"No, it's less effort than that"

Your workplace may be toxic. My manager celebrates simplification and cost reduction when it solves business problems.

Completely different topic. I'm not even referencing "my workplace", I'm talking our entire industry.

Please don't generalise or you wipe out the occasional good that does exist.

Then you’re just empirically wrong. I’ve never had managers who didn’t want me to have professional communication skills in the ten years I’ve been in our industry.

Now seriously, my comment is a call for people to acquire professional communication skills, because they are extremely useful when negotiating work in far too many areas to count. Such advice getting down voted indicates how little value quality communications has within the software developer community - to the industry's demise. Communications are everything, and if you don't have good communication skills you get overlooked, abused, and misunderstood... leading to career frustration, stagnation, and burnout.

I have met such managers you talk about but from my personal experience they are not a majority. Maybe I have been lucky or you have been unlucky.

You manager wants you to agree to the work they ask you to perform, and they want to load you up with work to maximize your efficiency. How one negotiates when you're reaching capacity is professional communications. If one is unable to attain work/life balance that is due to a lack of communication skills, the lack of the ability to explain you're past ordinary capacity, burning your health. Our industry is over run with members over working - that's due to their inability to communicate the are over capacity.

Tbh, I downvoted you not because I don’t value quality communications, but because negotiating around your capacity is a small slice of professional communication, and your approach is needlessly adversarial. You will experience a lot of useless friction in your life by taking that approach.

Good communication isn’t adversarial: by the time it becomes adversarial, you’ve already lost. It can include solid documentation, taking the time to mentor others, respectful but clear code reviews, helping others argue your case for rescoping, presenting your work at meet-ups or conferences, hallway testing a new feature, listening to teammates explain an approach…

…and yes, sometimes negotiating capacity. If that feels like an adversarial conversation, then your manager sucks, and you should find a new one.

I don’t think you’re being downvoted because you’re promoting improved communication skills. I think you’re being downvoted because you’re implying that managers “absolutely does not want you to have such skills”.

I’d wager portraying an important work relationship as adverserial and manipulative is why people downvote you. It’s a bit of an overplayed cliché with the bad boss.

Ironically you might be downvoted because of what you’re saying being misunderstood, which I guess is to your point.

My current manager asks me to define the work, and has asked me not to do certain things because he feared it would overload me. He values professional communication and endorses people who want to improve them, going so far as to allocate work time and support them financially in their efforts to learn.

I’ve also been a manager at 3 different companies, one of them my own, and my philosophy has not been to push deadlines or work, but to spend more time understanding requirements, and simply try to break down long-running projects into small pieces that can be estimated more accurately. One of the biggest problems I’ve witnessed in software is that estimates in units of years are always very wrong, while estimates in units of days or weeks are pretty good.

I have to agree with the parent; you’re making incorrect assumptions and maybe projecting your own bad experience, and ending up accidentally saying something that isn’t true.

They're not wrong. Our industry has a burnout problem. Some places are nicer than others to work at, but that doesn't mean the industry as a whole doesn't have problems.