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Before You Say a Word
Last episode was the why. Why communication stopped being optional in tech, and why AI is the thing forcing that. This one's the how, and the how starts before you've said a single word. You cannot pick the right way to say something until you know who you're saying it to.
Sometimes you get to prep. You know who's going to be in the room, you know their titles, you can walk in with a plan. Sometimes you're walking in cold. Both happen, a lot, and neither one is predetermined. Either way, your first job is the same: figure out what's actually in front of you before you open your mouth.
I've learned not to trust faces. One-on-one, you can read someone pretty closely. A room is so much noisier than that. Somebody's face can tell you they're bored out of their mind when they're locked in, and it can tell you they're locked in when they're thinking about lunch. It's just not reliable by itself.
What actually tells you something is the questions people ask. That's the real signal. The questions somebody asks you tell you exactly what they need from you, if you're paying attention.
My default is to start pretty general. I don't come in swinging hard technical or hard business right away. I lean one way or the other as I go, based on what I'm hearing back — the questions, the vocabulary people use. Honestly, it's a lot of vibes. Pattern recognition you build over time, and it's usually a mixture of the body language, the questions, the general read of the room. Don't expect to walk in and get it perfectly right. You're going to be wrong sometimes. That's part of it.
What I'm actually looking for, underneath all of it, is the same question every time: how does this create value, for them, for their team, for whatever they walked in wanting. And it cuts both ways. You want what they need, but you're after something too — recognition, backing, sometimes it's as simple as wanting a real conversation with your peers about the technical side. That shifts as you move through your career. What you're looking for isn't fixed.
You're not reading the room to perform for it. You're reading it to find out what it needs from you.
Two Rooms, Same Me
Let me give you two real examples. Same me, same kind of project, two completely different rooms.
Room one: Women Who Code, a technical audience, and I was on a serious clock. I was doing a walkthrough, a demo, not a lot of runway, and people had other sessions to get to. I wanted to respect their time, especially with technical issues eating into it right up front. So I went as technical as I could get in the time I had, while still making sure the impact of what I built actually landed. A room full of developers doesn't just want to see that something works. They want to know how. And if they're far enough into their career, they want the why — how does this benefit me, how does this benefit my team, where does this go long-term.
Room two: a work meeting, different day. This one I got a heads-up on — who was going to be there, what their titles were. Just enough to prep. If you know who's going to be in a room ahead of time, do your research. Look them up, see what they're into. It helps you navigate, and it helps you feel more confident going in. If you don't have that luxury, you're walking into strangers with no idea what they do, that's okay too. Default to general and work outward once you get a read.
In that room, I didn't lead with how anything was built. I led with what it does for people — ease of life, speed for the developers using it, the tangible stuff. The outcome. What changes for you.
Same project. Two rooms. One time I told them how it was built. The other time I told them what it was going to do for them.
I'm not going to pretend that switch is easy, because it isn't. It's hard for a lot of engineers, and I've seen people never invest in it. The harder direction is going from technical into business. Juniors get shielded from the business side almost entirely — that's not a knock on anyone, it's just not what that stage of your career is asking of you. But a lot of engineers get used to somebody else doing that translation forever. A manager. A staff or principal engineer who lives in both worlds. You get comfortable letting someone else carry that, and then one day nobody's there to carry it for you.
When You Misread It
And when you're the one doing the translating, you won't always get it right. Sometimes you get pulled headfirst into a tangent you're excited about. Sometimes you misjudge the room going in. It happens a lot. It is not the end of the world. You can still course-correct in the middle of it.
The real skill, the one that matters more than getting it right the first time, is that it's okay to not know something in the moment. Say so. "I don't have that number right now, let me get it to you" beats making something up, every single time. Don't guess at a figure you're not sure of and say it like it's fact. You can hedge instead — "from what I understand, this could bump productivity by something like twenty percent, but let me back that up before you quote me on it." Or flag it outright: the number's not confirmed, we're still looking into it, but the early read is something like ten percent, because of X. Either one beats making a number up and hoping nobody checks.
Flexibility itself is a skill, and it's harder for some people than others. If pivoting on a dime is difficult for you, that's what having support around you is for. Somebody who can help reorient you mid-conversation if you need it. You don't have to do all of this solo, and you don't have to become a professional speaker or a CEO to be good at it. If you want to be a dev, be a dev. It's okay.
For the mixed rooms, the ones where you've got both business and technical people, or you genuinely can't tell who the decision-maker is, default to general. Technical people can usually self-serve if you get stuck; worst case, hand them the thing and say "tell me what you think." Business folks are harder to fall back on if you don't already have your numbers ready.
Messing up the read isn't the failure. Bullshitting your way through it is.
The Tells Everyone Gets Wrong
Now, the thing I said I'd come back to. Misreading a room usually starts with trusting the wrong signal in the first place, and everybody's walking around with a body language cheat sheet in their head that's mostly wrong.
Crossed arms. Everybody thinks that means someone's closed off, defensive, not interested. Most of the time it means someone's comfortable. Or it's a habit. Or the room's cold. Or the chair doesn't have armrests. There's even research showing people are more likely to stick with a hard task when their arms are crossed — sometimes it's concentration, not resistance.
Avoiding eye contact, same deal. People read that as checked out, or lying. Plenty of engaged people don't hold eye contact. Could be culture. Could be anxiety. Could just be how their brain works. It doesn't automatically mean what you think it means.
Here's the one I actually care about: quiet, reserved posture gets read as disinterest constantly, and it's so often just introversion. An introverted person facing you, listening, nodding, making the little sounds that mean "keep going" — that's an engaged person. Real disinterest looks different. It looks like someone turning their body away from you. Cutting you off. Changing the subject. Looking for the door.
None of these gestures mean one fixed thing on their own. There's a framework I've been getting into lately that gets at this. It's from Evy Poumpouras, a former Secret Service agent, and she teaches this thing on reading people using animal types — Lion, T-Rex, Monkey, Mouse. The part that stuck with me isn't the labels. It's that nobody's locked into one of them. You can be a Lion at work and a total Mouse in a relationship that isn't good for you. Each one has a good version and a bad version. It's less four fixed boxes, more a spectrum inside each animal.
Which is really just a more colorful way of saying what actually works, and it's how people trained to read others professionally do it: know somebody's baseline first. How do they act when they're relaxed and engaged? Then you watch for what changes from that. Not one gesture in a vacuum. The shift.
Which, funny enough, brings us right back to the beginning. The most reliable tell was never the posture. It's still the questions somebody asks you, and whether they build on what you just said.
Emotional intelligence makes all of this easier, and some people start out with more of it than others. But it's not fixed. A skill you keep using gets sharper. One you don't use, or misuse, gets worse.
Crossed arms doesn't mean someone's closed off. It might mean the room's cold.
Who's Actually In Front of You
That's how you find out who's actually in front of you. Next time, we get into the part that's newer territory for all of us: how you talk to something that isn't a person at all, and why that turns out to be a completely different skill. Still a communication skill. Just a different one.
I'm Darian Glausier. This is Head First.