Name: How to Talk to a Software Engineer (for normal people)
Uploaded: 2020-03-27T18:22:43.000Z
Duration: 12 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hey, Tech Lead here and welcome back to another episode.

Present continuous

What I wanted to talk to you about today is

How to communicate with a software engineer.

I'm guessing that you're probably  like a software engineering manager.

and now you need to learn how to  communicate with your own team.

You probably don't know how to code  and you're way out of your league.

When you accepted your job, you thought that these would be like normal people, but they're not.

Some of you may be dating a software  engineer and there may be relationship troubles.

You may find that communication is just difficult.

Others of you may actually be software engineers

and have trouble communicating with yourself

make sense of what has actually happened to you

ever since you've picked up this profession.

I'm here to help as an experienced,  ex-Google software engineer.

Now, first of all I should note  that it is quite amazing that

we are even able to  communicate you and I

You may not be one and even  if you are a software engineer it can

Also be difficult for two software engineers to  practically communicate with each other.

I took this amazing leadership course  where we did an exercise.

It is called the True Colors exercise,  in which, we categorize people as:

Each person can be categorized as a color  and there are different personality types.

Now this was quite an interesting  exercise for me, because

fundamentally very similar and that  they reacted very similar to one another,

But, that is not actually quite true for many people.

They are very scientifically, rational objective people.

But, there's many other different colors.

Orange is much more action-oriented,  leadership oriented.

and you'll find that everybody is kind of different.

Many people, by the way, do not  talk to software engineers, period.

They will only communicate with a  software engineer through a translator

otherwise known as like a  software engineering manager.

And this is a pretty good idea, actually I would say. Because if you attempt to communicate directly

with a software engineer, you may accidentally  offend them and bring their wrath upon you.

You might find yourself being hacked or  stalked by software engineers.

Many of these people have not properly been

Socialized by our society and yet they exist.

You don't see them, but they spend a lot of their  time underground in basements and garages

Coding away, communicating with machines, and  much of the time we are protected from them.

Even inside companies, you might find that software  engineers are relegated to a separate entire building,

where normal people don't have to necessarily

communicate with them or interact with  them or even see them in any way.

But every now and then you may encounter one  and I have a few tips for you

The first tip is to communicate with them  using very simple If-then-else statements.

used by programmers all the time  and they will understand this.

You can also use do-while statements for loops,  like, for example, if your to say,

"While I am out        drink some coffee."

The programmer might just keep drinking coffee  in the repeated infinite loop, until you come back.

You might make sure that you're using very precise  language and you're not using words like, maybe.

In code, it's usually just true or false.  There's nothing in-between, it's binary.

Questions need to be answered deterministically,

which means that, the answer to a certain  question should be the same every time.

and the answer is different each time I ask it.

Well, you know computers don't work that way.  Computers always give the same answer.

If you were to change the answer you might offend  the programmer, you might piss them off.

You want to leave your emotions out, if possible.

even in scenarios where they're  banging their heads on the keyboard,

There's no apologies, there's no  emotions coming from the computer.

They've already been trained in the manner  in such that emotions will get them nowhere.

It's going to be a mistake if you're  expecting pity or sympathy

It's really all going to be about, cold hard facts and

Similarly, when you're talking to a programmer,  you don't necessarily need to show them

You know you can just give them  horrible news, whatever.

Whenever you start a conversation  with a engineer,

You want to clearly define the inputs  and the outputs of the conversation.

Unlike many conversations,  where a lot of people are

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How to Talk to a Software Engineer (for normal people)

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