> Some people might be offended or sensitive to direct questions, but that's for them to work through with their therapist.

It's a fair position to take, but in some cases where successful communication is a necessity, that stance doesn't cut it.

My go-to heuristic is "the wordier the question, the more likely it is to be perceived as well intentioned."

So if I'm wondering why someone didn't use sshd, I might say, "So I'm wondering if you considered using sshd for this? You probably did, I'm mostly curious about how you think it fits into things."

Wordiness works in my favor in two ways. One, the extra words help me to be precise in my _intent_ behind what I'm saying. Fewer words may, in some cases, technically be more precise, but have a tendency to leave the other person considering whether their initial interpretation is really the correct one or if there is some other implication to the words they're not seeing. Using more words cuts down on that effect quite a bit. It narrows the search space, so to speak.

The second way is that because I'm presumably actually speaking the question, it allows me to closely shape my intonation to be as neutral as possible. I say neutral rather than non-threatening, because non-threatening makes me think of how one speaks to a child, which is definitely not what you want when speaking to a colleague. And of course, you don't want to sound like you're coming from a position of superiority either. I like to think of it as an adventure between me and the listener to solve the puzzle. That takes the focus off some implied power struggle between me and them and instead frames things as the listener and I teamed up to slay the puzzle-dragon.

Number two doesn't apply if you're communicating through text, which is why it's important for those who communicate through text very often to have a tendency of always assuming the best intentions of a given piece of communication until proven otherwise, or by intentionally asking for clarification when necessary.

I was born when my dad was about 41 years old. The significant generational gap between us caused some difficulty in the way we communicated with one another and so I was forced to adapt my approach to communicating with him as I grew up. Now that I'm older, I find that I'm exceptionally good at communicating with other people where cultural differences between the communicators might otherwise result in issues for someone without the same type of "training" as me.

The downside is my written communication tends to be annoyingly wordy. Ironically, my high school English teacher didn't like me very much.

EDIT:

And knowing your audience is important too, of course. The direct, "Did you consider using sshd for this?" would be fine if I were talking to a senior dev, or someone I know is unlikely to take offense to a direct question. Actually, in the particular case of a senior dev, I'd probably reword it to be, "Why didn't you use sshd here? I would've thought it would be useful because of x, y, and z." This frames it as me asking for guidance from the master. I like to bring the wordiness technique in for cases where I know the listener has a tendency to take things the wrong way. Definitely not to be used all the time or else you get a reputation for being a wordy speaker.