management

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Quoting Sean Goedecke

On Insider amnesia, alluding to “the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect“:

When some problem with your company is posted on the internet, and you read people’s thoughts on it, their thoughts are almost always ridiculous. For instance, they might blame product managers for a particular decision, when in fact the decision in question was engineering-driven and the product org was pushing back on it. Or they might attribute an incident to overuse of AI, when the system in question was largely written pre-AI-coding and unedited since. You just don’t know what the problem is unless you’re on the inside.

But when some other company has a problem on the internet, it’s very tempting to jump in with your own explanations. After all, you’ve seen similar things in your own career. How different can it really be?

After working at a few prominent organizations over the years, this very much rings true. Large organizations are large, have complex internal dynamics, and it’s hard to guess why something is going on inside them without deep internal knowledge. It’s a good reminder.

Consider your (multiple!) audiences

I’ve been spending a lot of time helping colleagues with communications lately, and one of the refrains I keep repeating is “consider your audience!”

For any given project you’ve worked on, you may need to be able to talk about your work in many different formats. Non-exhaustively, these might include:

  • Working documentation for colleagues within your team, familiar with all the context and able to find and integrate other documentation
  • A detailed report for other experts outside your team, showing all your work
  • A short technical report, also for other experts, but without all the steps shown
  • A one-page executive summary, geared towards decision-makers who are in that fuzzy “informed but not fully expert” zone
  • A less-technical essay in more informal language, i.e. the “blog post” format
  • A single paragraph summarizing key results
  • A 30-60 minute presentation
  • A 5-minute presentation
  • A single bullet point that can go in your resume

Each of these formats is pitched at different audiences — people who have different levels of background knowledge, need different information about the project, and who are willing to spend different amounts of time reading your work. Some formats might work for multiple audiences, but a lot of the time you need to use a different format when the audience changes. IMO there is no such thing as a format that works for everyone!

A common trap I see engineers fall into is thinking that the first version, the detailed technical report, is the only document they need. And that all the others can be produced by just copy-pasting from the detailed report. To some extent that can be a starting point, but each of these different communication formats does need to be tailored to the people you expect to read it!

I also see folks forget that some audiences will not have time for a detailed report. If you’re communicating with a less expert audience, they are almost always going to be unwilling or unable to read a 20 page doc… or even a 5 page doc. These audiences need their own format because you need to be able to provide information at the right page.

Over time, and especially as you get more senior, you will likely need to be at least reasonably good at all of these. In my current role, managing a fairly high-level engineering team, I often need to be able to write all of these for any given project.

Because it’s 2025, many folks will suggest “just use an LLM translate between formats!” That’s not necessarily a bad approach, at least when you’re going from a more detailed document to a less detailed one. I’ve seen LLMs produce some decent executive summaries. But it’s really important to remember that LLMs are just text generators, not experts — you are the one who actually understands your project!

LLMs will also cheerfully invent information, so you can’t trust them to fill in details starting from a summary. (This seems like it should be obvious, but I have absolutely seen people try to use an LLM to produce a detailed doc from a summary — that direction doesn’t work!)