Asking clarifying questions is engaging with them as best as I know. To me, it's the gracious, honest, polite, and professional thing to do. I can't just make up an answer (say, that performance is what they are thinking about) and then riff on that.
I know this sounds blind, but it literally goes against my values. To say something I just made up without clarifying is not honest: it is playing a game. Because if I decide to play a game, where do I stop? What are the rules? I can't rely on my intuition and gut feeling, as we already established.
I thought writing things would be a better avenue, and in many ways, it is. But a document that shows "I engaged with your question for hours, for days, and these are my conclusions, along with backing-up research" is often perceived as even more dismissive or passive-aggressive, while it is literally the opposite.
> Asking clarifying questions is engaging with them as best as I know. To me, it's the gracious, honest, polite, and professional thing to do.
You are wrong about that though. In the way you are asking, anyway.
> I can't just make up an answer (say, that performance is what they are thinking about) and then riff on that.
It wasn't making up an answer or presupposing his intention. He asked whether you should switch, giving an answer that's essentially "no" but colored with a possible reason for switching is not making anything up.
How do I even know we should switch or not though? A good reason could be "we are moving the office to the UK, and we were only able to find react developers there". That's a pretty good reason to switch, if not an easy one.
I do think this is a strategy to try, although I'm pretty sure it's really not about the words, but about body language, timing, whatever... But it is really puzzling to me that you shouldn't ask questions because people will think you are asserting something, while making random assertions in order to probe for answers is the accepted way. I know it's probably how it works, but it will never really make sense to me, and I wish these games were just a little bit easier to play if people did see things from the other side more often, instead of throwing words like "asshole" around (as you can see in comments around here).
You can give him some information along with your questions, just like any social interaction. "It could help with performance if we are having issues there, but I personally hate the React ecosystem. Why do you ask?" That way you're both getting information as you go, rather than you making him wait until you've fully understood the question to get any response. That makes the conversation way more efficient too - if his underlying thought was "you seem bored, maybe this would be fun for you", then you've answered it completely already.
If efficiency was what he was after, he could have just said, "hey you look bored, would you feel more engaged if you were working on a migration to react?" Failing that, he could have clarified what he was going for after noticing the author missed it. Either way, it seems like the communication failures are more on the manager, for not having the awareness to appropriately direct the conversation and understand his needs, rather than the author, for failing to appropriate guess what the manager was obscuring.
This remains true even if allistics are generally better at such guessing.
If he's happy with the results of his efforts, then he doesn't need to take any advice. If he's not, then perhaps he will be interested in suggestions that he can implement, rather than "make your manager better".
I know this sounds blind, but it literally goes against my values. To say something I just made up without clarifying is not honest: it is playing a game. Because if I decide to play a game, where do I stop? What are the rules? I can't rely on my intuition and gut feeling, as we already established.
I thought writing things would be a better avenue, and in many ways, it is. But a document that shows "I engaged with your question for hours, for days, and these are my conclusions, along with backing-up research" is often perceived as even more dismissive or passive-aggressive, while it is literally the opposite.