ancient greybread told me. He said look at it as a Noisy system (signal is always lower than noise no matter what you do) with bounded chimps inside it.

Bounded meaning there are upper limits to what anyone can do. And there are upper limits to how frequently model updates of the chimp brain can happen per unit time. And the limits of a group are much lower. At the extreme end Large institutions once they settle on a model of reality can take decades to radically update it. Even if all signs say reality has totally changed.

So with those constraints in mind decide what you want to spend your energy and time on.

Yeah. It's just some random self-help piece. But slightly worse, as at least self-help books would provide some examples.

> Communicating effectively is the central problem of all humanity!

If that were true, there'd be something about it in the Bible.

I am a developer, I also have worked enough other jobs to know how important communication is and how bad developers can be at it.

A typical pattern I recognized is that many developers communicate like bad medical doctors: they do "Mhh, Ahh" and then after a way to short period they fire out a diagnosis of what you need, sometimes without you even having said everything relevant yet.

It is nothing new that people in software are at times not the best communicators. For the first part the interesting bit isn't what your clients want, it is what they need. Unless they are the usually rare customer that has a good understanding of how software could solve their problem elegantly, you will have to assume it was someone's job to come up with something and that someone has never written or thought a lot about software before. That doesn't mean their ideas are worthless, but it means the work of finding the requirements and coming up with a solution is usually not done when you arrive. And the way to get it done is communication, by observation and by having them explain the processes.

Many software developers are in fact really not listening in my experience. Not that developers are the only people that happens to, doctors or other technicians also come to mind. They are often trying to quickly come across as competent by showing off their good grasp of the subject. To them you are a clear case of some category of problem they have dealt with a hundred times. This can work for them.. Until it does not.