If you have been in tech long enough, you start noticing something odd. People are arguing, but not about the actual work. They are reacting to tone, brevity, phrasing, or the lack of it. Someone thinks another person is being cold. Someone else thinks the first person is being long winded. Both walk away mildly annoyed, neither quite sure why, and half the time they cannot even explain what just happened.
A lot of this comes down to how and when people learned to communicate.
Those of us who grew up on BBS systems, IRC, Usenet, and early forums learned communication when bandwidth was limited and context was fragile. Text was all you had. There were no reactions, no typing indicators, no easy edits. If you sounded sharp, that was on you. Because of that, habits formed around softening edges, explaining intent, and sometimes over clarifying just to avoid misunderstandings. That was not insecurity, it was survival. When misunderstandings could spiral for days in threaded conversations, clarity mattered. You learned to think before you typed, because you might live with that message for a while…
Younger ohana, or padawans as I sometimes call them, grew up in a very different environment. Slack, Teams, Discord, and modern messaging assume constant presence. Messages are fast, editable, and disposable. Tone is often inferred or ignored. Brevity is efficiency. Silence is normal. A short sentence is not rude, it is just a sentence. There is less emotional weight attached to each message because the tools absorb mistakes quietly and quickly.
Even acronyms evolved differently across generations, and this is where things get subtle. LOL is a good example. For GenX, it often came from those early low bandwidth days as a way to soften a message or signal friendliness. It was not always about something being funny. Today, that same “lol” can be read as dismissive or sarcastic by someone who does not know the context behind it. For many people, it is just muscle memory. No attitude intended. The meaning shifted, but the habit stuck… and that gap creates friction.
Neither approach is better. They are optimized for different constraints.
Problems show up when these styles collide at work. A GenX engineer writes a careful, friendly message and gets eye rolls for “over explaining.” A younger engineer writes a clean, minimal reply and gets read as cold or dismissive. Both think the other is being difficult, when in reality they are just speaking different dialects of the same language.
This gets trickier in leadership and operations roles, because communication is no longer just about being understood. It is about not creating unnecessary friction. Assuming everyone grew up with the same tools, norms, and unwritten rules is an easy mistake to make. I think about this constantly, because the cost of getting it wrong shows up as tension, not tickets or alerts.
At some point, you start noticing your own patterns. The urge to soften everything. The reflex to explain intent before intent is questioned. The “lol” that sneaks in even when nothing is funny. And yes, the GenX “…” that carries way more meaning than you intended. Once you see it, you get a choice. Not to erase those habits, but to decide when they help and when they add noise.
This is not about suppressing personality or “acting professional.” It is about code switching. The same way engineers switch between languages, protocols, or interfaces, experienced technologists often switch communication styles depending on the audience. That ability is not a weakness. It is fluency.
The irony is that many of the clearest communicators in tech came from eras where you had to slow down and think before you typed. Newer generations benefit from tools that quietly smooth over mistakes. Both bring strengths. Both bring blind spots. Understanding this does not fix every interaction, but it removes a lot of unnecessary judgment.
Most people are not being rude, awkward, or verbose on purpose. They are just running different defaults. Once you see that, work conversations get quieter. Not shorter, just calmer…
I hope this is helpful to you!