The corporate world has developed an allergic reaction to communication, and somewhere between the rise of Slack fatigue and inbox zero evangelism, we've convinced ourselves that the solution to poor communication is less communication altogether. This is not just wrong. It's dangerously incompetent leadership that masquerades as employee advocacy while actually undermining the very people it claims to protect. I experienced this firsthand recently when, as an engineering manager responsible for compliance and team development, I sent a blanket reminder about outstanding training requirements only to have a fellow manager immediately push back, claiming engineers were "getting too much shit" and demanding I stop "calling things out." Let me be clear: this mentality doesn't protect engineers. It protects mediocrity, enables organizational dysfunction, and ultimately creates the exact problems it purports to solve.
The argument against proactive communication typically follows a predictable pattern that sounds reasonable on its surface but collapses under scrutiny. It masquerades as employee advocacy with familiar refrains like "our engineers are overwhelmed," "they need focus time," and "we're creating notification fatigue." These concerns appear thoughtful until you examine what they actually propose: solving information overload by withholding critical information. This is the managerial equivalent of addressing obesity by removing nutrition labels, a solution that treats the symptom while ignoring the disease and ultimately makes the underlying problem worse. What these managers fail to recognize is that they're not reducing stress by limiting communication. They're increasing ambiguity, and ambiguity is one of the primary sources of workplace anxiety according to established research in organizational psychology.
Research from Project Aristotle, Google's multi-year study on team effectiveness involving over 180 teams, identified psychological safety and dependability as two of the five critical factors for high-performing teams. Psychological safety requires transparent communication where team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other. Dependability requires clear expectations where people know what's expected of them and can count on their teammates to deliver quality work on time. You cannot build either of these foundational elements in an information vacuum. A 2023 study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that role ambiguity was directly correlated with increased stress, decreased job satisfaction, and higher turnover intentions across multiple industries and organizational levels. When managers advocate for reducing communication about requirements, deadlines, or compliance matters, they're not creating the peaceful, focused environment they imagine. They're creating uncertainty, second-guessing, and the kind of organizational anxiety that leads to burnout far more effectively than any number of clear, informative emails ever could.
The criticism of my blanket communication reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of organizational dynamics and basic management principles that any competent leader should grasp. Individual call-outs create exactly the environment critics claim to oppose: one where engineers feel singled out, embarrassed, targeted, or unfairly scrutinized compared to their peers. Blanket communications distribute responsibility while maintaining accountability, creating a psychologically safe environment where everyone receives the same information and understands that compliance gaps are common and addressable rather than shameful failures. This isn't revolutionary management theory that requires an MBA to understand. It's basic organizational psychology that has been validated across decades of research. When you address an entire team about a shared requirement, you normalize the issue by signaling this is a common gap rather than an individual failure, you reduce defensive reactions because people don't feel personally attacked when everyone receives the same message, you create peer accountability where team members naturally align behavior with group norms, and you maintain documentation that protects both the organization and individuals by creating a clear record that information was communicated.
The alternative to blanket communication is individual outreach to each engineer, which is actually more intrusive, more time-consuming, and more likely to create the exact micromanagement dynamics that genuinely do waste engineering time. Imagine the scenario: instead of one team-wide email that takes thirty seconds to read, I would need to schedule individual conversations with fifteen engineers, each requiring calendar coordination, context-switching, and the social overhead of a one-on-one discussion about an incomplete requirement. Each engineer would need to stop their work, join a meeting, discuss why they haven't completed the training, commit to a completion date, and then return to their work with the cognitive disruption that comes from task-switching. The total organizational cost of this approach would be exponentially higher than a single clear email, yet this is apparently what managers who claim to protect engineering time actually advocate for when they push back against blanket communications. The math doesn't work, the psychology doesn't work, and the underlying premise that engineers need to be protected from information is fundamentally flawed.
Here's what makes the "stop communicating" argument particularly galling and reveals its complete disconnect from organizational reality: we're not talking about optional suggestions or nice-to-have recommendations that could be deprioritized when workloads are heavy. Training requirements, especially in regulated industries or organizations with security protocols, exist for legal and operational reasons that don't disappear because a manager decides they're inconvenient. When an audit occurs, and audits always occur whether from external regulators, internal compliance teams, or clients conducting vendor assessments, the first question isn't "Did your engineers feel good about the communication cadence?" The first question is "Can you demonstrate that personnel were informed of their obligations and given adequate opportunity to fulfill them?" The answer to that question determines whether your organization faces failed certifications that block contract renewals, regulatory fines ranging from thousands to millions of dollars depending on industry and jurisdiction, security incidents resulting from untrained staff who didn't understand proper protocols, or legal liability in the event of data breaches or compliance failures that could have been prevented with proper training.
In 2024, the average cost of a data breach reached $4.45 million according to IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report, which analyzed breaches across organizations of various sizes and industries worldwide. Organizations in healthcare faced average costs of $10.93 million per breach, reflecting the particularly sensitive nature of health data and the strict regulatory frameworks governing its protection. How many of those breaches involved personnel who weren't properly trained on security protocols because a well-meaning manager decided that compliance communications were "too much shit" for engineers to handle? How many could have been prevented by that supposedly annoying reminder email that takes less than a minute to read but could save millions in breach costs, remediation expenses, legal fees, and reputational damage? The cost-benefit analysis is so overwhelmingly in favor of clear, proactive communication that the opposite position becomes indefensible once you actually examine the risks involved.
Let's address the characterization of communications as "shit" that engineers are receiving, because this framing is both patronizing and revealing of deeper assumptions about professional capability. This language assumes engineers are children who need protection from information rather than professionals who can prioritize their own inboxes and manage competing demands like adults in any other profession. It infantilizes the very people it claims to advocate for, suggesting they lack the sophistication to distinguish between important communications and noise or the autonomy to determine how to allocate their attention. What engineers actually report as problematic in workplace communication studies conducted across the tech industry is unclear expectations where they're told something is important without understanding why or by when, inconsistent messaging where different managers provide contradictory information creating confusion and wasted effort, last-minute demands where requirements are communicated with insufficient lead time forcing rushed work and weekend overtime, unnecessary meetings where synchronous time is wasted on items that could be asynchronous, and lack of context where they're told what to do without understanding the broader purpose or how their work connects to organizational goals.
Notice what's conspicuously absent from that list of actual engineering frustrations? General team reminders about known requirements sent via asynchronous channels that can be read and processed when convenient. The 2022 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, which gathered responses from over 70,000 developers worldwide across companies of all sizes and industries, found that the top workplace frustrations were inadequate tooling, technical debt, unclear objectives, and lack of learning opportunities. "Too many informational emails" didn't crack the top ten complaints, and in fact, poor communication and lack of transparency did appear on the list, but as problems engineers wanted more of, not less. When we actually listen to what engineers say they need rather than what managers assume they need, we find that the problem isn't too much communication. The problem is bad communication, and the solution to bad communication has never been less communication.
The most insidious aspect of the "protect engineers from communication" mentality is that it masquerades as employee advocacy while actually representing something far more self-serving and problematic. It positions the manager as a heroic shield against organizational demands, a defender of engineering peace who alone understands what the team really needs. This narrative is appealing because it casts the manager in a positive light, requires no actual work to implement since doing nothing is easier than doing something, and avoids the uncomfortable reality that managers are responsible for ensuring compliance and accountability. But this is abdication dressed up as protection, a failure of basic managerial responsibility disguised as employee empowerment. A manager's job is not to insulate their team from reality or create a fantasy bubble where organizational requirements don't exist.
A manager's actual job is to provide context so people understand why things matter, remove obstacles that prevent people from succeeding, and ensure team members have the information and resources they need to meet expectations. Sometimes success requires completing mandatory training that isn't particularly exciting or immediately relevant to current projects. Sometimes it requires responding to organizational communications that might feel like interruptions to flow state. Sometimes it requires participating in processes that feel like bureaucratic overhead but serve important purposes for organizational health, legal compliance, or long-term sustainability. When a manager intercepts or criticizes necessary communication about these requirements, they're not protecting their team from unreasonable demands. They're creating a false reality where engineers don't have to engage with the ordinary responsibilities of professional employment, and that false reality inevitably collides with actual reality in ways that are far more disruptive and stressful than the original communication would have been.
This dynamic creates a perverse situation where engineers become dependent on their manager to filter all information, losing the direct connection to organizational context that helps them understand priorities and make good decisions independently. When managers position themselves as the sole conduit for information, they create exactly the kind of micromanagement and loss of autonomy that supposedly justified the communication restriction in the first place. Engineers can't make informed decisions about their own priorities if they don't have direct access to information about organizational requirements. They can't develop professional judgment about what matters and what doesn't if every piece of information is pre-filtered by someone else's judgment. They can't grow into senior roles that require independent decision-making and stakeholder management if they're shielded from the normal communications that flow through organizations. The "protection" becomes a cage that limits professional development while creating single points of failure where critical information lives in one manager's head rather than being broadly accessible to the team.
Once you accept the premise that managers should minimize communication to "protect" engineers from information, you're on a slippery slope with no logical stopping point. Should we stop communicating about security vulnerabilities that need patching because they might interrupt feature development? Should we avoid mentioning changes to deployment procedures because they require engineers to learn new processes? Should we hide information about upcoming organizational restructures that might affect team composition because they might cause anxiety? Should we withhold performance expectations and review criteria because they might feel like pressure? Should we conceal budget constraints that might impact project scope because they might be demotivating? Each of these could be framed as "too much shit" that distracts from the pure act of writing code, and each also represents critical information that professionals need to do their jobs effectively and plan their careers intelligently.
The logical endpoint of communication minimalism is a workforce that operates in ignorance of organizational reality until problems become crises that can no longer be ignored. Instead of proactive reminders about training deadlines that give people weeks to complete requirements on their own schedule, you get last-minute panic where managers suddenly realize an audit is coming and everyone needs to complete training immediately, creating actual disruption and actual stress. Instead of early visibility into changing priorities that allows teams to adjust plans and manage scope, you get blindsiding reorganizations where people learn about major changes through the rumor mill or sudden announcements. Instead of transparent communication about performance expectations that helps people course-correct before reviews, you get surprised and defensive reactions when feedback finally arrives. The irony is that minimizing communication in the name of reducing stress actually creates far more stress in the form of uncertainty, surprises, and crises that could have been managed smoothly with better information flow.
To be completely clear and fair to legitimate concerns about communication overload, there are real communication problems in most organizations that deserve attention and solutions. Email overload is a documented phenomenon where people receive hundreds of messages daily and struggle to identify what requires action versus what's informational. Meeting proliferation wastes countless hours in synchronous gatherings that could have been handled asynchronously or didn't need to happen at all. Notification fatigue from Slack, Teams, email, project management tools, and other systems creates constant interruption that fragments attention and destroys deep work. These are real problems that hurt productivity and wellbeing. But these problems stem from poor communication quality and thoughtless communication practices, not from communication quantity or the mere existence of organizational requirements. The solution is better communication that respects people's time and attention, not less communication that leaves people uninformed and unprepared.
What does better communication actually look like in practice, and how does it differ from the poor communication that legitimately frustrates people? Poor communication features vague subject lines that don't indicate priority or required action, buried action items hidden in paragraph text that people have to hunt for, unclear ownership where nobody knows who's responsible for what, and no deadlines that leave people guessing about urgency. Better communication features clear subject lines that immediately convey topic and urgency, explicit action items formatted distinctly with highlighting or separate sections, named owners so everyone knows who's responsible for each item, and specific deadlines that create shared understanding of timing. Poor communication scheduling includes meetings without agendas so people don't know what to prepare, no clear decision-making authority so discussions circle endlessly without resolution, and no documented outcomes so decisions get relitigated and action items get forgotten. Better communication scheduling includes distributed agendas sent in advance so people can prepare meaningfully, defined decision makers so there's clear authority to move forward, and documented action items with owners and deadlines circulated after meetings so everyone has a shared record.
Poor communication infrastructure means channels used inconsistently where sometimes information goes in email, sometimes in Slack, sometimes in ticket systems, and sometimes only in meetings, forcing people to check multiple systems constantly and still miss things. Better communication infrastructure means defined protocols where everyone knows that project updates go in one place, urgent issues go in another place, compliance requirements go in yet another place, and there's a clear system for what goes where and how to find it. A blanket email about training requirements with clear deadlines, specific instructions for completion, and links to necessary resources is actually a model of effective asynchronous communication according to these criteria. It provides necessary information in a format people can process when convenient, explains the requirement and its purpose, gives people adequate time to act without urgency-induced stress, and creates a paper trail that protects both individuals and the organization. This is exactly the kind of communication organizations should have more of, not less of, because it respects people's autonomy and time while ensuring they have what they need to succeed.
As an engineering manager, my responsibility is to ensure my team can succeed within organizational constraints, and that responsibility encompasses several specific duties that are non-negotiable regardless of whether they're always comfortable or convenient. I'm responsible for clarity, making sure people understand what's expected and why those expectations exist in the first place. I'm responsible for accountability, following up on commitments and requirements to ensure things actually get done rather than falling through the cracks. I'm responsible for context, explaining how engineering work connects to business objectives so people understand the bigger picture and can make better decisions. I'm responsible for advocacy, pushing back on unreasonable demands and unrealistic timelines that would set the team up for failure. I'm responsible for protection, shielding the team from unnecessary interruptions, scope creep, and distractions that don't serve any real purpose. Note that none of these fundamental responsibilities involves hiding information about mandatory requirements or creating an artificial bubble where organizational realities don't penetrate.
When a colleague suggests I should stop communicating about incomplete training, they're asking me to fail at my fundamental responsibilities in multiple ways simultaneously. They're suggesting I should create ambiguity instead of clarity by not telling people what's expected. They're suggesting I should avoid accountability instead of maintaining it by not following up on requirements. They're suggesting I should withhold context instead of providing it by not explaining why training matters. They're asking me to confuse advocacy with abdication by treating legitimate organizational requirements as unreasonable impositions. They're asking me to redefine protection as information restriction rather than removing actual obstacles to success. This isn't a reasonable request from a peer who has a different but equally valid management philosophy. This is a request that I abandon the core functions of management and pretend that wishful thinking can replace actual responsibility.
There's a broader trend here that extends beyond one interaction about one email and reflects a gradual erosion of professional standards under the supposedly noble banner of employee wellness and work-life balance. We're seeing a cultural shift where basic professional responsibilities are increasingly framed as unreasonable impositions that enlightened managers should shield their teams from experiencing. Professional responsibility has traditionally meant understanding that sometimes your job includes tasks you'd rather not do, and that competent adults manage these tasks alongside the parts of their work they find engaging and rewarding. Reading emails about mandatory training falls into this category of ordinary professional responsibility, as does responding to compliance requirements in a timely manner, participating in performance reviews and giving honest feedback, staying informed about organizational policies that affect your work, and managing your own time and priorities within the constraints of organizational needs.
Suggesting that engineers should be protected from these basic professional obligations doesn't elevate the profession or demonstrate respect for engineers as professionals. It diminishes the profession by suggesting that engineers are uniquely fragile compared to other professionals, unable to handle the standard requirements of organizational life that every other profession manages without complaint. Lawyers respond to communications about continuing legal education requirements and complete those requirements on schedule because it's a condition of maintaining their license to practice. Doctors complete mandatory training on new protocols, infection control, and medical record systems because it's part of providing competent care. Accountants stay current on tax law changes and complete ethics training because it's required by their certifying bodies. These professionals manage these requirements alongside demanding workloads, long hours, and complex intellectual challenges without their managers suggesting they should be shielded from the information. Engineers deserve the same respect, the assumption that they're capable of managing professional requirements without paternalistic intervention that treats them as less competent than their peers in other fields.
Organizations that adopt a policy of minimal communication, whether formally or through the accumulated effect of managers who individually decide to restrict information flow, pay predictable costs that compound over time and undermine organizational effectiveness in measurable ways. Compliance failures occur when people don't know about requirements, and those requirements don't get met, leading to failed audits, regulatory penalties, and the need for emergency remediation that's far more disruptive than proactive compliance would have been. Cultural erosion accelerates when lack of transparency breeds distrust, and when managers filter communications selectively, teams start to wonder what else they're not being told and whether management is being honest about organizational health, future plans, or potential risks. Duplicated effort wastes enormous amounts of time when without clear shared communications people ask the same questions repeatedly through different channels, creating far more interruption and overhead than a single clear announcement would have generated. Decision-making delays proliferate when information doesn't flow freely and decisions wait for information gathering through informal networks, slowing down everything from technical choices to strategic planning.
Accountability vacuums emerge when without documented communication it becomes impossible to determine who knew what and when, making it difficult to address performance issues fairly, learn from failures systematically, or distinguish between honest mistakes and negligent failures to act on known information. These costs compound over time rather than remaining static, creating organizations that move slowly compared to competitors, respond poorly to changing market conditions or technical landscapes, struggle with basic execution on even simple initiatives, and develop cultures of confusion and finger-pointing rather than clarity and shared responsibility. The cumulative effect of communication restriction is organizational dysfunction that manifests in missed deadlines, budget overruns, quality problems, and employee frustration with the very things managers claimed they were trying to prevent. The medicine is worse than the disease, and the tragic irony is that the managers who advocate for less communication often don't connect the organizational problems they observe to the communication restrictions they've implemented.
If we're genuinely concerned about engineering effectiveness, and we absolutely should be given the competitive landscape and the pace of technological change, the solution isn't less communication or protecting engineers from organizational realities. The solution is better prioritization frameworks that provide clear systems for determining what requires immediate attention versus what can wait until a more convenient time. The solution is improved information architecture with organized, searchable repositories where people can find information when they need it rather than hunting through email archives or asking around for tribal knowledge. The solution is reduced synchronous demands through fewer meetings, more documentation, and genuine respect for focus time as a limited resource that should be protected. The solution is clearer escalation paths with obvious processes for raising concerns or seeking clarification when something isn't working or doesn't make sense. The solution is realistic workload management through actual capacity planning that accounts for operational requirements, compliance obligations, and support work, not just feature development visible on roadmaps.
The solution is protected focus time through designated blocks where non-urgent communication is batched and people can work without interruption on complex problems that require sustained attention. None of these solutions, you'll notice, involve managers intercepting communications about mandatory requirements or creating artificial information barriers between engineers and organizational realities. They all involve making communication more effective, more respectful of people's time and attention, and better integrated into workflows rather than making it more scarce or treating information itself as the enemy. The goal should be communication that adds value without adding burden, and that's achievable through thoughtful design of communication systems and norms, not through the crude instrument of just reducing information flow and hoping for the best.
Managing is fundamentally about communication regardless of what level of management you're at or what type of team you lead. You communicate expectations so people know what success looks like, provide feedback so people can improve and grow, share context so people understand how their work fits into larger goals, align on priorities so everyone's pulling in the same direction, and ensure people have the information they need to succeed in their roles and advance in their careers. Suggesting that managers should communicate less is suggesting they should manage less, abdicating core responsibilities in favor of a hands-off approach that sounds empowering but actually abandons people to figure everything out on their own without the guidance and information they need. When I sent that blanket reminder about training, I was doing my job as a manager by providing clear information about a mandatory requirement in a format that respected everyone's time and avoided singling anyone out for public embarrassment. The pushback I received wasn't about protecting engineers from unreasonable burden or defending them from organizational overreach. It was about avoiding the discomfort of accountability and the inconvenience of follow-up.
Organizations don't fail because of too much communication about actual requirements that people need to know about and act on. They fail because of too little clarity about what matters and why, too little transparency about challenges and changes, too many managers who confuse silence with support and abdication with empowerment, and too much tolerance for the kind of soft incompetence that avoids short-term discomfort by creating long-term dysfunction. The engineers on my team are professionals with degrees, experience, and the demonstrated capability to solve complex technical problems under pressure. They can read an email that takes less than a minute to process, understand a requirement that's clearly explained, and manage their priorities accordingly without having an existential crisis or burning out from the overwhelming burden of being informed. They don't need a manager to shield them from information as if they were fragile children who can't handle reality. They need a manager to ensure they have the information required to do their jobs properly, meet their professional obligations, and advance their careers without being blindsided by failures they didn't even know were possible.
That's exactly what I provided with my communication about training requirements, and I'll keep providing clear, timely, respectful communication regardless of colleagues who think accountability is optional and transparency is negotiable. Because here's the fundamental truth about communication in organizations that everyone in a management role should understand: you can complain about it, you can try to minimize it, you can push back against it, you can create elaborate theories about why less is more. But you cannot build functional organizations without it, you cannot create high-performing teams in information vacuums, you cannot maintain compliance without documented communication, and you cannot develop professionals without giving them access to the information that professionals need. Any manager who thinks otherwise isn't protecting their team from burden or demonstrating enlightened leadership. They're failing their team, failing their organization, and ultimately failing at the basic requirements of management itself.