Getting information from people
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This is especially aimed at those who do maintenance programming and user support, but others can respond as well. (I'm kind that way.) Do you find that with some people, no matter how short and clear and precise you make your questions, it is difficult to get critical information from them?
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@chozang said in Getting information from people:
Do you find that with some people, no matter how short and clear and precise you make your questions, that it is difficult to get critical information from them?
This is because you're speaking the wrong language to them. These kinds of people need to be asked long, obscure, and vague questions in order to extract information from them.
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Seriously, though, making the question longer and more detailed often gets better results IME.
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My BA resembles this on steroids.
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@djls45 said in Getting information from people:
Seriously, though, making the question longer and more detailed often gets better results IME.
Really? I find that it makes them feel good, but it's absolutely useless. I know what bits of information I need, and if I give them opportunities to go astray, they will, and it leads to greater confusion, not clarity. I had a boss who would go on for 5 minutes. He knew what he was talking about, but it was useless to me. Finally, I timidly said to him, "There's only one person in the world who knows what my question is." But it didn't seem to register, except, perhaps, in a negative way.
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@chozang said in Getting information from people:
@Karla said in Getting information from people:
My BA resembles this on steroids.
BA?
Business Analyst -- you'd think since it is literally her job she would be decent at it.
Getting information from her is like pulling teeth and I have to repeat things constantly. She's worse than my 3 yo.
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@Karla said in Getting information from people:
Business Analyst -- you'd think since it is literally her job she would be decent at it.
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@loopback0 said in Getting information from people:
@Karla said in Getting information from people:
Business Analyst -- you'd think since it is literally her job she would be decent at it.
Invite her over, we could use more mods.
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@loopback0 said in Getting information from people:
@Karla said in Getting information from people:
Business Analyst -- you'd think since it is literally her job she would be decent at it.
LOL - I'm better at than she is and I don't even like to talk to people. About a year ago I started working around her and have been significantly less frustrated and more productive.
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@djls45 said in Getting information from people:
This is because you're speaking the wrong language to them. These kinds of people need to be asked long, obscure, and vague questions in order to extract information from them.
Yes and no; don't ask them your question, ask them to tell you the story of what they're doing and look for the answer to your question in what they reply with. And make sure you deploy things with enough remotely-accessible telemetry so that you can find out what you need without asking them at all when you need something technical and accurate (like exact error messages or IP addresses).
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@chozang Oh shit...the lady who is our liason or whatever to our HOA at the management company is a total retard. I don't think we've ever had any sort of communication with her that didn't result in a response that obviously ignored something we said.
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@chozang said in Getting information from people:
@Karla said in Getting information from people:
My BA resembles this on steroids.
BA?
Baracus, of course.
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@chozang said in Getting information from people:
Do you find that with some people, no matter how short and clear and precise you make your questions, that it is difficult to get critical information from them?
A company I used to work for had mandatory training on ... a specific process, complete with TLA, but Google shows no evidence that the name is used outside that company, so in the interest of anonymity, I'll just say ... the fine art of asking exactly the question you want answered and answering exactly the question that was asked. Failure to practice this art, especially if you ever had occasion to interact with the CEO, was a career-limiting failure — not career-ending, but creating a lasting impression that you didn't quite get the corporate culture.
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@chozang said in Getting information from people:
Do you find that with some people, no matter how short and clear and precise you make your questions, it is difficult to get critical information from them?
Yes, and I often find that something like what @dkf suggests helps (asking them to describe what they're doing rather than questions about what you think).
In many cases I find that the problem is that they don't have at all a mental model of the software, or the process that they are trying to achieve, that matches mine (I'm kind here, I'm saying "my model" rather than "the truth"...). So if you ask questions following your mental model, it's so far out of what they understand that they feel like they've misunderstood the question and their answer is widely off (see also jokes of support calls such as "what computer do you have?" (expecting Windows, Mac...) -> "a grey one"). By asking them to tell things how they see it, you get a coherent view, at least according to their model. You then have to understand what their model is, but you won't get anywhere until this happens in any case, and it sometimes gives you an opportunity to fix their model for the next time.
But it is very, very, frustrating...
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@chozang
Yes.
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Ask for screenshots. Always screenshots
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@Jaloopa
Inadvertently followed by screenshots of the entire desktop showing them composing the mail in Outlook and the cute picture with their dog they have as a desktop background
OR
you get a cropped screenshot that just cuts off information you are looking for or that has some information blurred out.
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@Luhmann on a wooden table
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@Jaloopa
Oh yeah, or a scan of a printen out screenshot preferably black&white
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@Luhmann said in Getting information from people:
@Jaloopa
Oh yeah, or a scan of a printen out screenshot preferably black&whitePasted into a Word document.
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@Luhmann A picture of roughly the right thing, unreadable because of reflections on the screen or because the phone they used to take the picture wasn't vertical enough.
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@remi said in Getting information from people:
@chozang said in Getting information from people:
Do you find that with some people, no matter how short and clear and precise you make your questions, it is difficult to get critical information from them?
Yes, and I often find that something like what @dkf suggests helps (asking them to describe what they're doing rather than questions about what you think).
In many cases I find that the problem is that they don't have at all a mental model of the software, or the process that they are trying to achieve, that matches mine (I'm kind here, I'm saying "my model" rather than "the truth"...). So if you ask questions following your mental model, it's so far out of what they understand that they feel like they've misunderstood the question and their answer is widely off (see also jokes of support calls such as "what computer do you have?" (expecting Windows, Mac...) -> "a grey one"). By asking them to tell things how they see it, you get a coherent view, at least according to their model. You then have to understand what their model is, but you won't get anywhere until this happens in any case, and it sometimes gives you an opportunity to fix their model for the next time.
But it is very, very, frustrating...
To be fair, their answer is more correct than what you were expecting. A gray one is a type of computer, while windows, linux, mac is is what operating system you run on it.
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@chozang said in Getting information from people:
This is especially aimed at those who do maintenance programming and user support, but others can respond as well. (I'm kind that way.) Do you find that with some people, no matter how short and clear and precise you make your questions, it is difficult to get critical information from them?
You just need to follow Jack Bauer's lead.
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@djls45 said in Getting information from people:
Seriously, though, making the question longer and more detailed often gets better results IME.
That just gives them more to ignore.
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@loopback0 said in Getting information from people:
@Luhmann said in Getting information from people:
@Jaloopa
Oh yeah, or a scan of a printen out screenshot preferably black&whitePasted into a Word document.
And then f
f
ffffff
fffaaaaaaaxed
Ugh. I managed to type it, in the end. You fuckers better laugh. You have no idea how painful that was.
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@Onyx said in Getting information from people:
I managed to type it,
You don't fax things by typing them!