"No, it's less effort than that"

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.

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.