People sometimes communicate unclearly on purpose:
* to avoid committing to some specific work.
* to avoid revealing that they haven't done some expected background investigation or groundwork.
* to try to cover up simply not knowing stuff.
* engineers may overthink a question and the answers for fear of saying something incorrect, because almost everything is riddled with conditions and limitations. And sometimes incomplete counts as incorrect. It's hard to know which may be relevant to the situation being asked about, leaving the busy-brained techie flustered. "Oh, in C, you use the + operator to add numbers. Oh but wait, if there are overflows, it is undefined; don't interpret my answer as meaning that you have a nicely behaved, safe addition. Oh, except for unsigned types ... I should also warn you that the operands possibly undergo promotion to different types, and one operand is converted to the type of the other according to some hairy rules that have portability implications; just try to avoid mixing signed/unsigned or integer and floating."
Politicians are evasive. Canada's Justin Trudeau has become internationally noted for using questions as prompts to dump carefully scripted messages.
> People sometimes communicate unclearly on purpose:
>
> * to try to cover up simply not knowing stuff.
One time, after interviewing more than a dozen candidates for a job position, I was pretty much convinced that the people who gave the shortest answers were the most knowledgeable. The most verbose candidate was used as an example to the recruiting agency, "we explicitly don't want this" -- he was invited for an interview only because he had successfully bluffed his way through the recruiter.
* to avoid committing to some specific work.
* to avoid revealing that they haven't done some expected background investigation or groundwork.
* to try to cover up simply not knowing stuff.
* engineers may overthink a question and the answers for fear of saying something incorrect, because almost everything is riddled with conditions and limitations. And sometimes incomplete counts as incorrect. It's hard to know which may be relevant to the situation being asked about, leaving the busy-brained techie flustered. "Oh, in C, you use the + operator to add numbers. Oh but wait, if there are overflows, it is undefined; don't interpret my answer as meaning that you have a nicely behaved, safe addition. Oh, except for unsigned types ... I should also warn you that the operands possibly undergo promotion to different types, and one operand is converted to the type of the other according to some hairy rules that have portability implications; just try to avoid mixing signed/unsigned or integer and floating."
Politicians are evasive. Canada's Justin Trudeau has become internationally noted for using questions as prompts to dump carefully scripted messages.