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You ask your engineer a simple question: “What happened with the deployment yesterday?”
Instead of a direct answer, you get a wall of text. Context about what they were trying to do. Explanations of why the approach made sense at the time. Caveats about the documentation being unclear. A timeline of events that somehow takes four paragraphs to explain a ten-minute incident.
You’re frustrated. Why can’t they just say what happened?
They’re not being evasive. They’re being defensive. And the difference matters enormously for what you do next.
The signal in verbose communication
When someone over-explains, they’re not trying to waste…