Ask Slashdot: Communication Skills For Programmers?

An anonymous reader writes "As a new developer at a young-ish software company, I've been told my communication skills need some work. I'm not painfully introverted or socially inept, but I get lost in my work and only contact people if I need something from them or they ask me a question. Traditional advice isn't relevant to casual, less hierarchical companies — I don't have to hold my tongue when someone is wrong or worry about formalities. But I do need to connect with people professionally, since my team members and managers decide my perf and advancement. How do you keep colleagues abreast of your work without having exponentially many needless conversations?"

[SOLUTION] communication skills

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped reading after the first 2.5 sentences because as I programmer, I can see where this is going already and I like to be efficient. So - what you need to do is look yourself up in the employee database. If you don't have access with your user account, just use the root account - noone will mind. First make sure that all communication skills you have are listed, none are left unmentioned. Add missing ones - if you can think of any - to your entry in the database (and if necessary to the meta-table which describes all relevant skills). If all your communication skills are already listed, you'll need to learn some more and then add them. Maybe morse code - that's pretty easy to learn and always comes in handy. Speaking Klingon is always a popular choice too... My personal favourite when it comes to efficiency though is learning to speak backwards: You can easily learn that without even having to sacrifice any of your time by secretly recording yourself with your phone/headset while you're talking and listening to the reversed version of it played back to you, while the other person talks.

And that's already it - so simple. You should manage to figure the rest out on your own, just google "communication".
( Please don't forget to mark this topic as [solved], so other helpful people don't waste their time clicking on it! ;) )

Oblig Dilbert

[khasim]

Sadly, it is the lowest common denominator (well maybe highest common denominator): those that do need a lot of social interaction will get very frustrated by not having it. The assumption is usually that those that are quite or less social are not harmed by being forced to say hi and deal with small talk (even though that isn't the case when you need hours of consecutive time to figure out things sometimes, or just like the socialites might feel with no social interaction that like your life is being wasted with "how's the weather" talk).

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1996-01-12/ [dilbert.com]