Avalaxy

Specifically Instagram. After many years, I still get regular messages from spam bots, usually pretending to be women that are romantically interested. It seems trivial to ban (or even prevent) those accounts, from a technical perspective. Reporting them also doesn't seem to do much. Why is this still a thing? This should have been a solved problem years ago no? Are there, besides technical reasons, other reasons to keep spam bots alive on their platforms?

At work, I frequently find myself in situations where I'm pulled into some meeting where I have absolutely no idea what is going on and what people are talking about. I came to the conclusion that this is because most engineers are simply terrible at explaining things in a clear and concise way.

Same example of things that I encounter all the time:

- Completely not giving any sort of context. This happens often when I'm pulled into a meeting to talk about feature X, and where the other participants are already knowledgeable about feature X. It would help a lot of they would give me some context on what the feature is about, but at this point it's already a meeting with 10+ people, talking about the finer details so I can't really ask them to start all over from the beginning to explain it.

- Trying to explain things by going into the details instead of talking about the higher level principles. For example by showing me lines of code, instead of showing me schematics of what goes on at a higher level before showing me the nitty-gritty details.

- Not explaining the WHY. Often, people explain all sorts of solutions without even discussing what problem the solution solves.

- Relying on mostly text instead of images. I often have to read walls of text that describe a system. Or I have to listen to someone rambling on about how a system works. But it's very rare that they pull up a quick sketch, some diagrams, some screenshots, or whatever.

This happens in 8~9 out of 10 meetings. It's extremely rare that people explain things in a clear way, and it's starting to exhaust me. These days it often leads to me just mentally checking out and thinking about what I'm going to have for lunch/dinner. How do I deal with this? What are your strategies?