The quest for an understanding of the need for good communication skills in developers, as well as everyone else, has become my personal vocation. I've been working in tech for four decades, and my vantage sees weak and poor communications as the underlying factor of all this chaos, this absurd reliance on extreme tooling, the overly complicated tech stacks, and the industry failure of resorting to "leet testing" to gain employment.

I'm an example of failed communications: I'm the idiot who went bankrupt trying to create Personalized Advertising, which is now known as Deep Fakes. I had a feature film quality system working in '08! But I could not convince investors how placing consumers into the video advertising of products with a celebrity commending their purchase would be a viable business. Granted, the global financial crisis had making new tech investments difficult to impossible to land. However, despite my placing VCs into film clips right in front of their eyes, they still did not get it. And inevitable one of them would have the "ah ha!" moment and declare "we should make porn!" and then that would be all they could conceive. I spent 5 years pitching, I took communications courses, hired marketing firms to critique my message. Still to this day, I cannot get people to realize the advertising value of placing consumers directly into the advertising. It is the ultimate "show them what this is", but I can't get people to grasp the value of that.

> Trying again is often not an option.

Life is an iterative game. You fail one day, you pick yourself up and try again the next one. The very act of trying makes you better at it. (For example by having a better internal model of what other people might think of a given text.)

> I know I'm a reasonable or adequate communicator, it's just that I'm not an excellent one.

For whatever it is worth I find what you write perfectly clear.

> I've noticed during heated debates on HN that the total of my votes can fluctuate wildly in both directions and finally end up close to zero.

Oh i see! Controversial subjects be controversial. I don't think aiming for "non-controversialness" is a worthy goal in itself. Of course one should pick their battles, but I wouldn't take that as a sign that there is anything wrong with how you communicate. You are not going to convince everyone, every time about everything. If you could, we would probably call that geas not communication anyway. :)

> They were so good they would spellbind their audiences.

I'm not familiar with the names you mention, but I will check them out. Thank you for the recommendation.

I still think we have spellbinding orators who discuss current public issues. I would count Adam Conover or Jordan Peterson as such for example. (and here I intentionally picked ones ideologically far from each other.) Now of course since I don't know your examples I can't judge how they measure up to them.