Two Tiny Fixes That Could Transform Your Communication at Work
14 Jul 2025 #miscDid you join Software Engineering because you liked coding and time alone? Think again.
You’ll spend more time in meetings than coding:
- Daily stand-ups
- 1-on-1s
- Team retros
- Five minutes (that become hours) with another dev revisiting code you wrote a year ago, and you barely remember it
With all these interactions, technical skills alone aren’t enough. You need strong communication skills.
The best resource for that? How to Win Friends and Influence People. Newer books exist, but this one is a true classic.
Here are two ideas from that book that changed how I approach conversations at work:
Never, ever, ever tell anyone they’re wrong.
That’s the worst way to start or end a conversation. And you won’t change the other person’s mind.
At a previous job, I had the chance to apply that principle.
We were working to connect our hotel solution to a third-party API using the PKCE flow. One developers read an outdated tutorial and wanted to implement it incorrectly.
If I hadn’t read the book, I would have said, “You’re wrong. Here’s how to do it… You, moron!” OK, I would have only thought the last part.
But instead I said something like, “Hey, maybe I read an outdated tutorial or something. Here’s what I found…“ A few moments later, I got a “You’re right!” with a facepalm emoji.
Avoid blaming. Instead, pretend you’re the one who might be wrong.
Be careful with your “but.”
Often what comes after a “but” is something negative.
And people remember more the last words they hear. So if your “but” comes last, that’s all what they will remember.
“That’s a good idea, but we will go over budget” is different from “That’s a good idea, and if we stay within budget, it’ll be perfect.”
Find ways to replace your “no, but…” with a “yes, and…”
Ten years ago, I thought coding was just cracking symbols. It took me years to learn coding is also about being in countless calls and sync-ups: negotiating deadlines and sharing expectations with non-tech people.
That’s why working on our communication skills is one of the 30 proven strategies in my book, Street-Smart Coding: 30 Ways to Get Better at Coding. That’s the roadmap I wish I had when I was starting out.