It's more about effective communication than power games. Brevity is natural when you have to communicate with lots of people via email and your main priority is getting shit done. What's funny is that for random/cold emails, i'm far more likely to reply if I can respond in a line or two without being rude.
I don't think it's fair to say that all of the skills are aimed at manipulation through means of social interaction.
There's nothing particularly wrong with empathy, it's all about connecting with people and building a better understanding through feeling. Unfortunately numerous self-help book titles often make it seem as if this is a hack, or a manipulation, in its essence though I feel that it's not.
Agreed. I find numerous parallels between that and learning to program.
The new hire who shows up at their desk with "Learn Java in 24 Hours" feels like a "manipulator" and "huckster".
The one who makes a deep study of the Gang of Four book looks like a Carnegie or Clinton from the outside.
The one that grew up around computers looks like a "natural". However, they just went through those previous two stages of learning while nobody was looking.
The "natural" uses the same external behavior as the rest, but at such an unconscious level as to evade easy detection by themselves or others.
It seems to me, at least as far as my Google Autocompletes and general beginning linux searches, that many people who are new to linux are searching "problem $x ubuntu" not "problem $x linux."
That's just my anecdotal evidence, Linux, when it is adopted by new people seem to run Ubuntu and aren't as much aware of other distros, I for one don't know much about Arc or Redhat or too much about how they differ.
