[HN Gopher] Just don't ___________________________________________________________________ Just don't Author : moks Score : 567 points Date : 2022-11-08 12:57 UTC (10 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.tbray.org) (TXT) w3m dump (www.tbray.org) | _pastel wrote: | I see this when giving and receiving form advice in a few | physical disciplines. "Just relax your shoulders here and move | naturally." | | Physical mastery often looks relaxed, natural, and simple, | because all extraneous effort has been removed. When you're | training hard to reach that state, the "just" can really sting. | It feels like: "not only are you bad at this, but it's _simple_ | to not be bad at this ". | newaccount2021 wrote: | gjvc wrote: | Interesting how single words can have such an impact. I find it | jarring to hear someone begin a sentence with "So", as if they | have given the current topic some thought (when 9 times out of 10 | they haven't), or to hear them end a statement with ", no?" where | turning a positive assertion into a question sounds somewhat | underhand. | WesolyKubeczek wrote: | Many people for whom English is like their third language | (coming from Russian or Ukrainian background specifically) tend | to abuse "So," as a sentence opener, like other people may | abuse "Well,". | | Same thing with "..., no?". More cultural than linguistic. I've | also heard it's a Mexican quirk, too. | | Still annoys me, but I can see where they're coming from. | gjvc wrote: | Very true, but I've heard native speakers adopt it, too. | | "Get off my lawn!" | KIFulgore wrote: | Funny... my roommates and I used "just" for comedic effect in | college. | | I was stuck writing an algorithm and asked my more-experienced | roommate for help. He briefly scanned my code and said, "well, | you kind of just... code it." | | I looked at him quizzically and just blurted, "straight up?" | | "Yep, just straight up code it." | | Then we all laughed at the absurdity. He wasn't trying to | trivialize the problem, to be clear, but didn't know exactly how | to express what he was thinking. But that became our standard | answer to any programming challenge. "Just straight up code it." | [deleted] | creeble wrote: | Somebody has to do the Monty Python quote. | | To play the flute, you just blow in this end, and move your | fingers up and down on this end. | | In the 70s, people thought of programmers as typists. | larrywright wrote: | This is very reminiscent of a favorite scene from the show | Schitt's Creek. | | https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NywzrUJnmTo | JackFr wrote: | I had an office mate, who after our abusive and demeaning boss | would leave our office, would quote Gene Hackman from Superman | III: "I ask you to kill Superman, and you're telling me you | couldn't even do that one, simple thing." | | (Sometimes if she was still in earshot he would say it in | Spanish which somehow made it even funnier.) | bryceacc wrote: | "it's simple, we kill the batman" | TheRealDunkirk wrote: | As an engineer, I once opined to a fellow engineer, I wonder | how Static Guard works? And he said, "You know what causes | static electricity?" Naturally, I said yes. He said, "It makes | that go away." | projektfu wrote: | An almost-correct answer if you remember your elementary | school science class with charges on glass and amber... Amber | being _elektron_ (elektron) and the root of the word | electricity. If you coat the amber (or polyester) so it no | longer holds a charge, by pairing its charge carriers with | molecules that hide them, then you have static guard. | gretch wrote: | Ppl do this for fun in "souls" video games communities all the | time as well. | | "This boss can kill you in 2 hits" -> "oh well just don't get | hit" | | There's definitely an aspect that can cheer you on if you are | in the right mindset to receive it: everything is in your | power, conquer yourself and rise up to the moment | sixhobbits wrote: | I remember a meeting at FAANG where there was a bunch of | discussion about a difficult problem and then a higher-up | manager stopped the conversation to interject with | | > Guys, we're thinking about this in the wrong way. The | solution is to just get the right people together into a room | and build the solution. | | Which was definitely true but also not useful. | Aeolun wrote: | I feel like this is more or less the same thing as everything | before the word 'but' often being invalidated by the use of that | word. | quelltext wrote: | Not saying it's not good to learn about how "just" might be | perceived or avoided but I am surprised this article is getting | so much support. I feel like in the environment I'm in "just" | never implied anything negative (e.g. lack of understanding on | the receiver's part, making it seem like they _should_ have | considered ... but didn 't, etc.), rather: | | - _I_ don 't yet understand why steps x, y, z are necessary. To | me it would seem simply/naively doing ... might work but I'm | probably missing something. | | - Would an (objectively) simpler (though possibly not perfect) | solution (which I'm just putting on the table here) suffice here? | | - I think we can do ... here and it'll be fine. Should we / let's | see if that works, and revisit ? / . | | Sure, "just do it" would often be bad, indicating a variety of | things like "stop dwelling on this or arguing, do what I say". Or | "can you just quickly do this (thing I find trivial but don't | understand at all) for me", but in the end it's the context that | matters. | | Like, I can turn this around as well. The word "don't" is | negative and should be avoided at all cost. Better: "could we try | ... instead of ..." (see submission title). | | Then conclude "don't worry about it" should not be said. Which to | be fair is also true in some contexts but again, context! | | EDIT: To be clear it _is_ valuable for me to learn that usage of | "just" could be problematic. That's important when not knowing | the other party but among coworkers I also happen to have more of | a relationship with than just one-off comments, these kind of | word choices are not what make or break things. Especially in a | diverse environment I assume everyone is acting in good faith and | I would only let word choices affect me if the sum of my | interactions with a coworker has been negative already and I | "know" they are trying to incite an argument. | shanusmagnus wrote: | I too am a bit surprised, but my reason for upvoting is that | I've been using this idiom my whole life and never have thought | about it until this moment; getting the history of usage was | super interesting. Figuring out _how_ one would figure out the | history of usage is interesting! A little gem. | paxys wrote: | Is it a surprise that people don't all work in the supportive | environment that you have? Here's a more accurate example for | me: | | "This feature will take about 3 weeks to ship." | | "Why so long? It's just a button that does stuff. Can't you | just..." | | When the other side of the argument is a PM who can't describe | what an HTTP call is, it's hard to look at it as a good faith | discussion. | quelltext wrote: | > Is it a surprise that people don't all work in the | supportive environment that you have? | | No, but what I'm saying was that usage of "just" is not the | issue, a shitty environment is. If your boss / coworker / PM | doesn't use "just" but still constantly makes it seem like a | task should be easy to do in other ways (e.g. telling you | your estimate is way too high for a task) and puts pressure | on you not listening or accepting to your reasoning, is that | better than them using the word "just", you explain why and | they get that things aren't as simple as they thought? The | underlying issue is not the particular choice of word. | | You might say as advice "don't presume a task is easy, if you | want to avoid people think/misunderstand it can help to avoid | the following words:...". But the really important part would | be the first part of this advice. | | Though to be fair I don't even know if I'd agree with _that_ | advice either. Stuff is misunderstood or not well understood | all the time. Expectations exist if you want them to or not. | Maybe it 's better to communicate those expectations. | | > "Why so long? It's just a button that does stuff. Can't you | just..." | | a) The core aspect to address is not the word "just", but | that the person asks you something they consider simple. | Changing the wording (removing "just" or other such words) | doesn't change the actual sentiment. | | b) The "just" in the example does emphasize to the listener | further that the speaker is underestimating the task at hand | or doesn't yet grasp the full context. While I would see this | as problematic usage, it precisely is what can help the | listener in identifying that they might have to spend some | time to address that misconception in their follow-up reply. | | Whether it's ultimately super useful or not I don't know, but | it does provide extra signal. I personally would rather have | someone use "just" if they do in fact think the task is | simple/trivial than beating around the bush. I then | understand that there _could_ be an issue of misalignment or | even disagreement on difficulty. You really do want to get | that out of the way instead of each party in silence, | paralyzed, thinking "I still don't get why we cannot / need | to do X / Y, but I don't want to sound like ...". | | And that goes both ways. I have definitely gotten a good | reset and ended up agreeing with the speaker that a solution | can in fact be simpler albeit not perfect. And if the speaker | and I then agree that it's sufficient, why not. I'm | digressing. Important is that communication happens in good | faith. Politeness likely doesn't fix this if that's not the | case. | fardo wrote: | Context would matter here, but the above question on its own | wouldn't typically rise to bad faith, even if phrased as | written. | | The job of the PM often demands creating project schedules, | delegating assignments, spurring their team to deliver | assigned tasks on time, and managing the team. It very much | is their business to have some sense of how long things take, | why they take so long, and get a sense whether the bottleneck | is a personnel skill or motivation issue or the technical | nature of the problem space. | | A good faith answer would likely include an explanation why | shipping a button took 3 weeks, would likely explain the | relevance of those HTTP calls in your use case, and would | help to give them a better sense of the work involved so they | can better mentally cost out new interface items without | creating expectations you'd be unlikely to meet. | andscoop wrote: | I was surprised to see it as well. I think these discussions | are healthy and I personally do find them interesting | sometimes, so I guess that should make me less surprised that | it has traction. | | I think it's partially the tone of blame towards the use of | "just". While I am interested in micro-optimizations, | especially in how I communicate, I suspect most people don't. I | don't begrudge anyone who uses "just" in speech though. | | Another article / perspective on this would be written to help | others understand why they or others use "just" in speech. This | would help people interested in optimizing communication see | the flaws in the use of the word, while aiding in | understanding/empathy for this who are on the receiving end. | seabriez wrote: | Yeah, agree here. People are pending over backwards parsing | language, you can take any word and make the same argument. | Even phrases like "consider", "other", "alternative" can be | interpreted in wildly different ways, essentially making | conversation much more muted and passive agressive. Meanwhile | the core issue is not discussed, which is; maybe we shouldnt | inject mental health into words that are meaningless in that | context. Maybe this should be handled with direct conversation | instead of passive aggressive ways of inserting some kind of | special meaning into random words. | robertlagrant wrote: | We're in a bit of an era of establishing finer- and finer- | grained politeness laws, all of which presuppose that the | recipient's perception of a communication is all that matters. | haberman wrote: | And furthermore that the recipient is not capable of | moderating their own perception, or communicating directly | with a person who offended them to work it out. | area51org wrote: | > all of which presuppose that the recipient's perception of | a communication is all that matters | | ... and assuming that the listener is able to parse and then | object to phrasing on the fly. Phrasing _can_ matter, but | fine-grained hypercriticism is mostly a useless exercise. | runlevel1 wrote: | Perceived intent shapes how it's interpreted. | | "Could you just cache the hot partition keys?" probably doesn't | carry any negative baggage when it's said by someone you trust | to be empathetic to your situation. i.e. You know they aren't | underestimating your abilities, you trust they earnestly want | to help, and you know you can ask them for help without being | judged. | | The "Stuck" example is different. The "just" underestimates the | difficulty for the listener. So the speaker may respect their | abilities and earnestly want to help, but they've | underestimated the challenges of their disability -- and | overcoming the challenge is not as simple as asking for help. | | However, in both cases, the statements work the same without | the word "just". Given how little information it adds and the | risk of getting it wrong, I think I'll try to use "just" a | little less. | vasco wrote: | Just do it is great advice and much of the people that have big | problems with it should just do it. | | It means don't sit there thinking about how I said "just". Or | how it means I think you're dumb. It means just fucking do it. | Just do it. Do it. | | The people I've enjoyed working the most have just sat down and | done it. Difficult things too. Things that took time. They just | did the work. So stop thinking about the shenanigans and just | do it. | | It's sad and funny how much people will fight the words and | spend time arguing this is too crass or not kind instead of | just doing it. | | This is my hill I guess. | BurningFrog wrote: | "This one trick will make you a great communicator" | 1shooner wrote: | If the recipient of "just" thinks the speaker is so dismissive | that they can't pursue clarification, the two probably have | bigger communication problems than a single word choice. | jodrellblank wrote: | https://wiki.c2.com/?JustIsaDangerousWord | | https://www.excitant.co.uk/just-is-a-dangerous-word/ | 3pt14159 wrote: | "Just" is just like the word "k" | | To some people it's seen negatively, like they should have | thought of something or other, to others it's a stand-in for | "merely" or "simply" but I find "simply" much more condescending. | | Speaking generally, I heard the word "just" mostly when working | on motorcycles or other hands on things like laying down floor | boards or finishing concrete. There's a shared respect for the | workers in those environments that ascents to a quick course | correction by someone that has a better idea. If I heard someone | on a construction site say "simply hammer in the cross beam from | the ladder." I'd probably throw the level at them. I don't want | politician speak at a job site. | | But then I found out about how some people in tech hear the word | "just" as a signifier of thinking the person is stupid. So I've | toned it down. But sometimes. | | Sometimes. | | Sometimes, really, just put in a caching layer for your webserver | or tell me why I'm wrong. | Hermitude wrote: | While it's all great advice, it doesn't need to clutter a space | dedicated to upstart tech ventures. | [deleted] | sgeisenh wrote: | This is great advice. | | Anecdotally, I've been having pretty bad anxiety this year from | work that I _feel_ should be easy but turns out to have many | unexpected wrinkles. In retrospect, it seems like there may have | been a lot of "justs" when discussing early solutions. | | I've started to take a step back when approaching problems to | better understand potential obstacles, but this was still a | pretty big toll on my confidence. | t-eckert wrote: | I am going through the same thing this year. You're doing the | right thing in reevaluating. Have confidence knowing that even | if your previous work didn't go how you wanted it to, stopping | and taking a look at _how_ you do that work is a sign of | progress towards a point where your work meets and exceeds your | expectations. | wodenokoto wrote: | I really wish there was a version of "just" and "only", that has | the connotation of there is one and only one thing, but not the | connotation of that being trivial. | | Something that expresses "there is 1 thing and that makes it a | big deal!" | ISL wrote: | "Precisely one" may cover many of the relevant situations. | XCSme wrote: | "Just do the dishes." | | "It is sufficient to do the dishes." | | ? | XCSme wrote: | Or maybe instead of "did you just try clearing the cache?", | "would clearing the cache solve it?". | [deleted] | jodrellblank wrote: | Soleley? | https://duckduckgo.com/?q=define%3Asolely&ia=definition | | PJ Eby used your sentiment in writing about self improvement, | where some instruction might say "write a list of three things | you are grateful for" and instead what people _do_ is | "complain that their life isn't good, wallow in self pity, | consider things they want but don't have, write a list of three | things they feel obliged to be grateful for but aren't really, | roll their eyes at the idea that such a thing could possibly | help, etc. etc." and he said "just write a list of three things | you are grateful for, and don't drag that other baggage along". | | See also, telling people to "just get out of bed" in The | Article which means "move legs, lift bodyweight" not "find | purpose in life and reason to go on living, discover religion, | and only then excitedly jump out of bed cured and full of joie | de vivre". And not "reject getting up because it won't cure you | and you don't want to be cured anyway because life is shitty". | alex_young wrote: | This usage of just is fascinating. | | For instance: Can't we just apply this small | change to remediate the larger problem? | | Why not? Saying such a thing can actually be helpful. Perhaps | (and in many cases probably) the other party hasn't considered | doing so. However, we're also almost stating that the listener | has spent considerable resources coming up with solutions which | seem overly complicated to the speaker... | | "Just" is an almost perfect linguistic trap to set for oneself. | It really does seem like the perfect cousin of "I told you so", a | turn of phrase which never wears well in any form. | quelltext wrote: | > However, we're also almost stating that the listener has | spent considerable resources coming up with solutions which | seem overly complicated to the speaker... | | To be fair, it also indicates that the listener hasn't done a | good enough job at explaining why their solution isn't "just" | doing that. | | It could also indicate that the speaker admits to maybe not | getting the problem and "just" can sufficiently signal that the | speaker thought the solution was simpler/smaller and needs more | details on what's up (why not?). So there it serves as a crutch | for the speaker's insecurity. | | In the end it can be a useful word even if sometimes it isn't. | In the end I'd suggest we don't always overanalyze and ask more | additional questions, and adapt to each others use of words | instead. I have coworkers who a) don't speak English well and | b) have a very blunt way to point out things. Might be | difficult the first few interactions to gauge their sentiment | but I didn't jump to conclusions, and basically after a Zoom | call to chat casually it became clear that's just how they | communicate. I do suggest to them sometimes that using a | different word might make them seem more approachable or nicer | but ultimately I know they are nice and who is to say that my | assumptions of how people should talk for me tp deem them | polite are the right ones. | nvahalik wrote: | I'd say yes. But only in one of a couple of contexts: | | 1. Its solicited advice. Hey so-and-so, what do you think about | X? I've tried X, Y, and Z and they haven't worked. | | 2. Its part of a brainstorm/solution meeting. All ideas are on | the table. | vsareto wrote: | I'm all for cutting this out with medical advice and such | (unsolicited advice, and importantly wrong advice), but this | example annoys me: | | >You look at some graphs and error messages. It's easy (once | again, I speak from experience) to say something like "Could you | just cache the hot partition keys?" or "So, just scan the logs | for the high-latency signals and frequency-sort them." | | >This. Will. Not. Help. | | It's not fair to ask people for help and then complain about | their word usage when trying to help. This is a situation where | solicited advice was asked for. | | Some people diagnose and troubleshoot by starting simple -- this | is especially true if they've been roped into an incident in | progress and no one has caught them up. Is it plugged in? Is it | turned on? Have you power cycled it? Have you done other simple | things that humans tend to forget when dealing with a crisis | because we aren't perfect? | | >Do not, to quote the OED, "represent as a small thing" the | difficulty of something you're asking someone else to do, when | you're not inside their head and don't understand what they see | and feel. | | Why don't you turn this around and consider that there may not be | any bad intentions from someone when you hear the word 'just'. | It's possible it's just a habit of speaking they've developed. | You are not in their heads just like they are not in yours. | | If you want to work it out like adults, then talk about the | phrasing and see if you can come to an agreement. That will help | you see if they are being condescending rather than reacting to | hearing the word 'just' used. | ajkjk wrote: | > It's not fair to ask people for help and then complain about | their word usage when trying to help. This is a situation where | solicited advice was asked for. | | ... yes it is. You can be forced by circumstance to ask for | help from an unempathetic jerk and then still feel like they | are an unempathetic jerk. | | Incidentally, it is nerdy 'hacker' types who are especially | guilty of putting down people when asked for help. But not all | uses of the word 'just' have that effect. You can usually tell | the people who are using it out of consideration versus those | who are using it to demean and belittle. | arkh wrote: | > Some people diagnose and troubleshoot by starting simple -- | this is especially true if they've been roped into an incident | in progress and no one has caught them up. Is it plugged in? Is | it turned on? Have you power cycled it? Have you done other | simple things that humans tend to forget when dealing with a | crisis because we aren't perfect? | | Usually when it's not a person you're often working with you'll | start by a little speech like "I've been asked to come help. | I'm not up to speed so I'll ask stupid questions. Please don't | mind it, I just want to cover the bases before we can start the | hard work". | b3morales wrote: | The essay seems to be from someone who is more often on the | _giving_ help side than the _asking_ side. And I read it from | that perspective: starting from the assumption that you want to | help, here 's a thing that will make you more effective at | doing so. | zoogeny wrote: | It reminds me of the Robustness Principle [1] which states: "be | conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from | others" | | I think this advice about the use of "just" applies. You should | be liberal in accepting "just" statements from others but | conservative in sending "just" statements to others. | | 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle | quesera wrote: | Credit where credit is due. That's Internet pioneer (Jon) | Postel's Law: | | > Perhaps his most famous legacy is from RFC760, which | includes a robustness principle often called Postel's law: | "an implementation should be conservative in its sending | behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior" (reworded in | RFC 1122 as "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative | in what you send"). | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel | deanCommie wrote: | > It's possible it's just a habit of speaking they've | developed. | | That's not an excuse. If your habit of speaking causes | problems, sometimes the problem is you. Language evolves. | Societal norms evolve. | dj_mc_merlin wrote: | > It's not fair to ask people for help and then complain about | their word usage when trying to help. This is a situation where | solicited advice was asked for. | | This is not wrong but it's not always useful. Being more kind | in your language when giving help will carry your point across | more clearly. Consider a junior engineer stressed out by | deadlines -- sure, they should listen to you calmly and fix the | problem, but it can be hard when you're not used to the right | mindstate. A bit of finesse when choosing your words will go a | long way. | | This goes the other way too -- ignoring when people use | unnecessary language when giving help is for the best, even | though in a perfect world they wouldn't. Communication is about | being understood, not being fair. Giving a bit from your side | to speak on terms the other side is more comfortable on is a | great skill to have. | m000z0rz wrote: | > Communication is about being understood, not being fair. | | This is why in some cases it's better to say "Just" instead | of trying to hide what you're trying to say in order to maybe | be more sensitive without even knowing if that's necessary. | | For this situation, I tend to phrase it as "Can we just <x>"? | which might be received better than "Just <x>", but "just" is | an important word here - I want the other person to | understand that I think this ought to be easy. If it's not, I | probably want to know why, because that will give me more | information about the problem and possible solutions. | llbeansandrice wrote: | I feel like "just" is a huge source of resentment between | engineers and non-technical managers/clients/etc. Can we | "just" return true if the picture contains a bird?[0] | | [0] https://xkcd.com/1425/ | asoneth wrote: | I think it depends on context. | | If "Can we just <x>" is coming from a trusted colleague who | understands the problem space that is exciting because they | may have found a shortcut or clever solution. | | If "Can we just <x>" is coming from a non-technical client | or project manager then I feel nervous because in practice | it often indicates that they have underestimated the scope | of the problem or we have overestimated the scope of the | problem. In some cases it is possible to have enough | meetings to level-set expectations but in some cases the | "just" seems to be a leading indicator of persistent | project tension due to mismatched expectations. | vasco wrote: | When I ask for help, I go with humility, it'd never cross my | mind to get helped and then turn around to chastise someone | based on their use of words, I care about if they helped me | fix the problem or not. Is pragmatism dead? | tristor wrote: | > Is pragmatism dead? | | Yes, unfortunately. Along with many other things. Our | society has become socially hyper-conscious and that means | that anything practical and in some cases observation of | reality itself must be sacrificed on the alter of social | consciousness. | vsareto wrote: | I agree with culling 'just' because it rarely adds clarity, | but I don't get the emotional impact others are having when | they hear it. This blog post is trying to establish that its | use definitely means something bad and condescending, but I | don't agree with it: | | >The word "just" is a signal that you're not taking their | problem seriously. | | It wants to use this (flawed imo) reason to make people feel | guilty any time they use 'just'. | potta_coffee wrote: | I think the issue is that sometimes the word is "just" | filler, and sometimes it's intended to communicate the | opinion that the problem is superficial and ought to be | easily handled. The meaning is highly dependent on context | and who is speaking. | CharlesW wrote: | > _This blog post is trying to establish that its use | definitely means something bad and condescending, but I don | 't agree with it:_ | | You don't need to. Just don't use it, and you'll be fine. | | (^This is an attempt to provide an illustrative example.) | Dylan16807 wrote: | Yeah, I don't think that example works very well. | | The "just" isn't diminishing the problem, it's diminishing the | debugging step. And that debugging step is legitimately simple. | | There's definite room for improvement. The sentence is better | if we either remove "just" or change it to "let's start by just | scanning". But it's not the same problem as the overall article | is describing. | danielmarkbruce wrote: | Yeah, plus... sometimes caching the hot partition keys is just | the answer to the problem. | readthenotes1 wrote: | We just can't address the instability/fragility of correspondents | with one-off word play. | | Neuroticism, which we all have, is the most important | personality/communication style factor and it's the one that the | HR approved courses rigorously ignore... | andscoop wrote: | I'm torn on this article. To start I think this is good advice, | but I'm not sure it is the __best__ advice to help the people it | proclaims to help. I'm actually not sure it even targets the | right side of the issue. | | The article is likely good advice for those looking to improve | the gentleness of their communication skills, but ultimately this | will only be a small portion of the people that care enough to | improve their communication skills and put these learnings into | practice. This still leaves the majority of ones communication | open to the use of this word out of ignorance to the issue. | | Instead I'd like to encourage those who feel resentment or anger | over the use of this word to recognize it for what it more likely | is. A mistake on the part of the speaker. An artifact of speech | they picked up along the way. Generally just ignorance, nothing | personal. | | I apply this advice myself in many areas of my life. You can't | change everyone, but you can change yourself. So make yourself | more resilient where you can. | | I'm not exactly sure why I bothered to type all this up, other | than I have a feeling there is another perspective here that will | reach more people and help those struggling other than trying to | correct the speech of the masses. Of course it's never quite that | black and white, it's probably a little bit of both. | [deleted] | ISL wrote: | I like to use the word "just", but find that it frequently makes | my writing worse. | | Furthermore, I find that it is often easy to write a sentence | that contains the word in order to get a thought out of my head | and then simply remove the word. | | Just give it a try someday... ;). | geerlingguy wrote: | Now you can remove the simply too ;) | mellavora wrote: | oh happy day when that word is removed. Pet peeve. | ISL wrote: | I thought about it :). | tenebrisalietum wrote: | Adverbs are easily overused. | krono wrote: | This is how I've seen most professional writers work too, | except they edit quick in-place copies of previous iterations | in case some path doesn't work out. Should sound somewhat | familiar to programmers. | macinjosh wrote: | A better way to live your life than allowing yourself to get | worked up over simple and slight turns of phrase others use or | worrying constantly if your phrasing might trigger someone would | be to assume the robustness principle and simply live as if | everyone is doing the same. "Be conservative in what you do/say, | be liberal in what you accept from others". Don't take other's | words so seriously and cynically and always assume they have the | best intentions. | simonw wrote: | I've been trying to teach myself not to use the word "just" in my | documentation. | | I was inspired by this legendary PR to the Django docs that fixed | all kinds of words that "minimize difficulty involved": | https://github.com/django/django/pull/11482 | justin_oaks wrote: | Awesome. It's one of my pet peeves to see "just" or "simply" | and similar words in documentation. | | It makes the documentation clearer and less condescending to | remove words that imply a task is easy. Implying a task is easy | doesn't help people to perform the task. | | It's especially frustrating when the documentation is | incomplete, as most documentation is. For example, "If you need | different behavior, just implement a custom component" ... and | the custom component documentation is incomplete or missing. | _sigh_ | gerad wrote: | "Just" is a 4 letter word | draw_down wrote: | notacoward wrote: | To re-purpose a popular quote: everything after the "just" is BS. | | It's not that there are _never_ valid uses, but 99% of uses that | I see tend toward careless and condescending. Sometimes they 're | part of an "adversarial learning" process in which the person | making the suggestion _knows_ it 's probably wrong but uses it as | a way to be educated without having to ask for it. You'll | recognize this one because they'll "just" over and over and over. | Other times "just" is an expression of the person's own | frustration with the constraints of the problem or the pace of | progress, which isn't really helpful either. Often, as tbray | points out, it's a way to make light of others' struggles. Only | rarely is it constructive, most often as a way to snap someone | out of "analysis paralysis" or other kinds of mental looping - | and even then there are better alternatives. | | And don't get me started on "should" or we'll be here all day. ;) | thethetermin wrote: | Wow. Didn't expect to see this banalities supported here on HN. | If we believe something is simple, "Just" or "Simply" is fine. | It's about the tone and what the person speaking really mean. If | the sentence is told in a way that implies that the problem is | trivial, and yet the other person is no capable of anything, then | it's going to be offensive anyway, regardless of the wording. | Leave this stuff to social justice warriors and JUST try to be | nice with others. | gavinray wrote: | > "They're not making good progress, and someone's asked you if | you can help. You look at some graphs and error messages. It's | easy (once again, I speak from experience) to say something like | "Could you just cache the hot partition keys?" or "So, just scan | the logs for the high-latency signals and frequency-sort them." | > This. Will. Not. Help. | | I wouldn't have thought to do this and would have appreciated | this advice. I'm also not an SRE. Fixing issues/helping others | isn't about sparing their feelings, it's about effectively | solving a problem. | | Not that you should go out of your way to be hurtful, but any | genuinely useful advice/suggestions should be given without | regard for emotion. You're at work, not a social club. | coldpie wrote: | > but any genuinely useful advice/suggestions should be given | without regard for emotion. You're at work, not a social club. | | Aside from just being bad manners, this is a recipe for a hard | cap on your career. Work is made up of people, not robots. | Being friendly and considerate takes relatively little effort | (not none!), and may mean you will be the one who gets the call | next time an ex-coworker is looking for an acquaintance to | recruit up the ladder at their new workplace. | kayodelycaon wrote: | > Being friendly and considerate takes relatively little | effort | | You snuck in a just. ;) | | My brain doesn't have working emotional processing. It took | me decades to build up a complex enough logic tree to handle | social interaction. As a result, I find being friendly and | considerate taxing. At least I enjoy the challenge | communicating correctly, otherwise I wouldn't consider it to | be worth the effort. (ADHD and short term rewards... ugh) | coldpie wrote: | > It took me decades to build up a complex enough logic | tree to handle social interaction. | | Yeah I feel pretty much the same way fwiw :) I wasn't | saying one needs to be an outgoing social butterfly, just | that being "that smart person that no one wants to talk to" | is poison for your career, all emotional considerations | aside. | dacohenii wrote: | > Not that you should go out of your way to be hurtful, but any | genuinely useful advice/suggestions should be given without | regard for emotion. You're at work, not a social club. | | I agree that this could be useful advice and that you should | _not_ hesitate to give it if you think it will be useful. | However, I think it's rather extreme and short-sighted to say | that such advice should be given entirely "without regard for | emotion." | | Here's the thing. Your co-workers are human. Humans have lizard | brains, and sometimes get defensive. In order to maximize | productivity and harmony in the workplace, you want to avoid | that. | | There's this thing called tact. Use it. | gavinray wrote: | I have a hard time empathizing with this. I understand the | principle, but here's where I come from/my experience: | | When many of my coworkers message me on Slack for example, | they don't just leave me a message asking for what they want, | they say "Hey, how are you", or "How was your weekend", or | some other silly thing. | | I know they don't care about the answer to my question. Now, | instead of being able to asynchronously answer their | question, I have to spend my own energy (I'm slightly | autistic, so it doesn't come easily to me) coming up with | some reply to this, so that they THEN ask what they actually | want to know. > [03 AM] COWORKER: Hey | gavinray, how was your weekend? > [10 AM] gavinray: It | was decent, what about yours? > [11 AM] COWORKER: Good. | Hey, about ISSUE-123, do you... | | Now they have wasted both of our time and drained me of my | lifeforce. Sometimes there are hours of delay between this/we | are in different timezones. | | Just ask me for what you want, I know you're only talking to | me because you want something. | eventhorizon77 wrote: | This can be a cultural thing. In particular, if I | understand correctly, in India it is considered rude not to | make small talk before jumping into work. (I'm slightly | autistic too but it's not completely useless. I ended up | taking a trip to India at one point, and such trips are | much easier if you've put in the effort to understand the | culture, and your coworkers everyday lives.) I would | suggest trying not to be so brief. Ask about their family, | their commute to work, etc - get to know them a little | better. | vaidhy wrote: | Coming from India, we do not talk like that in our native | language. I am guessing it is because we have been | repeatedly told that is how americans talk (reinforced by | movies and TV shows). Now, I start with just a greeting | and jump to the issue.. "Hey P!! Good morning.. I just | want to check about issue XXX". It sounds less rude, but | does not ask the banal questions. | eventhorizon77 wrote: | So it seems we have found a self-referencing loop of | assumptions about each others' culture! Interesting. | abbeyj wrote: | Spreading https://nohello.net/ around your company may | help. I have it set as my status message. | gavinray wrote: | This rocks, thanks for sharing | applesauce004 wrote: | There is another way to look at this situation (beyond the use | of language and specific words). The takeaway can be as | follows: Ask questions before doling out advice/help. What this | means is, you are getting a better understanding of the current | situation, you are being sympathetic and by the time you talk, | you do so from a position of knowledge and not shooting from | the hips. | | For e.g., if a colleague is stuck debugging a slow API call, it | would be good to ask them. "Hey, what all have you tried so far | to resolve the issue" If partitioning keys and adding more CPU | cores has already been tried, then you could suggest - what | about scanning logs for high-latency calls? | | I think the point the author is making is not just using the | word "just". It is about being thoughtful and sympathetic | before trying to solve the problem. | | At least, that was my takeaway. | gavinray wrote: | Ah, I completely missed the point that it was over the word | "just", I thought it was over the actions in their entirety. | | Agreed you could probably phrase it more delicately, though I | do think the intent is justified. | iquerno wrote: | the biggest productivity milestone we've ever hit while doing | freelance programming work was to just don't. there certainly | already is a solutions for what we were trying to solve, because | clients come and go, but the problems are generally the same | phreack wrote: | Another one of these that I hate is "why haven't you done X" or | "you know X right" not as a question but as a suggestion. When I | didn't know about X, or didn't even realize X was an option | (particularly when it's niche knowledge that's not obvious), I | get extra ticked off about the assumption. Please share your | ideas without being condescending, it's worth it. | [deleted] | adnmcq999 wrote: | Slow news day? | rootusrootus wrote: | I routinely remark to both our product folks, and some of our | lower level senior leaders that 'just' is one of the most | expensive words in the English language, and please avoid using | it when you're trying to decide how much effort something will | take. They're not intentionally trying to trivialize the effort, | but they're causing themselves to misunderstand the effort | involved by presuming it to be simple. Just ask the development | team for a real estimate. | jkingsbery wrote: | You know what else doesn't help? That obnoxious thing where each | word in a sentence gets a period after it. I'm pretty sure that | doesn't help either. | | Just write out sentences with the period at the end so you don't | sound condescending. | smolder wrote: | The period every word thing could. Not. Go. Away. Fast. Enough. | | I haven't really seen UsInG aLtErNaTiNg CaPs to indicate | mockery lately, so maybe there's hope. | justinlloyd wrote: | Conversely I have learned to distrust any software developer's | opinion on a subject of how easy it is to do something, | especially when it comes to replicating the actions by a | layperson, when they blurt out "Oh, it's easy, you just..." | | "Oh, it'll be easy to distribute this update to our customers | (who are Doctors), you just have FTP into our server, unzip it, | and copy the files into your Program Files directory." | | "Oh, that's an easy problem to solve, you just have to get the | client site to standup a docker container on their infrastructure | and..." | | Just... don't. | taeric wrote: | Rhetorical tricks to reframe problems are annoying to me. More so | when I find myself reflexively doing it. For example, calling | something simple. Or referring to a desired feature as "making it | easy." | | I think often you can be specific. Don't push for the team to | make a feature easy. Push for the number of steps necessary for | something to be reduced. Or to enable undo/redo. | | I wish I had an easy exit for the "just" advice here. I don't, | sadly. Empathy is the best I can come up with. | vanviegen wrote: | I'm reading the 'just' in (most of) these examples a bit | differently: the person making the suggestions is using the word | to acknowledge that the suggested approach is probably a lot | simpler than what the struggler was considering, but perhaps good | enough (to get started). | | If however it turns out the suggestion is _not_ significantly | simpler than what was being considered (perhaps because what 's | being suggested is not as easy as it appears to the one making | the suggestion), I can see how that can come across as | condescending. | gooseyman wrote: | I thought this aversion was just my own insecurities. | | I once had a manager that used to start every ask with this. | | I finally shared with him that every time he throws the word | "just" into an ask, it seems to minimize the actual work required | to get X done. He acknowledged that he understood that things | don't JUST happen, and to his credit, I want to say he stopped | using can we just as his lead in. | | It be became. | | Can "we" | | We. | avg_dev wrote: | i used my imagination and took that to be a very good outcome. | can you confirm this is the case? | taneq wrote: | For bonus points, suggest they "should just quickly" do X. | Because if you tell someone that a task is quick, you're not | asking as much from them, right? /s | [deleted] | londons_explore wrote: | If anyone is trying to help me or tell me something, please | ignore all this advice. | | If you think something is simple, just tell me how you find it | simple and show/tell me how you'd do it. I'm pretty sure I'll | catch on, and before long I'll think it's simple too. | | If everyone interacting with me has to tiptoe round every mental | health issue I may or may not have, then I'll learn slower and | together we'll get less done. Lose lose. | nnm wrote: | Same here. "just do X" is more informative that "do X" as it | infers that "do X" is a simple thing. I would like to know | that. | | Also "just do X" infers that the person is very confident that | "do X" will solve the issue. I like to get confident advice. | pornel wrote: | Related: if someone has a chronic condition, don't drop on them | unsolicited medical advice, especially things like "have you | tried yoga?", "you just need more sunshine", "you must try my | cousin's healing tea!". | | You're not their doctor, and they haven't shared all the medical | details with you. Your 3-second diagnosis is almost certainly | terrible. They've heard it a dozen times already, and it's | difficult and tiring to politely decline well-meaning but | frustratingly useless advice. | MajimasEyepatch wrote: | Or to an overweight person: "you know you'd be a lot healthier | if you just lost weight" or "why don't you get a gym | membership" or "it's just calories in minus calories out, bro"? | Gee, thanks, you're the first person ever to tell me that I | should lose weight and it's just a matter of diet and exercise, | like every fat person on the planet doesn't already know. It's | like saying to a smoker, "You know that's bad for you. You | should quit." That sort of comment is almost entirely self- | serving. | 0xcde4c3db wrote: | > "you know you'd be a lot healthier if you just lost weight" | | Not least because weight loss is unlikely to make someone | _much_ healthier unless they have type 2 diabetes, severe | hypertension, or are way beyond "overweight". There is a | substantial population-level association between obesity and | morbidity, but it's heavily influenced by those who are | _extremely_ obese (which tends to come with a variety of | other issues not immediately relevant to the average fat | person). | maerF0x0 wrote: | obviously the actual weight matters, but on average this | advice is poor. | | Across the spectrum of over weight people (from mildly to | extremely obese) there are a range of health markers from | blood pressure, HDL/LDL/Triglycerides, insulin sensitivity, | leptin/ghrelin, sex hormones (and PE/ED), blood sugar, | cortisol, inflammation, arterial calcification (on and on | the list goes) that are all positively improved by | returning to healthy "normal" (not average) weights. | | Layne Norton's book "Fat Loss forever" and youtube channel | are excellent resources to begin understanding. | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUxVCtScf8U | | https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/43596925-fat-loss- | for... | kamaal wrote: | At least in this case, any advice would be helpful. But it | also depends on the person. If the person has been trying | several things, and is curious to learn more and work on the | suggestion, even small help can make a huge difference. | | When it comes to things like working out in the gym, or | nutrition. There are often some small optimisation/hacks you | can do on top of the things you are already doing that can | significantly move the needle in terms of gains. If you are | walking, something like carrying weights in a backpack could | help you burn extra calories. If you are already doing push | ups, introducing you to burpees can make a whole world of | difference. Similarly if you are already doing Kettlebells, a | complex could significantly move the needle in terms of | gains. | | Beyond this, learning itself requires lots of humility. You | must be prepared to be offended in one way or other to learn | any person, in any way. Chances are high nearly every one you | meet has some idea about how to make progress but not the | entire idea. You need to take in feedback from several people | piece together some kind of a coherent strategy to win. | BeetleB wrote: | > At least in this case, any advice would be helpful. | | It's not clear what you mean by "this case". It's a rare | case where "any advice would be helpful." | | > Beyond this, learning itself requires lots of humility. | You must be prepared to be offended in one way or other to | learn any person, in any way. | | The mistake you're making is assuming that the person is | having this discussion with you because he wants to learn | for you. And that, after all, is the point of several other | comments in this thread. | | It was definitely years before I understood what people | meant by "I don't want your advice or solution. I want you | to _listen_. " | | Losing weight _is_ a simple equation of calories in vs out. | The reason people are not losing weight is not because they | don 't understand that. If you want to help, don't suggest | ways they can reduce calorie intake or burn more calories. | Understand what the barriers are that's preventing them | from acting. It's almost never a lack of knowledge about | nutrition/exercise. | roxymusic1973 wrote: | It can be helpful to tell smokers that. | BeetleB wrote: | I've yet to find a smoker who would agree it's helpful. | | I've yet to find a smoker who doesn't know that quitting | would be good for them. | andsoitis wrote: | what if they complain about it chronically? are you then | justified to offer unsolicited advice, or do you have to just | listen (i.e. be their outlet)? | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | I think that's a very good question. I'll give an anecdote | from group therapy. | | There was one member of my group who was having a difficult | time motivating himself to make a particular change he wanted | to make. I had long since learned the dangers of "advice | giving", so really just asked why he felt it was so hard to | make that change. He definitely had a lot of backstory that | could explain his underlying fear. | | However, this pattern went on for about 9 months (him | complaining about not being able to make this change, the | rest of the group offering support). Finally, at one point I | said "Bob, I really care about you, but to be honest, you've | been complaining about your situation for months now and you | aren't actually doing anything to change it. I understand | where your fear comes from, but if you're not going to even | try to do something different, I don't really want to hear | about it anymore." | | The next week he came in having made the first step toward | his goal. Point being I had a much bigger motivating impact | on him once I let him know how he was affecting _my_ feelings | (of course, after we had a lot of time to build up trust) | than if I had said "just do x, y, z". | ketzo wrote: | I think you've unintentionally explained _why_ your advice- | giving worked in that moment, too -- Bob knew you were | coming from a place of good faith! | | You weren't "just"-ing him -- you knew the intricacies of | his situation, and it's a lot easier for someone to take | advice to heart if they can trust that you actually know | the context. | kayodelycaon wrote: | What about the complaint bothers you? Is it annoying the | person never attempts to improve? Is it making you feel bad | you can't help? Is it bringing your own mood down? | | If you don't know the person, it is not your responsibility | to help them with a chronic problem you don't understand. So | just let that go. Feeling guilt because someone else hurts is | not a good motivation for assisting them. You're going to | cause more damage because helping them is about you, not | them. | | You also aren't obligated to be someone else's therapist or | support. It is always appropriate so set boundaries and | decide how much attention you're willing to give them. Doing | something out of obligation means you're just tolerating a | problem. Try to avoid "tolerating" things, try weighing | consequences and choose your level of involvement instead. | (Easier said than done.) | | Basically, you have to think beyond "ugh" and figure out why | you're bothered and decide how to act. In some circumstances | (like work), you're just stuck with it and you'll have to | carefully set boundaries. | thfuran wrote: | Well, they're not obligated to complain to me about their | problems and then get upset if I engage in the | conversation. | [deleted] | mbreese wrote: | Most people don't want you to solve their issues. They just | want you to listen and understand them. If someone asks for | advice, that's another thing entirely. But I've learned over | the years that just listening and appreciating what someone | else is feeling is the most helpful thing you can do. | coldpie wrote: | This is one of those personality differences that I find | utterly fascinating. I think you're right that most people | feel the way you say, but I feel the exact opposite! If I'm | talking about a problem, it's because I haven't figured out | how to solve it and would be happy for ideas. Otherwise why | talk about it? You're certainly not interested in my | problems, and it's by definition a problem for me, so it's | not like I enjoy just talking about it for no reason. | | It was definitely a learning curve realizing that most | people don't feel how I do about this. Still baffles me to | this day, but I've learned to put that aside and just shut | up because I guess people want that. | imknewhere wrote: | For real? Like if in the course of a conversation, | somebody brings up that they've been struggling with | depression and have a hard time getting up in the | morning, you actually interpret that as a request for | instructions they can follow, in order to become happy | again? | | I just find that a little hard to believe. If it's | actually true, well, I dunno, I'm sorry for you? | ketzo wrote: | I'm the same way. Not to over-generalize, but in my | experience that feeling is a big | | 1) guy thing | | 2) engineering-type thing | | 3) type-A-personality thing | | and god help you if you're all three! | | All three of those groups are overrepresented on HN, too, | so at least you're probably in good company :D | | I just learned that I need to stifle my automatic | "problem-solving mode" when it comes to personal | interactions, and all of my conversations got _way_ | better. Glad I was at least able to learn pretty early in | my life! | Gigachad wrote: | Personally I like both. Listen first, listen completely | and then offer suggestions. While some people will let | you get a few lines in and then start blurting out | useless suggestions without hearing the full situation. | mattw2121 wrote: | This is a lesson I am continually still trying to put in | practice. I had the initial ah-ha moment from White Men | Can't Jump. | | See. if I'm thirsty. I don't want a glass of water, I want | you to sympathize. I want you to say, "Gloria, I too know | what it feels like to be thirsty. I too have had a dry | mouth." I want you to connect with me through sharing and | understanding the concept of dry mouthedness. | miroljub wrote: | It may be the most helpful thing _for them_ , but listening | to someone else's problems could be emotionally taxing to | the person listening. Double so, if the listener has a | feeling that he's there just to listen, and that the person | talking about the problem just wants to offload their issue | to the listener, and is not at all interested about what | the listener have to say about the topic. | | If you want someone to just listen, go get a psychologist. | They are at least paid to listen to other people's | problems, and have tools not to take stuff personally and | not to feel bad about it. And they get paid in the end. | kayodelycaon wrote: | The parent didn't say you had to stick around. People | default to fixing things and need to know that's the | wrong thing to do. | miroljub wrote: | In such situation, one should do what is the best _for | them_. Not sticking around or running away may be | unnatural and thus also emotionally taxing. Giving advice | and trying to help, even if the person just wanted to | vent, is not bad. | | You [1] came to me with your problem. Now it's not only | your problem, it's also my problem, since you shared it | with me. I want that problem to go away, and will help | you or give you advice how to deal with it. Then _I_ will | feel better. If I just listen to you, it may be the best | thing _for you_ , but _for me_ it is the wrong thing to | do, since I 'm not made that way. | | I you just want to vent so that _you_ can feel better, | don 't make _me_ feel worse because of that. Find someone | else. | | [1] "You" and "me" used for clarity, since "they" & | "them" is confusing. | grimjack00 wrote: | "just listen" isn't necessarily any easier than all the | other "just <do the thing>" phrases. | BeetleB wrote: | > are you then justified to offer unsolicited advice, or do | you have to just listen (i.e. be their outlet)? | | You've exhibited what the book _Crucial Conversations_ calls | _A Fool 's Choice_. There are other options. The recommended | one would be to express to them the pain you have in always | hearing it, and exploring with them their need to always talk | to you about it. | | They have a need, which is causing them to express it to you | (perhaps in a suboptimal manner). You have your own needs, | but are having trouble expressing your needs. It's a skill to | learn, and it won't come easy, but it is learnable. | TheRealDunkirk wrote: | As someone who has suffered from migraines for 30 years, I can | tell you that everyone just LOVES to tell you ALL the things | you're doing wrong to cause them. As though I haven't been to | every specialist I can find, and have tried -- literally -- | every treatment known to man (except botox, yet). | ketzo wrote: | Oh man, in my experience, migraines in particular are the | worst for this because a ton of the common "justs" are | actively conflicting | | "Just cut out caffeine/just try some caffeine when you feel | one coming on!" | | "Just get more exercise/just make sure you're not exerting | yourself too hard!" | | "Just get more sun/just make sure you're wearing sunglasses | when you go out!" | diydsp wrote: | "Just follow FDA publications for prototype medical devices | and DIY build your own before it comes to market." | projektfu wrote: | Part of the reason why some of these suggestions conflict | is because a lot of people with "migraines" have never been | diagnosed, and are just complaining about a bad tension | headache. Then many people are misdiagnosed. Finally, there | are several theories about causes of migraine. | | Still, 100% true that people are usually unhelpful with | their flippant medical advice. | TheRealDunkirk wrote: | > "Just cut out caffeine/just try some caffeine when you | feel one coming on!" | | The very "best" part of my journey was seeing a migraine | specialist very early on. I told him that I thought maybe | caffeine had something to do with it. He brusquely told | me that caffeine had nothing to do with it. Twenty years | later, I went to the same guy, because I had learned some | new things. Again, I mentioned how much caffeine I was | drinking, and he cut me off, and, again, brusquely told | me that this was my whole problem. When confronted with | the contradiction, he mumbled some things, and I got out | of there. I was peeved. He retired not long after. | | Another, very-thoughtful doctor I saw, explained that the | East Coast / West Coast research hospitals are actually | divided on the issue of how much caffeine contributes to | migraines, so it's not like it's exactly clear. | | In my experience, I can confidently say that caffeine | withdrawal headaches and migraines are 2 different | animals, but they can present with the same intensity of | pain at times, so it _is_ confusing. | laputan_machine wrote: | It depends. If you're complaining to me about your chronic | condition then I will feel compelled to give you advice on | things that I think might help you. | | That's the crux. It turns out people just want to be free to | whinge about their issues without doing anything about it. | | That's fine, but don't talk to me about it, then. At the very | least, tell me that you just want to whinge. | | Edit: Obviously this is to my friends and family. If I got | talking to a stranger at a bus stop and they told me about how | their arthiritis was giving them gyp this morning I would be | sympathetic, I wouldn't tell them to do more stretches and eat | more fish. Assume my comment is with good intentions, please. | [deleted] | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | > If you're complaining to me about your chronic condition | then I will feel compelled to give you advice on things that | I think might help you. | | Heh, I have to admit I chuckled at that one. To be honest, I | felt somewhat similarly earlier in my life. In all | seriousness, I highly recommend group therapy. You will | discover that no matter how much you feel "compelled" to give | advice in moments when people are looking for support and | connection, that nobody, and I mean nobody, wants to hear it. | stcroixx wrote: | You can't tell if someone is looking for advice or support | and connection. If you assume, like you suggest, you're | going to get it wrong sometimes. I'd personally never waste | someone's time with my problem if I didn't genuinely | respect and value their perspective. I'd also consider | advice to be support though. Not everyone is looking for | silent head nodding. | droopyEyelids wrote: | You're sort of changing the subject to an easier situation. | | There is a big difference between a group gathering for | therapy, and having someone engage you in 'conversation' | where they're cornering you to complain about their | ailment. | BeetleB wrote: | I think you misunderstand group therapy. | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | Still, even in real life, giving unsolicited advice never | works in my opinion. It's basically as useless as | complaining about something and thinking it will | magically change without doing anything different. | | Note I have seen the following be useful: | | 1. Is the person really just saying "I want a hug" with | their complaining? If so, and you care about this person, | just give them a hug. | | 2. Depending on your relationship with the person, and if | you can accept any blowback, it's also fine to say "I'm | sorry, I don't want to be a receptacle for your | complaining today." | | 3. _Ask_ the person if they want help fixing the problem. | spiffytech wrote: | I have a chronic condition that comes up lot because it | dominates my life. It touches everything I do, so bringing it | up is unavoidable. | | Early on I liked people trying to help. But after years of | working on the issue, I've learned how specialized my | situation is and how useless most advice is for me. | | But friends & family don't have anything to offer besides the | usual armchair advice. When I open up to someone new I always | have to go through the phase of defending why I can't "just" | do X, and that gets very tiring. | | I'll get someone to understand that neither they nor I know | how to improve my situation, but people eventually forget why | X is off the table and I have to defend my decisions all over | again. | | I don't want to whine about it - I don't need to vent, and | I've looked into everything anyone's thought of. It's just | that this is an inextricable part of what's going on with me. | If I can't talk about this with a person, I can't really talk | about my life at all. | laputan_machine wrote: | I think there's a misunderstanding in what I'm saying, or | perhaps people aren't understanding that listening is | actually quite a skill to practice and is really quite | draining. It isn't free to ask people to listen to you, | there is a cost associated with it. | | Asking people to listen but then they can't input is | something I find incredibly arrogant, egotistical, selfish, | basically it's a terrible human trait and I'm surprised | there are so many apologists in this thread that defend | this kind of behaviour. | | Again, I'm not talking about off the cuff "how was your | day" "oh my angina is playing up again" "WELL THEN YOU | SHOULD DO THIS AND THAT" kinds of conversations... I think | that is obvious. | | I mean the 30 minute ones where someone is sounding off to | you about their problems. Yeah, I am going to give you | "advice" (as in, this is a problem lets figure out how to | solve it). I'm genuinely surprised this is seen as A Bad | Thing. Especially given our community is one of hackers and | yanno, people who get hired to solve problems... | spiffytech wrote: | Yeah, there could be a communication gap here. I'll give | you the benefit of the doubt that you're talking about | truly excessive situations. | | The mild versions of the patterns you're objecting to | don't seem problematic. | | As someone who's problem might be unfixable, sometimes I | just need a sounding board and don't expect actionable | advice. And sometimes people just want to vent, but I try | to save that for my therapist. | bbarnett wrote: | _you must try my cousin 's healing tea!"._ | | "Healing tear"?! Is it a specific tear, or all of them? | | Such as, cousin watched a beautiful sunrise, on the same day as | seeing a baby being born, while discovering donuts are actually | good for you. | | That tear, that tear of joy, was saved, and here's a microgram | of it, try it, it heals! | | (Don't read HN before the focus of coffee, lest this) | yoyohello13 wrote: | I've learned that 9 times out of 10, if someone is telling you | about their problems, they really just want some understanding | or compassion. | | I've found that instead of trying to 'fix' their problem with | unsolicited advice, saying something like "Wow, that sucks, I'm | sorry you're going through that" leads to a much more positive | response. | onemoresoop wrote: | You're right about that. People who try to fix others do so | because they don't want to feel the other person's pain | because, it hurts, it's unpleasant and they don't know what | to say. They genuinely want the other person to get better | but fail to see how it may make them feel worse by suggesting | a fix. | goodpoint wrote: | There's a whole subreddit for this | https://www.reddit.com/r/thanksimcured/top/?t=month | [deleted] | void_msgs wrote: | billbrown wrote: | In my world, "just" is a four-letter word. | lyptt wrote: | I've noticed it puts people on the defensive when I put 'just' in | a sentence, even though I have no intent to disparage others with | my words, so I make an effort to avoid using that word at all in | any business setting. I've found it goes over much better when | framing suggestions as 'Maybe you could try..." than 'Just | do...'. | klooney wrote: | I love this article, but now I'm worried my "never say just" | schtick will seem derivative. | sagaro wrote: | Seems like a recipe for creating snowflakes. People should just | grow a thicker skin and move on with their lives instead of | taking offense and getting depressed that someone told them | "just" | j6zauas4gz wrote: | I dont think you are right about that, but for the sake of this | comment lets assume that you are right and that this will | create snowflakes. | | Even if that's true on the macro scale its still incredibly | useful to keep in mind the impact your language has on the mind | of the person you are communicating with. If my goal is to get | the person I am communicating with to do a thing, most of the | time idgaf about whether or not I contributing to them becoming | a snowflake. It does not matter _why_ the persona you are | talking to is getting offended. Offending people is counter- | productive, so it should be avoided if you can avoid it. | quesera wrote: | I agree with you, because in the real world I do need to talk | to people -- and people come in all psychological shapes and | sizes! | | But on the flip side, there are few things I personally | dislike more than being spoken to by someone who is being | cautious of my feelings. | | It's slow. It's tedious. Most of them are bad at it. And | honestly it's _more_ disrespectful to imagine that you are | going to upset me, than to just bravely take that risk. | | I concede that I'm the weird one. But we do exist. | rufus_foreman wrote: | Just draw the rest of the owl. | wink wrote: | I had a coworker who, in planning poker, every time someone said | "We just need to..." switch the number he originally picked for | the next higher one. Very effective way to get people to actually | think about what could go wrong. And no, the people who know 100% | what the story was, hardly ever said "We just need to...", even | before that. | ChrisMarshallNY wrote: | If I had had a nickel for every time someone has said "Can't you | _just_ write me a _little_ app? ", I'd be obscenely wealthy. | | One of the downsides of being good at something, is that we make | it look easy, so people think it's easy. | dshpala wrote: | I don't mind receiving "just", in my view "what do you think" is | far worse. | | You can just brush "just" away (which is kind of expected), but | "what do you think" implies some kind of reasoned answer. Which | then can be debated, even if the original idea was bogus from the | start. | spansoa wrote: | For those that don't get the subtle reference to Nike's slogan: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Do_It | sshine wrote: | I stopped using the word "just" in the meaning "only" when I took | math courses at university. | | The lecturers were so good to use that term ("trivially", | "evidently", etc.) when it was anything but. | | The smartest students were good to follow up. | | Everyone else were quiet. | BlueTemplar wrote: | And yet in the introductory classes teachers heavily insisted | that "obvious","evident","trivial" shouldn't be part of your | vocabulary (you would lose points) and when using a shortcut | you should always reference it... until you got several levels | above it (you wouldn't do it for basic arithmetic when doing | calculus of course, OTOH in algebra commutativity is not to be | assumed...) | | Of course teachers/researchers didn't always follow these best | practices themselves... | glitchc wrote: | "The proof is left as an exercise for the reader" is often | short-hand for "I don't know how to prove it myself and will | defer the question to someone with greater expertise." | arkh wrote: | When estimating tasks difficulty, every time we hear the word | "just" it gets bumped one more level. Experience tells that this | small word always hide a world of hurt and not thought out edge | cases or legacy code. | unsupp0rted wrote: | I get a lot more mileage out of "have you tried..." than "why | don't you just...". | | As a recent example, I wrote a system that auto-generates PDF | packing slips from an order form, to send to a warehouse for | picking and packing. | | Yesterday a client told me to "just make it landscape" while I | was explaining why "just making it landscape" won't solve the | problem of giving the warehouse whitespace to pencil stuff in, | because even though "just making it landscape" solves this same | problem in Excel, when the client was sending out Excel files as | packing slips... the current system is not Excel". | | I couldn't find a way to get the client to get from "just make it | landscape" to listening to me ask "what is the warehouse actually | trying to pencil in?" and "how much space do they need? Are they | penciling in notes globally at the top of the document or on a | line-item basis next to each SKU?" | | To the client I was wasting their time because "just make it | landscape". | | Needless to say working with this client is challenging on an | interpersonal level. The work itself is fun though, and it's | improving my EQ handling a client like this. | SlickNixon wrote: | Have you tried scaling the output of the system by 77%, | rotating it counter clockwise by 90 degrees, and aligning it to | the bottom of the page? | Max-q wrote: | Now I got really curious why just making it landscape wouldn't | solve the problem. It would give white space on the side | regardless of which document format was used to print the page, | wouldn't it? Is it due to a different size of the printed | label? | nostromo wrote: | Food for thought: It's quite possible you're not understanding | the client well, and are indeed wasting their time. | | I've worked with contractors where you know what you want and | why, but the developer insists on throwing up a lot of | objections on how it won't solve the problem for x or y reason. | Changing the orientation of a PDF seems like the kind of | request that should be straight forward and not require a lot | of heavy lifting to convince a contractor that it's worthwhile. | unsupp0rted wrote: | I changed the orientation of the PDF as requested. This did | not add any white space next to line items, since the line | items table uses 98 % width either way, unlike when printing | from Excel I guess. | | This is what I tried and failed to get heard yesterday. | | Also now in Landscape the cover page header takes up like 50% | of the page. But hey "just make it landscape". | | What the client needs me to do, I suspect without being able | to confirm because my questions are "wasting their time", is | give the warehouse a place to pencil stuff in next to line | items. | | So I prepped both versions, portrait and landscape with a SKU | Notes column at the side, adjusting the table width and | header height, etc and emailed those options over unprompted. | | The portrait version shows double the line items per page and | probably (?) solves the problem at hand... assuming I guessed | right on limited information. | | So far no reply to any of the 3 solutions. | robocat wrote: | You seem to be making things difficult for yourself. Do you | have an example of what it used to do from Excel? Just do | something similar as your first cut. You implied you knew | how Excel printed since you wrote "because even though | 'just making it landscape' solves this same problem in | Excel". | | It sounds like you can't communicate with your users, which | could be the meta-problem that you need to fix. | | When you have a problematic person in the middle, sometimes | you can set up covert channels of communication (risks, but | rewards too). Problematic people are often causing problems | within the organisation too, so you can find champions that | will route around them. | | Edit: Politics are important, but sometimes you are getting | paid to solve a problem, perhaps using unofficial nefarious | methods. It requires a lot of skill, and you need to avoid | traps, but again that is part of what an external developer | is paid for? | jcelerier wrote: | > What the client needs me to do, I suspect without being | able to confirm because my questions are "wasting their | time", is give the warehouse a place to pencil stuff in | next to line items. | | have you thought that maybe this is not the reason at all | why they want this ? maybe they have a scanner somewhere | that works better with the landscape format ? some | regulation to comply with ? | | I find it absolutely insufferable when you ask people to do | something that you want, and they ask you why ; like, this | is not at all why you're being paid unless you're in a R&D | position ; if I was in your client's shoes I'd start | looking for another contractor that would give me what I | ask no question asked. They're paying you for your time, | no? If they ask you to dig in a hole and then fill it back | after you do it. | jimbokun wrote: | > I find it absolutely insufferable when you ask people | to do something that you want, and they ask you why | | Wow, I really want to avoid working with you on anything. | naasking wrote: | > have you thought that maybe this is not the reason at | all why they want this ? maybe they have a scanner | somewhere that works better with the landscape format ? | some regulation to comply with ? | | Sure, which is why asking "why?" is so crucial. Or are | you suggesting they try to comply to some regulatory | requirement without actually knowing that they're doing | so or what regulation must be complied with, so they can | actually confirm compliance? Sounds like a disaster | waiting to happen. | QuercusMax wrote: | If you ask me to implement something and I don't | understand _why_ you need it, then I may not do it right, | and you may get regressions in this functionality in the | future. Developers need to build a mental model of the | problem they 're solving. If the answer is "we've always | done it this way" that's not very compelling especially | when we're building a new system! But if you say "this is | required because of XYZ", then this is something that I | can understand, and more importantly, _document_ as a | requirement. | unsupp0rted wrote: | > have you thought that maybe this is not the reason at | all why they want this ? | | Yes, that is the reason I ask questions about who is | using this and what their objectives are. | | > They're paying you for your time, no? | | No. They're paying me for the value my skillset and | experience brings. I don't bill hourly, I bill bi-weekly, | 2 weeks in advance. | | At any time they can fire me or I can fire them. Most | likely we're setting the stage for either of those two | outcomes right now, unless we can get our communication | in sync. | | I'll try to find a replacement client who's interested in | communicating the problems they're facing, working with | me to come up with solutions, then working with me to | iterate on them. | | > If they ask you to dig in a hole and then fill it back | after you do it. | | I'm not currently at the point of desperation that | accepting something like this would require. | | This is more like something a prison or internment camp | might do to mentally break prisoners. | mcguire wrote: | " _If they ask you to dig in a hole and then fill it back | after you do it._ " | | This is a recipe for a really crappy career. | | Source: my career. | jcheng wrote: | Not sure why, but now I really want to know how this turns | out! | martinflack wrote: | At least the conversation hasn't progressed to printing | it upside down or on the back... | unsupp0rted wrote: | If history with this client is any indication, they will | not realize I have offered these viable solutions at all. | | A week or so from now the warehouse will complain vaguely | that they have "no place to write". | | The client will blame me for the poorly designed packing | slip and suggest we "just go back" to the Excel version | (which required multiple hours a day of manual data entry | by an employee who is no longer at the company and cost | untold $ in human error). | 2devnull wrote: | The next trick to learn is that the customer will still | blame you for not telling them that landscape won't fix it. | Then you'll waste less time the next time your customer | asks for something stupid. Fail fast can work well for | client management. | derefr wrote: | Tangent, but the phrase "client management" makes me | imagine asking a client's point-of-contact employee, if I | can speak to _their_ manager. I wonder how that would go? | unsupp0rted wrote: | Solid advice. I shouldn't have pushed so hard to get | heard. Should have just made it landscape (which took | minutes) and let it fail. | | The trick is balancing that against wanting to be a | consultant to them (i.e. somebody who knows what he's | doing and offers viable solutions that they themselves | can't think of) rather than a mindless pair of hands that | gets directed by them to throw code at a wall. | naasking wrote: | > Solid advice. I shouldn't have pushed so hard to get | heard. Should have just made it landscape (which took | minutes) and let it fail. | | Not necessarily. You'll just get back, "that's not what I | meant by landscape". | Aeolun wrote: | You need clients that will allow you to be that for them. | Sometimes they just want a really expensive code monkey. | | I'm not exactly sure why. Maybe paying hundreds of | dollars an hour is a sort of status symbol? | yamtaddle wrote: | Raising rates seems to help. The more they're paying you, | the more they're willing to listen, it seems. Though of | course you can never completely escape bad clients. | shanusmagnus wrote: | Argh, that resonates. My general strategy: speak up | briefly on how we should do {x}, and then, when I am not | heard, do their thing {y}, which usually fails, since if | I speak up in the first place it means I probably know | what I'm talking about. | | Anyway, they can recognize the failure of {y}. Now it's | time to make my suggestion again, not in an asshole way, | but rather: "I think we should do {x}" as if it's the | first time I said it; or "Let's revisit what you're | trying to accomplish here." | | The happy story would be that people are abashed at my | great wisdom and sorrowful that they did not heed it. | More accurate story is that no acknowledgement of | anything occurs, but they are more receptive in the | moment, and even a bit more receptive in the future. Took | a long time to arrive at this, sadly, my great wisdom | notwithstanding. | actionablefiber wrote: | I go with "my first impulse is to suggest..." which IMO adds | the diplomatic nuance of admitting an incomplete understanding | of the problem and/or the person experiencing the problem. You | either get a "good suggestion, I'll try that" as a response or | you get "you might think it's a good idea but I already | considered it and XYZ problems occurred" and you can work from | there. | JJMcJ wrote: | Similar to correcting a big shot's mistaken notion, where you | might say something like "Curiously, that turns out not to be | the case." | fishtoaster wrote: | Oh, I might have to borrow that! I've sometimes used "for my | own understanding, is there a reason we're not doing X?" | incanus77 wrote: | Similar: I like "maybe a dumb question, but tell me about | X". I am never shy about being possibly redundant or asking | "dumb" questions. | enneff wrote: | I try not to frame things as "dumb questions" because I | find that junior devs can feel a lot of their questions | are "dumb" but really they're often very good questions | and (even if you lead by example) they can be hesitant to | ask them. I think it's generally a good assumption that | if someone has a question in mind then it's worth | exploring, so there are no dumb questions. | hamburglar wrote: | This one grates on me as insincere-sounding, to be honest. | It can sound a bit like a sarcastic way to state the | obvious. "Oh, you're cold? For my understanding -- and I | may be way off base here -- but is there a reason you | haven't closed the fucking window?" (Obvious extreme | example of intentional sarcasm) | pbourke wrote: | I wish more people would ask simple questions with the | expectation of getting a complicated answer. | | Usually it's more along the lines of "for my own | understanding, why can't we just ship things as they're | ready instead of waiting for everything in the order to | go in one box?" | dr_dshiv wrote: | "Naively, I'd be thinking about trying..." | matwood wrote: | Same. "My first thought is...but I'm sure I don't understand | all the nuances." | | Branching way off topic, and paraphrasing Sun Tsu here, but | he says to always give your opponent an out unless you plan | to completely destroy them. Very rarely in business do you | want to or need to destroy someone so I try to soften my | suggestions. | | The other mantra I repeat almost daily is 'do I want to be | right or effective'. It feels great to tell someone an idea | you know is 100% right, but does that mean they'll use it? At | the end of the day I want to be effective. "Just" feels more | like being right, than effective. | | Speaking of phrases, early in my career the senior VP of my | business unit was a nice, very sharp woman. One of the best | executives I've ever met. Listening to her on calls was a | master class on EQ and how to deal with people | professionally. But, anytime she said 'help me understand...' | you knew the hammer was coming. | mindcrime wrote: | _I go with "my first impulse is to suggest..." which IMO adds | the diplomatic nuance of admitting an incomplete | understanding of the problem and/or the person experiencing | the problem._ | | Same here, with a slight variation. I usually say "my first | thought is to try ..." or "the first thing that comes to mind | for me is ..." | | Depending on the situation I might also use the old "Have you | tried ..." phrasing. | hamburglar wrote: | I also like "could you try..." as a way of acknowledging | that it's a suggestion that may be unworkable for reasons I | don't know, and that I'm willing to hear that. | thecrumb wrote: | "could we try" | woopwoop24 wrote: | not always a we | smoe wrote: | I found, often it is actually faster, after a very brief | discussion, to just do what the client wants and let them (or | you) realize that they were in the wrong. Then reverse it | without being smug "I told you so" about it. | | E.g years ago on a complex web form I got the feedback from my | client's client, that because their boss was colorblind and | couldn't recognize the yellow/orange borders for missing | required fields (iirc), those fields should be greyed out | instead. I wrote back something on the line of "Very valid | reason to make _a_ change, but my concern with greying them out | is, that this is how commonly deactivated /disabled fields are | shown in which you can't enter anything at all". I got told | that this doesn't matter, I have to grey them out. Which I did | without additional comment, sent them the new version and | couple of hours got the response to undo it again and find | another solution. In the end everyone was happy. | | Obviously in this case it was something that only took a few | minutes that can easily be reversed, but I often see people | spending way more time debating on things (and not seldomly | getting unnecessarily emotional) than it would take to just try | out a couple different solutions and giving people something | more tangible. | giantg2 wrote: | You know what sucks about using things like "maybe", "let's try | x", etc? Is that I do this regularly in my job, but the | managers want more assertive answers. | blowski wrote: | Marriage has taught me to go even further than that. I now ask | "are you telling me to get it off your chest, or you want help | solving it?". If the former, I don't offer any solutions | whatsoever, in any kind of format. | thegrimmest wrote: | I'd prefer we live in a world where idle complaints are not | entertained. If you want advice, complain. If you do not, | keep silent. | ceras wrote: | Curious, does this apply to romantic partners too? | Personally, I'd be sad if my wife didn't share things | troubling her that she didn't need my help solving. I like | knowing how she's feeling about things. | | But at work, I understand this mindset. Though personally, | I still actually don't mind hearing people complain. And | since I'm a manager, complaints are a very useful signal | for me: even if I'm just in listening-mode, they give me | more clarity on precisely what's going on in my team. | thegrimmest wrote: | Of course I don't callously dismiss my romantic partner | when she complains. We both also recognize that | complaining is fundamentally indulgent, pointless, and | selfish, and strive to develop better coping mechanisms. | Even when suffering greatly, I am loathe to complain. | When I do complain, I am sure to apologize. | | At work, _actionable_ complaints (read: criticisms) are | indeed a very useful signal, and I try my best to pay | attention to them. | jodrellblank wrote: | Then shouldn't you, by your own principles, have kept | silent instead of posting that complaining? | thegrimmest wrote: | I don't think my post is a complaint, more an expression | of desire. It has also spawned an interesting discussion, | which seems to be the idea here. | goodpoint wrote: | That's exactly a complaint. | thegrimmest wrote: | This is a bit pedantic. I did qualify the word complaint | with the word "idle". A broad enough definition | encompasses any desire for change in the world. There | must be a distinction between statements which invite | meaningful conversation and those which do not[1]. | | 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIJYO4u5iug | Jarwain wrote: | Venting is a pretty normal and healthy way of dealing with | emotions. | jimbokun wrote: | Are we sure that it's healthy? | | I mean within reason I'm sure it's fine. | | But we probably all know people who complain about the | same things incessantly, with no desire to change them. | And at some point it's reasonable to decide if those are | people who you really want to continue to invest time | into. | thegrimmest wrote: | And responding to venting with advice/criticism is also | (clearly) perfectly normal right? | blowski wrote: | Sure, nobody's saying "you're a bad person for offering | advice". | | In some contexts, though, offering advice can feel like | you want to close the person down rather than listen to | them, that you think their problems aren't serious enough | because you'd solve them easily. I'm guessing you've had | at least one occasion where you have a work issue, and | your manager is casually dropping solutions that didn't | work, and you were frustrated with them as a result. | | As such, the consequence of offering solutions is that it | can damage your relationships with people, or at least | not use an opportunity to strengthen them. | thegrimmest wrote: | To recenter the conversation - in a personal context idle | complaints (ie. venting) are considered rude, and are | often accompanied by an apology, for a reason. You're | basically monopolizing a person's time, and expressing | explicit disinterest in their perspective. Using | complaint as a coping mechanism is a fundamentally | selfish thing to do[1]. Therefore I don't think we should | tolerate it idly. If you want to talk and only be | listened to, talk at an inanimate object. If you want to | be an equal party in a _conversation_ , speak to a human | being. | | In a work context, it should (always) be about most | efficiently solving the problem at hand. When I have a | work issue, I preface my request for support with the | steps I have taken to attempt to solve the problem. | Anything else wastes the time of everyone involved. When | this is done correctly, the first thing to come to the | mind of the people I'm asking is often _exactly what I 'm | looking for_. | | > _your manager is casually dropping solutions that didn | 't work_ | | Casual, useless, unsolicited advice is also a waste of | time and energy (see "seagull management"). If my manager | did this I would promptly tell them to either dig into | the problem properly with me, figure it out themselves, | or leave me to it. | | 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIJYO4u5iug | MikePlacid wrote: | > You're basically monopolizing a person's time, and | expressing explicit disinterest in their perspective. | Using complaint as a coping mechanism is a fundamentally | selfish thing to do[1] | | Yep, and allowing other person to do all this to you is | definitely spoiling. At the same time, a possibility and | ability to spoil someone you love - is one of the biggest | pleasures in life. | | (I've shown the video to my wife. She said: "See, you | could have done much worse") | thegrimmest wrote: | > _If you want advice, complain. If you do not, keep | silent. reply_ | | I couldn't agree more, I would amend the above with | "unless you are sure you are loved by your listener, and | are willing to impose on them" =) | MikePlacid wrote: | > that you think their problems aren't serious enough | because you'd solve them easily | | That would be a rather strange reaction. A single brain | gets easily stuck on a problem, so if involving the | second brain helps that does not mean that the problem | was easy. Or that the first brain was defective. | (Frankly, I think it was evolutionary "cheaper" to | implement the rule "if stuck - consult" than to implement | an unstuckable brain). | mcguire wrote: | You should probably not say this sort of thing in public as | it may cause people to view you as an emotional or | intellectual cripple. | MikePlacid wrote: | > Marriage has taught me to go even further than that. I now | ask "are you telling me to get it off your chest, or you want | help solving it?" | | I may be much slower to adapt. My wife of (almost) 30 years | usually starts with explicit "I am telling you this to just | get it off my chest". | yboris wrote: | Thank you for the reminder -- it _does_ feel like people can | be in (at least) two different modes -- with a desire to vent | and be heard, or inquiring about a solution. Yet it is not | obvious which since the two can sound so similar. | | If someone is grieving it's probably time to just listen, but | when someone is stuck with a social problem they may be | _rubber ducking_ with you rather than considering you to be a | good approximation of an oracle ;) | lephty wrote: | "Rubber ducking." As in speaking to your rubber duck with | no expectation of a response? First time seeing this usage. | Thanks. | Scarblac wrote: | A way to deal with really perplexing bugs is to just | carefully explain the code to an actual rubber duck. | | "This code is obviously correct, right duck? Look here, | this line first does x, then y happens and here... Wait a | minute, that doesn't do z at all!" | 98codes wrote: | Moreso than that, imagine a rubber duck floating in the | water: silently looking at you, nodding in understanding. | idontpost wrote: | kudos200 wrote: | I think they're probably referring to | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging | Aeolun wrote: | The only problem is that you often hear the same variation of | the problem multiple times with no action taken to resolve it | in between. | | That frustrates me. | blowski wrote: | I'm guessing it frustrates you because you like solving | problems? You hear someone stuck in a rut and you want to | help them out of it? | | Totally with you on this. I'm a solutions architect by day, | and my entire skillset is helping people solve problems. | | Do a role-play: someone comes to me complaining about how | it's really frustrating having to type all this crap into | Excel, so I suggest using OCR, or taking a course on | getting quicker with the numpad. Unfortunately, I missed | their real problem: they hate their job. Me telling them | "here's how you could be better at a job you hate" doesn't | really help them, it simply looks uncaring and assumes they | haven't already thought of those things. | | So I could just nod and say "oh that's sound terrible" | every time they mention it. You're right, it might look | crass and robotic. | | Even better here would be saying "Wow, typing all that crap | into Excel, you mentioned it last week as well. Sounds like | you really don't enjoy doing that?" and encourage them to | expand a bit. Is it the typing? What makes it so | frustrating? Do they think it's their job in the first | place? | | Eventually, they admit to you (maybe they hadn't realised | themselves) that they hate this bit of their job, and need | to discuss with their manager not doing it any more. (Or | maybe they hate the company they work for, and need to find | a new job. Or it's actually the keyboard they're using they | hate. Or whatever, you need to listen to find out.) | | This is how you help them out of their rut. They feel that | you're interested in their problem, and when they do find a | solution, they'll own it because they found it. | [deleted] | lazide wrote: | My challenge is that to be able to usefully respond to | people's rants, I need to empathize with them and expend | at least some mental effort to understand their problem. | | If they go on a rant about something, that dumps | emotional and mental load onto me. | | If they don't resolve, or attempt to resolve it, that | means they'll continue to dump it onto me - and even | worse, it will be a boring, already heard it problem with | no new information! | | If they continue to do that, and I continue to listen, | I'm essentially their emotional garbage dump and enabling | their lack of dealing with their actual problem and | frustrations. | | Even worse, it is often hard for me to get my mind off an | unresolved problem. So then it bugs me. | | I like solving problems because then I have a lot fewer | things bugging me. They almost always result in progress | in other ways too, and accomplishing things, which is | nice. | | Even worse still if it's the kind of problem they are | making for themselves, or are intentionally not trying to | solve. Of which there are many. | | Eventually, I just don't want to be around them, or get | progressively more blunt with changing the subject | because it makes it exhausting and unpleasant for me | being around them. | | Some people seem to be able to just ignore the emotional | affect or load, and get whatever they want from the | convo, and I can do so if I exert effort to do so. | | But life is too short for this kind of BS on the regular. | drc500free wrote: | I'm sorry that it frustrates you, that must be difficult. | giantg2 wrote: | Even better is when there's a agreed upon action and then | they just abandon that plan, leading to the same discussion | and plan,, only for it to be abandoned again... | 2devnull wrote: | Another useful thing to say, "oh no that sounds terrible, | what are you going to do?" It can help reframe from | complaining to strategizing, and that can make people more | receptive to outside ideas. | blowski wrote: | Depends on the person as to whether I'd say that. With an | employee who's constantly moaning about everything - I'd | absolutely say that. | | With my wife? Noooo, it would sound like I'm saying "I'm | not interested in your problems unless you have solutions". | As her partner, she wants me to share the burden of her | problems, even those for which she has no solution. | SnowHill9902 wrote: | I wouldn't recommend this. First of all, you shouldn't | provide personal opinions such as "terrible". Then, asking | what they are going to do forces them to confront the | problem which they may not be ready to do yet, or may not | want to articulate to you. | derefr wrote: | Usually in the sort of situation where you'd say this, | you're just reflecting the speaker's very-clearly- | expressed emotional state back at them to demonstrate | that you're actively engaged in listening and considering | their statements. | | It's not something you'd say in response to a text | complaint, where there's not enough "bandwidth" to | clearly communicate the complainant's emotional state; | but it's something CSRs are trained to say on phone calls | all the time. | | It's also the reason that therapists vastly prefer | speaking in person, to video calls, to phone calls; and | almost never even consider doing "therapy via text chat." | There's not enough bandwidth in text chat to enable a | therapist to properly engage with and respond to the | emotional content of a client's communication; but with | each additional level (voice, video, in-person meeting), | that's more possible. | | (Interesting consideration, given that: suicide/crisis | hotlines should probably consider offering video calls as | an option, as the increased bandwidth for emotional | content will allow the operator to engage with + | potentially help the caller on a deeper level.) | Aeolun wrote: | I'm sort of inclined to think that people calling suicide | hotlines are probably not that enthusiastic to hop on a | video call. | | Just reaching out is hard, and you want to be as | anonymous as possible. | wglb wrote: | A very useful and practical question at the right time is "Is | there a request in there?" | kelseyfrog wrote: | Thank you for bringing this up. This was a life lesson that | unfortunately had to be spelled out for me in a very | embarrassing way. | | My ultimate takeaway is to now default to listening without | advice. The result are on average better as people who want | to vent are more put-off by advice givers than advice seeks | who receive a good listener. It's also made me quite a bit | more appreciative of times when I need to vent and someone is | there to simply listen. | bigiain wrote: | > My ultimate takeaway is to now default to listening | without advice. | | Eve when it's not listening to someone who's venting, that | can be really powerful anyway. | | The best sys admin I've ever work with used to keep a teddy | bear on the end of her desk. When people came to her with a | question or problem she'd say "talk to the bear". It's | astounding how often explaining the problem to an inanimate | object results in the solution becoming obvious to the | person ding the explaining. | | (Note, she was really good at not saying in a rude or | dismissive way, but she was somewhat on the spectrum and we | ran a lot of cover to ensure the CEO didn't get told to | talk to the bear...) | vasco wrote: | What do you do though? Just stand there quietly nodding? | When I try to do this I end up basically saying "that | sucks", "hmm hmm", "yeah", etc which is very frustrating to | me as I'd hate someone doing that to me. Or worse, | sometimes I get the feeling that those "that need a | listener" actually want mindless agreement with whatever | the situation was or I feel like I'll be reinforcing | insecurities. | | Let's say someone is telling you they are fearful for their | job, they think they will get fired soon, even though they | have nothing specific to point to. As a listener, are you | agreeing with this or are you neutral nodding your head? | Because my default would be to reply that they should do | the best they can and if it comes to that they will surely | find better pastures, but then I'm giving advice already. | | I hear this advice but I have little clue how to put it | into practice, moreover because of what I mentioned above, | if I'm telling someone something, I definitely want them to | think about it and try and help me with advice, otherwise I | feel like they don't even care and would not share again | with the same person. | abnercoimbre wrote: | There's a term that's useful here: active listening. If | they are fearful for their job, express concern and ask | them to tell the story: | | _" Oh no, that's terrible! Why are you fearful, are you | all right?"_ | | and you remain active by asking follow-up questions. For | example to plug gaps in the story: | | _" Wow! Did your manager say that to your face? Or was | it hearsay through that one co-worker?"_ | | and so on. Expressing emotions is also perfectly fine: | | _" I feel bad. Wish I could do something for you."_ | | I'd only interject long enough to get them talking again. | If they need your help they'll have asked it by now :) | avianlyric wrote: | There's a big difference between agreeing with someone, | and acknowledging their emotional state. | | In these situations people just want to hear you | acknowledge that you understand they are in pain, no | necessary agree with their cause of action. | | If you're not sure what to ask, then your best course of | action is to enquire about _why_ they think they feel a | certain way. Why does they job makes them stressful, why | does talking with a certain person make them anxious. | You're not rendering judgement on their emotions or | feels, you simply acknowledge they are what they are, and | that's normal. | | For some specifics the following might be useful: | | "Why do you think X makes you anxious" | | Once they answer | | "Yes, I understand now why that might make you anxious" | | Or | | "It's perfectly normal to feel anxious" | | If there behaviour is causing issues: | | "It's perfectly normal to feel anxious, that's ok, but | the way you're dealing with it is causing issues for X. | Perhaps we can find a better way for you to cope?" | | For more, it's worth looking at Mental Health First Aid. | It can provide a number of very practical tips of dealing | with someone in crisis, which are also excellent for | helping those that just need to vent to someone. | mikepurvis wrote: | > There's a big difference between agreeing with someone, | and acknowledging their emotional state. | | This has been a key takeaway for me too, also in the | context of intimate partner communication. | | However, I would say that there can for sure be pitfalls | with it-- it's easy to believe that you are communicating | _only_ acknowledgment of emotional state, but have the | listener receive it as signing on to their interpretation | of the facts, the overall premise, their assessment of | the other players ' actions and motivations in the story, | and so on. | | This can lead to major misunderstandings down the road, | when the person presents concrete actions that they are | expecting will be taken. They may not be anticipating any | pushback on this because previous validation-of- | emotional-state conversations led them to believe you | were both on the same page, when in fact you have | significant concerns (whether it was that they misjudged | the situation, escalated it unnecessarily, viewed someone | else's actions unfairly, failed to accept a compromise or | take possible corrective actions, whatever it is). | | At that point, it's probably the type of conflict best | taken to a professional to sort out, but I think of these | situations when I see relationship coaches on TikTok | talking up this kind of emotional validation as being a | silver bullet for resolving all conflicts and achieving | lasting harmony. | kelseyfrog wrote: | > Let's say someone is telling you they are fearful for | their job, they think they will get fired soon, even | though they have nothing specific to point to. As a | listener, are you agreeing with this or are you neutral | nodding your head? | | As a listener, I'm my goal is to create an environment | for them to talk about what bothers them in the most | vibrant, and exploratory way possible. I realize that's | not exactly the most helpful explanation so allow me to | go into more detail. There's a few conversational | techniques that I pull from heavily when I'm trying to | actively listen: conversational orienteering, and open | ended questions, non-Sorcratic questioning. | | For lack of a better term[1], conversational orienteering | is actively being aware of the topic of conversation and | its local topology. Given a topic, one should be able to | generate several other topics: one that is more abstract, | one more specific, and several adjacent. Over time, a | listener gets a sense of where a conversation wants to go | and uses the conversational topology to orient towards | that goal. It took me a bit of practice to be good at | picking topics not too far and not too close to the one | at hand - too far can make conversations feel | disconnected and random, and too close can make someone | feel like they are being misunderstood. | | Secondly, I don't think open-ended questions needs much | explanation, but when someone is venting or needs | support, hows, whys, and whens give the speaker much more | room to express themselves than 'Do you...'s. | | Thirdly, it's important to be non-Socratic in questions | and responses. Leading the speaker is much much worse | than telling them advice and should be avoided at all | cost. | | If you've ever worked a problem out verbally, you should | be able to recognize that these principles work to | cultivate a good verbal environment for the speaker. I | don't see them as not helping, so much as creating an | environment where they have the best shot at verbally | processing their issue. I think it's important to | recognize that emotions can get in the way of people | being able to take action and that speaking can help | diffuse strong emotions so that someone is ready to take | a concrete step toward fixing their problem. I've seen | that happen a lot. Even just feeling understood can help | people feel better about making a real decision. | | It's probably also important to point out that there are | some people for which verbal processing works really well | and some who can complain endlessly. It's important to | recognize the difference. For the later, value your time. | Maybe give them 15mins of listening and then decide to | change the subject, for them verbal processing is not | going to help. They probably need to work on issues in a | clinical or therapeutic environment you cannot provide. | | Hope this gives some insight, and even if it doesn't, | feel free to tell me too. | | 1. If this actually has a term, please let me know. I'm | coining one just to be able to talk about it. | MadcapJake wrote: | This is hard for me too. If it's a big complicated thing, | I try to recapitulate what they said which then leads to | them feeling more listened to. That way, I stay busy and | feel like I am engaged without trying to solution for | them. If it's a simpler thing, this advice doesn't work | and can feel condescending. Ymmv. | distortedsignal wrote: | It sounds to me like you want some way to engage with | what the other person is sharing. I find that I get a lot | of mileage out of asking <i>really dumb questions.</i> | | So with your example, I would first accept their feelings | - we've all been insecure about jobs from time to time - | and then try to probe into them. | | "Has your boss been talking about money being tight? Did | one of your big customers just drop?" | | "Has your boss been talking about your performance? Do | you see others on your team being dismissive of your | role?" | | Questions like this let the counterparty know that a) | they matter to you and b) you're hearing what they're | saying. I think that's what you're saying you want to | convey. I could be way off base here. | enneff wrote: | There's a fantastic book and tv series by a research | psychologist Brene Brown where she talks a lot about how | to be on the listening end of these kinds of | conversations. Often in these situations the other party | just wants to have their emotions validated by someone | they trust. Just being there to acknowledge their | feelings and see their pain is enough (and trying to do | more can sometimes make things worse). I highly recommend | checking Brown out, she is quite incredible. | bigiain wrote: | At least personal type conversations, "that sucks" is | very very often exactly the right thing to say. Even in | work situations it can be a reasonable first response, at | least with people not too much further up the org chart | than you: "The load balancer latencies have just spiked" | "That sucks". (I'd suggest against using it if CTO comes | in yelling about the entire network being cryptolockered | though. Unless it's "That sucks, but I told you so. I | quit.") | croo wrote: | You could try to associate this with the rubber duck | trick where you just tell your problem to anyone, just to | articulate the problem may very well solve it. You don't | need input. | | In my experience this is also a women-men difference in | brain wiring. Men often looks for help when he fails to | solve a problem, women always looking for emotional | support before solving a problem. | | If you give a solution for someone looking for an | emotional support or vica-versa you've expreienced one of | the main source of frustration in relationships :) | scrozier wrote: | It's very cool that you are sensitive to how frustrating | saying "that sucks" is for you. _Many_ people are looking | for just that, though. It might be informative to try out | "that sucks" enough times to see what response it gets | from the person you're interacting with. You might be | surprised. (I was.) | npteljes wrote: | I can really empathize with this struggle. | | >As a listener, are you agreeing with this or are you | neutral nodding your head? | | The "trick" I do is to try to set aside whatever train of | thoughts I might have had before the person spoke to me, | and try to imagine that the thing they talk about is | happening to me. And then, voice my reaction to that. So | if someone told me that "I'm fearful for my job. I think | I might be fired soon", the first that comes to mind is | "Oh my god, that's horrible! Why do you think that | happens? Have they hinted about this before?" | | Now, this maybe works a handful of times in the | conversation. A second thing that you can do is trying to | imagine the relations of the thing that just got told to | you. By relations, I mean relating to anything, how it | connects to anything: the speaker's environment, life | circumstances, your shared universe, anything. Continuing | the example above: "The timing is such a shame, given | what's going on in your life, I would have liked it that | at least the job is stable". | | Third thing, you could discuss the persons possible | actions and reactions to the event, and how others in | their life have, or will have taken it. Continuing: "Do | you have anything else lined up, just in case?" "Could | your side gig support you until you find another job?" | "How did your spouse take the news?" | | And the fourth thing, it's always worth thinking about | WHY the other person told you the thing they did. What | are you to this other person? A friend? Colleague? Are | you their superior? Spouse? Do you relate, in a way, to | the thing that they told you? Are you maybe a recruiter, | and that's why they tell you that they are fearful for | their job? The answers to these questions can bring you | closer to your natural response to the situation. | [deleted] | scrozier wrote: | Exactly. Being on the receiving end of unsolicited advice is | truly annoying, which most posters here seem to be ignoring. | Unsolicited advice is annoying, no matter what insincere | bullsh*t you wrap it in | jakelazaroff wrote: | +1 to this advice. I've heard it as "do you want comfort, or | solutions?" | kweinber wrote: | This sounds really patronizing. I would be careful with | that phrasing. People who don't want their problem solved | often know the solutions and don't like the tradeoffs or | change they entail. It is often not a knowledge problem. | kelseyfrog wrote: | It also implicitly discounts one of the most valuable | processes: verbal processing. Some people, myself | included, find themselves verbalizing a problem and the | tensions in every choice and monitoring the logic and | emotional response present in saying it out loud. | | In this way, listening and solving aren't too dissimilar. | Simply listening can give the speaker an appropriate | environment in which to solve their problem. A listener | can play a part in helping to solve the problem, but | helping foster the environment in which the problem can | be solved. Don't mistake this as a silver bullet, but | simply recognize that being a listener is an | underappreciated role and listener vs solver isn't as | dichotomous as it sounds. | jakelazaroff wrote: | _> It also implicitly discounts one of the most valuable | processes: verbal processing._ | | Not really. The question, more generally, is: what should | my role be in this conversation? Should I be an active | participant in solving the problem? Or should I support | you as you work through it? | etothepii wrote: | I think the implication is that by listening passively | you can be an active participant. That is to say, | speaking the problem out loud causes it to run through | alternate pathways in the brain which helps the person | sharing their issue resolve their own problem. | | As with so many things in life, the hard part is working | out if your actions should be motivated by actually | helping or feeling like you helped. | [deleted] | Aeolun wrote: | > This sounds really patronizing. | | I think generally the person you'd say this to is already | aware how the conversation will go if you don't clarify | beforehand. | BlueTemplar wrote: | This is soooo important ! (And not just in marriage...) | AareyBaba wrote: | Deborah Tannen a linguist has a book which addresses the | different ways men and women communicate which I found eye- | opening. | | You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation | https://www.amazon.com/You-Just-Dont-Understand- | Conversation... | pkoird wrote: | Or, the way I do it: "do you want me to just listen, or do | you want me to offer advice?" | [deleted] | [deleted] | gwbas1c wrote: | > Needless to say working with this client is challenging on an | interpersonal level. | | I've had a few people accuse me of being difficult. Usually | they were quite difficult themselves to work with; yet were | totally unaware of how unreasonable they were. | | (Queue the scene from Beauty and the Beast where the Beast | accuses Belle of being difficult.) | | I noticed later in the thread that you were considering walking | away from the customer. If you do this, I think it's best to | walk away completely. Don't find a replacement, don't try to | keep the business. Just cut the cord as quickly and completely | as legally possible. | reaperducer wrote: | A surprisingly successful shortcut for dealing with people who | won't listen is to throw out the old "Best practices" canard. | | "Oh, you'd like to do x? Well that's not' best practices' these | days." | | People will accept any ridiculous thing you say if you pretend | it's "best practices." | yboris wrote: | I like the phrasing "I'm curious if ..." or "I wonder if ..." | which hopefully communicates that is is _just_ ;) my humble | guess upon first impression of seeing the problem. | dr-detroit wrote: | bombcar wrote: | I would have taken it as "this portrait packing slip has what | we need, now scale and rotate and put it on the left of the | same size paper" - and then gone over to the warehouse and | grabbed a few copies of what they did. | rob74 wrote: | Yeah, just pop over to a client's warehouse (which may not | even be in the same city) to chat with some guys you have | never seen before - sounds like a plan! I imagine if it would | have been as simple as you suggest they would have _just_ | done that ;) | cmmeur01 wrote: | I'd suggest a phone call, but yeah dealing with the actual | users is far better than some middle manager without a clue | how the job actually gets performed. | colechristensen wrote: | "just" is a subtle pejorative and unless you're trying to be | insulting, it's better to rephrase what you're saying | especially if you're getting negative reactions you don't want. | edw519 wrote: | _what is the warehouse actually trying to pencil in?_ | | Wow! Great question! | | This tells me that the root problem here is that development | was done before analysis. Broken process. Often broken results. | And most certainly broken management. | | OP is nitpicking semantics while unsupported is identifying | something so much larger: an opportunity to avoid OP's | conundrum by doing things right in the first place. | | Best wishes, unsupported. I hope you get an opportunity to | build what was actually needed in the first place (and may | deliver results orders of magnitude higher). But somehow I get | the feeling you'll end up just giving them work-around | landscape and move on. We've all been there. | | TRANSLATION: What would need to change in this business to | print the warehouse workers' notes on the pdf before it's | actually printed. And please don't supply a response that | begins with, "Just don't" | unsupp0rted wrote: | Thanks for the positive feedback! | | As a consultant or contractor or whatever (client doesn't | know the difference), I need to find a happy medium somewhere | between "how can I personally reconfigure the business for | you" and "I'm a mindless pair of hands that codes". | | I can't go so far as to change how the warehouse operates. | | But it wouldn't hurt to _answer my questions_ about how the | warehouse operates and ask me to come up with solutions in | line with that, rather than "just make it landscape and stop | wasting time with questions". | toldyouso2022 wrote: | From past experiences (don't work freelance anymore) I | think consultant and contractor cannot be the same person. | For example: If you are paid to give advice and then | develop, wouldn't you recommend the most expensive thing? | Too many times I lost energy and renounced money to | recommend not doing extremely dumb stuff instead of doing | it. And I was even wrong in doing so! I'm not the | entrepreneur, I'm not the one organizing resources, so I | should not have a say unless specifically paid. If I were | to work again as freelance, I would only do either | consultancy or contracting, never mix the two | edw519 wrote: | _I can't go so far as to change how the warehouse | operates._ | | Why not? That's what differentiates those who sling code | from those who do real Digital Transformation (not the crap | our bosses spout off.) | | _it wouldn't hurt to answer my questions about how the | warehouse operates and ask me to come up with solutions in | line with that_ | | This says volumes about what they think about you and | worse, what they think about their business and the problem | at hand. | | Most users are fleas who used to jump 6 feet but now only | jump 3 feet because they can't even imagine any more. | | Sorry to hijack the discussion and I didn't mean to suggest | you should be doing any more than you are. (Believe me, at | my rate, I get the job done and move on.) I just enjoyed | seeing someone bring up the bigger picture. | vaidhy wrote: | I was wondering why this answer was rubbing me the wrong | way and I realized it is because your answer shows a | complete lack of empathy for "the other side". I have | worked on warehouses and it is complicated. | | >This says volumes about what they think about you and | worse, what they think about their business and the | problem at hand. | | Why is this bad? If someone who is not technical, asks | you to explain in detail about how the networking is | setup and why is it not possible to just rewire the | entire network to support something small, I wonder what | your answer would be.. | | Operations managers in warehouses hone their skill over | many years, running a large, very variable labor force | efficiently. There are many variations over every single | process and they have to keep the flow going while people | come and go. If you cannot deal with an abstract request | without asking everyone undergo "digital transformation", | maybe you are in the wrong business. | edw519 wrote: | _shows a complete lack of empathy for "the other side"_ | | I must have misspoke or I'm just not the writer I used to | be because this is exactly the opposite of what hundreds | of warehouse and shop people have said about me for over | 40 years. (about 10% of that work is mentioned here: | edweissman.com) | | _Why is this bad?_ | | Because NO ONE is working the real problem (which is | certainly not changing report orientation to leave enough | white space for "out of the ERP system" notes). | Everyone's dancing around it with semantics, jerry rigs, | and workarounds. I.T. should be a trusted business | partner. And unsupported's management should be putting | them in a position to work the real problem. Instead, | they're just another nerd who should shut up, put in a | meaningless fix, and stop threatening their managers. | | _I have worked on warehouses and it is complicated._ | | Agreed. All the more reason to find out what notes | they're adding to reports. Mission critical "notes" | outside the system is a giant red flag. I'd rather work | the red flag than make people happy. If it's important | enough to put on a packing slip, it's probably important | enough to be part of the system of record. A good old VSM | should identify that and reduce that complication. | andsoitis wrote: | > "have you tried..." | | Or: "what have you tried?" | aloisdg wrote: | Been there. People hate that | https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251309/comments- | can... | rgoulter wrote: | I'm less optimistic about whether phrasing helps. | | The message is not the meta-message. | | The reason the examples in OP of 'just do...' irk is because | the 'just do...' supposes to be helpful, but any sincere | thought given shows that the suggestion isn't helpful. | | Instead of giving sympathy/relatedness, it comes across as | dismissing the problem. -- I think this can be down to | miscommunication; but I think whether something 'sympathises | with problem' or 'gives solution' is deeper than a phrasing. | Cthulhu_ wrote: | Even better, since it's an open question instead of a | suggestion; the suggestion itself can already be | condescending or insulting someone's intellect. Even though | sometimes it IS that simple, see Occam's Razor. | | But really, "have you tried turning it off and on again", | while a funny quote, can be quite condescending as opposed to | "What have you tried". | andsoitis wrote: | Yep, exactly. | | The only caveat I'd offer is that sometimes this is not a | good question to ask ("what have you tried?") because it | can be interpreted as "are you doing anything about it?" | Edge case, true, but still worth being intentional about. | torstenvl wrote: | Asking "what have you tried?" suggests that the answer to | the question will lead to the answer to the problem. | | But the person seeking help _already knows_ what they | have tried, and they don 't have an answer. | | So in the absolute best case, it's a useless question, | you're just trying to get them to rubber duck it. In a | less-than-great case, it'll be taken as a suggestion that | they need your guidance in basic critical thinking and | troubleshooting. | | In my view, the very limited potential upside (successful | Socratic rubber ducking) is not worth the significant | potential downside (insulting them by suggesting they | already have the answer, they're just not smart enough to | see it). | BlueTemplar wrote: | People are not equal in (sub-(sub-))domain experience. | And we all can be distracted or dumb sometimes. Consider | how powerful rubber ducking is : it works even when | you're not talking to another person ! (And you might not | think about doing it in a stressful situation.) | | It just needs to be done tactfully. And in case it _was_ | a stupid mistake, defuse the ego issues by telling an | anecdote about how you 've made a similar one. (It's even | helpful if it was a dangerous mistake : telling how you | got punished, but the world didn't end.) | michaelt wrote: | _> In my view, the very limited potential upside | (successful Socratic rubber ducking)_ | | It depends on the situation - if you're not familiar with | the person asking, and you're talking with them one-on- | one, it can be a chance for them to establish their | dignity so you can triage their request properly. | | If I'm looking after a shopping website and someone tells | me they can't put things in their basket, I might usually | start by asking with some pretty basic questions. | | By giving them a chance to tell me they can't put things | in their basket on pages X and Y but can on Z, and it | only happens when using Firefox, and that they've tested | with multiple accounts, these browser versions and OSes, | with and without plugins/ad blockers, and they've got | confirmation from several other people - probably I'm | going to skip asking them to clear their cookies and I'll | launch straight into reproducing it myself. | | On the other hand, if I'm looking after a shopping | website with clumsy warehouse staff and a customer tells | me they ordered two widgets and only received one, | probably I don't need any more info from the customer - | and resolving the problem rather than batting it back to | the customer would be good customer service. | BlueTemplar wrote: | That's why you preface it with "just to be sure". Depending | on the situation, "what have you tried" can come before or | after (or in the middle, if several obvious known failures | exist). | huhtenberg wrote: | "Everything, nothing works". | | Few people like being asked open-ended questions when they | are irritated. | dspillett wrote: | "CNR, not enough detail, ticket closed, reopen with more | information if your problem persists". | | I don't have time to dig information out of people in order | to try to help them, if they can't make any effort to help | me help them when I ask for more information. | | This is of course one of the reasons I'm not generally | client facing these days! | yourapostasy wrote: | I have the opposite problem with many technical support | teams these days. I supply them with a full breakdown of | what error I encountered, the reproduction | code/commands/data, my configuration, what I think | happened, how I tested for that, alternative explanations | I came up with and tried, traces, trace markers, vendor- | standard dumps, and a call to action of the next piece of | information I need (usually an explanation of what is | exactly happening inside a specific function call that | the trace doesn't reveal). I did what I dreamed of | receiving when I fielded technical calls back in the day | but never did, and am trying to follow all the vendors' | own support guidelines of what they want to save everyone | time. | | There are so many offshore teams these days that I wonder | whether the volume of what I supply in my support tickets | overwhelms the English as a second language support | engineers' total comprehension abilities, between the | combined English-to-native language parsing and | internalization of the case details itself. About 9 out | of 10 times now when I reach offshore engineers, there | are responses with blatant signals they simply did not | read through even a third of what I painstakingly put | together. With English native speakers, it is closer to | 1-5% depending upon the vendor. | | No shade to the offshore teams, but it adds an | unnecessary debugging cycle for them, I suspect they're | under insane metrics to uphold incentivizing this | behavior and I just politely point out where I already | gave them the information they're requesting. Most of the | time they simply escalate the case straight towards the | development team. | dspillett wrote: | _> I suspect they 're under insane metrics to uphold | incentivizing this behavior_ | | This is likely to be it: perhaps they are effectively | paid by the ticket or response (due to how | pay/bonus/other structures align) so paying attention to | all that information costs them significantly. Their | ideal is to get a reply to you ASAP so they'll prioritise | tickets where they can bang out a link to an existing | knowledge-base article. | | _> No shade to the offshore teams_ | | In some cases it may also be that they are employing | cheaply rather than not carefully, so some of the people | aren't great to start with (either technically, in terms | of their claims to understand English well, or both), but | I think you are right generally to give them more credit | than that and suggesting that most of the time it is due | to unhelpful metrics & targets (you get what you | measure!). That and failing to provide sufficient | support/documentation/training to the people trying to | help you (sometimes you might know _far_ more than them | as they first saw the system last week). | | _> Most of the time they simply escalate the case | straight towards the development team_ | | They are likely not to do this on first response, even if | it is very much the right thing to do in a complex case, | because of a negative metric deliberately in place to | reduce load on dev teams (which may be as under- | staffed/under-trained and more over-worked than the | support team). | | _> I have the opposite problem with many technical | support teams these days. I supply them_ | | I try to be forgiving about lack of information in the | initial request, as long as they are understanding about | my response being a curt "I need more information" and a | list of example data1. If I ask for more information and | just get a vague response, _that_ is when I knee-jerk hit | the CNR button. | | ---- | | [1] the standard "what was on-screen, details of the form | you were editing2, what did you do, what did you expect, | what happened instead, include error messages3 and data | you entered2, and at what time did this occur (be as | accurate as you can)4..." | | [2] which parts of this may vary significantly depending | on the situation, and providing all possible information | may be a waste of their time and mine, which is part of | why I try not to mind the initial information being | slight vague. | | [3] this _doesn 't_ tend to vary, as a rule I _always_ | want to know any messages that were emitted and feel | justified in being immediately irritated when this data | isn 't included from the start - "I got an error" does | not suffice. | | [4] this can be as vital as the error/exception messages, | sometimes more so, if I need to go diving into logs for | further clues. | [deleted] | jasonlotito wrote: | > This is of course one of the reasons I'm not generally | client facing these days! | | That's like someone who isn't a C/C++ developer having | opinions on C/C++ development. | theamk wrote: | Yep, and that's a good reason to professionally avoid | people who become irritated too often. | | I have been lucky enough so far this was possible.. and if | this could not be avoided, one stategy was to try to | deflect any specific promise with "I need to research this | first", and then ask same question again when the person | cools down. | | It does mean that irritable people get help slower, but | that's how the life is in general anyway. | jerf wrote: | Mmmm, well, I'm all about being accommodating and gracious | to people under stress, but as this is all generally in the | context of a professional interaction, there are _some_ | expectations of those who are being asked questions. If you | don 't want to be pestered with my every guess about what | you may have already done, likely hitting several things | you have, you really ought to be able to answer the | question "what have you tried" with something a bit more | specific. | | I'm not asking for total accuracy. I've certainly | experienced on both sides accidentally giving the | impression something was tried that in fact wasn't and all | sorts of such verbal errors and mistakes. But you do need | to give something in response to that question. | jasonlotito wrote: | > but as this is all generally in the context of a | professional interaction, there are some expectations of | those who are being asked questions. | | The expectation is that they speak the same language. | Whether they understand what I'm asking is on me, and | helping them understand what I'm asking is also on me. | | "What have you tried?" is such challenging question, | because you don't know the technical skill of the person | involved. Will they use the same terminology as you? Do | they know what upload/download mean? Servers? Anything? | | And then there is the case of someone coming to you after | trying many things. They won't necessarily have a list of | things they've tried. | | What I find most useful is going back and confirming | assumptions. | | "What have you tried" assumes a lot. It assumes a | problem, it assumes a direction of the problem, and it | also guides you into thinking of the solutions rather | than the problem, even if subconsciously. | | Always start by verifying assumptions. That, and going to | the source. Both of these revolve around going to the | source and verifying. | [deleted] | marcosdumay wrote: | > but as this is all generally in the context of a | professional interaction | | Odds are the person you are talking to have tried several | dozens of things, 2/3 of what they don't even remember | anymore. | | Asking "what have you tried" is very often an | unprofessional display of power disguised as a time- | waster question. The one exception when the person | answering has not had time to try several dozen options. | theamk wrote: | Nah, it is a basic "getting to know" question. "I | rebooted the machine" will get one response, "I cleared | the cache and local storage; and also reproduced in | incognito window" will get the other and "I am not going | to answer that, also you are unprofessional" will get yhe | third type. | | Withholding useful information and being rude about it is | not the best way to get help. | jimbokun wrote: | In a professional work context, you are responsible for | managing your own emotions in order to solve the problem at | hand. | derefr wrote: | "Can you give me three examples of things you've tried that | didn't work?" | allenu wrote: | It's funny, I think hearing somebody say this in person and | seeing the exasperation on their face would invite empathy | on my part and help me understand their situation (i.e. | they're in a bad mood because of this problem), BUT seeing | somebody say "Everything, nothing works." in a Slack | message would absolutely annoy the f out of me. I'd | immediately assume they're not communicating properly. I'm | not saying the latter is their fault, but just that | communication differs based on medium. | | Anyway, the nice thing about in-person conversation (or | even over video call) is the conversation can flow a lot | more easily, so even if you said "Hey, just do X" and they | angrily respond, you can adjust quickly and say "Oh, sorry, | I figured we'd go for the most obvious thing first. Okay, | let's figure this out." I think opening lines matter way | less when it's in person, and tone matters way more. You | could say "Oh, just try X" in a friendly manner or "Oh, | just try X!" in a condescending manner. In text, it's up to | the receiver of the message to interpret. | ipiz0618 wrote: | Reminds me of a colleague who, upon seeing every little issue of | a massive program, complains the whole thing is "completely | broken". And when people try to explain why the issue happens, he | would interrupt and say "I don't care, just fix it right now". | The intention is obvious - to show authority and frame everything | as urgent. | RobinL wrote: | As soon as you recognise the word 'just' is problematic it can be | very useful. As in, 'why don't you just'. | | If you find yourself about to say 'just', it's a great time to | pause and think about why the person hasn't 'just' done what | you're about to suggest. It usually gives a deeper insight into | the problem - usually (but not always) it's a harder problem than | it initially looks. | | And even if the solution really is obvious, it's often useful to | think about why it wasn't obvious to the other person. | avg_dev wrote: | this is an interesting technique. it sounds a bit difficult, | but i will give it a try. | sfpotter wrote: | I mentor students on research projects. I think it can be fine to | use the word "just" in this context exactly to telegraph that I | think a particular task should be easy. Student says, "But what | about X?" I might say, "Oh, just do Y." It's fine if they feel | the tension of me knowing how to do something and thinking it's | easy and them not. The key part is providing a supportive | environment so that they know they can ask questions. At this | point, it's on them: they can challenge themselves and try to do | Y without any help, or they can ask for more guidance. This is | what they call a "teachable moment". | | Learning how to differentiate between when it's reasonable to ask | for more help and when it's not is an important skill to pick up | since there's a dividing line for basically all roles you might | find yourself in. | Cthulhu_ wrote: | The main differentiation is whether it's used to trivialise a | problem someone may have, especially if you're not in the same | situation as the person. The mental health one is great, in | that there's so many people that will say things like "just go | outside" or "just do yoga" or "just do drugs". | jamincan wrote: | As someone who struggles with depression, I definitely relate | to that example. Part of the frustration is that those things | are already voiced in my head. The other part of the | frustration is that I've already cycled through worse and | better periods, and in retrospect, the positive cycles | leading out of my worst depressive periods always seem that | simple - it always starts with something that seems stupidly | trivial like picking up dirty laundry off the floor - which | lends credibility to the voice in my head and which makes it | oh so agonizingly frustrating when such a simple thing feels | impossible. | hoistbypetard wrote: | > Student says, "But what about X?" I might say, "Oh, just do | Y." | | What would be lost if you said "I think it would be easier if | you did Y instead."? | | That would convey the thing you think "would be fine" without | any of the negative baggage that use of "just" can carry. | sfpotter wrote: | I don't think the two usages are significantly more or less | negative. Body language, intonation, context, etc. are | everything here. | hoistbypetard wrote: | That's completely fair for face-to-face verbal | communications. I was, for some reason, putting it in the | context of written text-only exchanges. IME, in that | context "just" has a significant chance of carrying very | negative baggage compared to a more explicit "I think it | would be easier if...". | wldcordeiro wrote: | The negative baggage isn't something universal though from | looking just at the comments here alone. | mastermedo wrote: | I'm not sure I agree. I'm a very outgoing extroverted person, | and even I feel cut-off when someone points out they think | something is super easy, especially when it's really not easy. | | Just a few weeks ago at work, one of the TLs told me I should | 'just do X', and when I pushed back saying it's going to take a | few weeks, he said 'oh it's just a couple of lines, I can do it | in 10 minutes'. I challenged that. 5 integrations and 2 weeks | later we had a first working version, that caused more harm | than good in the end because of an assumption that didn't hold. | | I think easy things might be easy in theory, but not | necessarily in execution. So when a student comes to you, I | suspect they have thought about theory, but find the execution | hard because of the knowable unknowns they are not aware of and | you are. Many times people don't even propose things that might | seem obvious to them out of fear they might say something | stupid. Indicating something is easy in a demeaning fashion is | bad. Phrasing it differently has a different effect. E.g. Oh, I | think that might be solved with X. It should be relatively | straightforward. Look at the work I did <here>, it should match | your use case. | sfpotter wrote: | You missed the part of my post where I said that I work hard | to create an environment where it's OK to ask questions. | | My point is that it's not just about the language you use. | Not saying "just" isn't a magic bullet. Regardless of the | phrasing, there's a lot more pedagogical work that needs to | take place to build a good environment. | antris wrote: | Yes you are correct that not saying "just" isn't enough. | But saying it often works towards eroding that environment | and it's unproductive towards that. That's the point of the | post, not that it's a magic bullet. | dislikedtom2 wrote: | Great article. It's like people assume that you are some free | rational actor, instead of being totally shaped by your history | (specially childhood). | photochemsyn wrote: | For the case of helping someone with a technical problem, as | author notes. words like 'simply', 'merely, 'just' are | downplaying the person's efforts and inherently cause unnecessary | strife, discouragement, resentment, etc. Sometimes, letting them | work through it for a while longer on their own is the better | course. | | In the situation where help is clearly needed, 'let's consider | possible solutions' is a better entry point, along with 'let's | ensure we don't make it worse' - i.e. take a snapshot of the | current situation, store the current working file, etc. Now | you've gone into a collaborative situation, and if there's a | solution the person will feel like they've been a part of it, not | like they're an idiot who should have been able to figure it out | on their own. Makes for a much better working environment, better | morale, sense of being on the team, etc. | | For the person on the other end, the person who needs help, this | is where keeping a log of your activities (in the lab world, this | means a detailed and updated lab notebook, maybe a logging app of | some kind for programming), so if someone asks the (sometimes | irritating) question of 'what have you tried already' you can | just point them to it. | | For the case of seriously depressed people who can't get out of | bed, that's a bit tougher. Cup of psychedelic mushroom tea | perhaps, plus someone to hold their hand for a few hours? | mindcrime wrote: | _In the situation where help is clearly needed, 'let's consider | possible solutions' is a better entry point, along with 'let's | ensure we don't make it worse' - i.e. take a snapshot of the | current situation, store the current working file, etc._ | | Meh. Just goes to show how communication is a very subjective | and personal thing. To my ears, both of those phrases would | sound extremely condescending and patronizing. If I were | struggling with a problem and someone approached me and said | either of those things, I'd be more inclined to say "go f%#@ | yourself" than anything else. _shrug_ | photochemsyn wrote: | So what would you want people to say to you in that | situation? | | It's also true that at some point, if people are overly | prickly, but the problem absolutely has to be solved, then | it's going to be 'show me the logs of exactly what you've | been doing, now go take a break and let me work on it.' That | also will piss people off, most likely. | spacehunt wrote: | "I've worked with similar problems in the past, let me know | if you want to pick my brains" would be a much better | start. Don't assume people want help, even if it seems | crystal clear to you help is needed. | mindcrime wrote: | There's an awful lot of "it depends" to all of these | scenarios. It may even be possible that there is, in fact, | _some_ scenario where I 'd be OK with what's quoted above. | But generally speaking, I would not be happy with something | that comes off as smug and suggesting a "I'm the teacher, | and you're the student, now let me show you how stupid you | are" mind-set. But if the person speaking had the right | standing in my world-view and I was really stuck, well then | maybe I would tolerate that (even if it wouldn't be my | preference). | | I lean towards the kind of language I mentioned in another | comment, with things like "Hmm... have you tried _______?" | or "The first thing that occurs to me when I see ______ is | ________" and so on. Or even "Do you think that maybe | _________?" | diydsp wrote: | haha yes. mirrors my frustration from senior EEs telling me: | | "All you need is a capacitor." or | | "That's just a diode." or other people saying, | | "Multiplication without an ALU is easy. It's just shifts and | adds." | devchix wrote: | And if you're a woman, cut the word "just" from your vocabulary, | especially in professional communication. It diminishes your | voice. | | "I just want to make sure ..." vs "I want to make sure ..." | | "Just letting you know ..." vs "I want to let you know ...", "I | want you to know ..." | | "This is just one example ..." vs "This is one example ..." | | "I'm just going to unblock ..." vs "I'm unblocking ..." | | I struggle with this myself, it's a self-effacing learned | behavior. | kapp_in_life wrote: | Feels odd to gender this suggestion. I find myself doing this | as well. | scelerat wrote: | Good advice for stronger written and spoken language, | regardless of gender. | devchix wrote: | Agree, although I think more women fall into this habit of | speech, due to societal conditioning to appear non- | confrontational and direct. It also seems to reflect more | negatively on women as a diffident signal. Thus, while it's | generally good advice for everyone, it's more important that | women pay attention to their use of the word "just". | LeonB wrote: | There's a saying "Beware of giving advice before you're asked, or | after." | Swiffy0 wrote: | I'll go ahead and say that a sprinkle of humor would help a lot | here. | | If a coworker comes to you with a problem that is trivial to you, | it shouldn't be a problem in the first place for you to say "Oh | just do X". | | The problem lies in how the other person takes it and most | importantly if the environment allows people to safely "confess" | they don't know something, regardless of how trivial it is. | | If it does, there shouldn't be any problem. The dialogue can | continue in multiple positive ways such as "Oh that didn't cross | my mind, thanks!", "I don't know how to do X", "Can you show my | sorry ass how to do X?", "Just do X huh... How do I do X again?", | "See the problem with X is that I don't know how to do Y / how to | apply X in this case" and "Well obviously I should do X! I was | just testing you" | | If it doesn't, the problem is with the environment. | | When you have a problem with the environment, you shouldn't try | to "solve" it by making it impossible for the problematic thing | to enter the environment (censoring comes to mind), but instead | teach the environment how to deal with the problem when it | eventually and inevitably enters it. | gnuvince wrote: | A few months ago, I wrote a blog post[1] about the word "just" | that echoes the thesis of Tim's article: avoid using the word | "just" if you can, it's reductive. | | [1] https://vfoley.xyz/just/ | themodelplumber wrote: | I wrote about the same word a while back too, along the lines | of personal development: | | https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/just-is-a-dangerous-word... | | Also related IMO is a general tendency to under-think | summarization (related to reduction): | | https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/so-just-to-sum-that-up-s... | kayodelycaon wrote: | The corollary to just is "should". It took me a while to accept | some things aren't trivial to change and telling myself things | _should_ be a certain way is not helpful. | | Almost every advice I come across on self-improvement is wrong | _for me_. Very few people have considered my experience and | limitations. Most of it is actively harmful to implement. | | Funnily enough, the project management strategies I use at work | are extremely helpful with this. | | Given a problem (a "should"), we need ask "what needs to change", | "what is required to change it", and "what is the priority" | (urgency X impact). Then we can decide if this needs to be | focused on right now. | | :) | tdiff wrote: | I think that just too much attention is being paid to somebodys | feelings nowadays | KaiserPro wrote: | Active listening is a learnable and useful skill. | | Most of the time we are predicting what people will say, and | using the spare time to work out what we are going to say in | return. This means that we often miss nuance or vital details. | | This means that we can squander time or emotional capital by | projecting our mental model of the person onto them. (this is a | long winded way to say biases, but that triggers people, so I | tend to avoid using that.) | | So how do you active listen? | | number 1) Slow everything down. | | You do not need to reply instantly. Use non verbal queues to | indicate that you are thinking and paying attention (nodding, | saying hmm, etc, etc) | | number 2) pay attention to non verbal cues. | | Are they getting more fidgety? are they relaxed? are they looking | more sad, can they keep eye contact? All of these cues give | insight to the person's feelings. You should be able to spot if | you are making sense, as they will change their pose/behaviour. | | number 3) repeat what you think they are saying back to them to | get agreement | | "If I understand correctly you feel that [..] is that correct?" | | You will need to pay attention to your body language and tone. | Are you butting in? are you feeling angry? pity? annoyance? why | are you feeling those emotions? is it better to come back later? | | There are many more parts to active listening, but most of it can | be learnt. Basically its practical empathy (as in understanding | what people think, and why they might think that, rather than | aiming to feel the same emotion as someone else.) | [deleted] | h2odragon wrote: | > you're not inside their head and don't understand what they see | and feel. | | This is also information worth communicating. The newcomer to the | project is _expected_ to be ignorant of the problems and the | mental set of those addressing them, in any reasonable setting. | To confess your own ignorance and declare your readiness to learn | in that situation is better, I think, than to pretend knowledge | you do not actually posses. | | "Just do this?" questions are re-phrasable as "Would this work?" | questions, if the language environment is prickly. | daenney wrote: | My favourite one is "surely it's as simple as..." or other | equivalent things of "I have no clue how to do your job but will | tell you anyway". | reifyx wrote: | "Just" is used in chess commentary frequently and usually a bit | too flippantly as the speaker hasn't gone through all the | necessary calculations as the players have to. Sam Shankland | mentions this. https://youtu.be/GbFgmXqVLl8?t=1069; | https://streamable.com/yuglrw | havblue wrote: | It's definitely true you need to avoid giving unwanted advice to | people you care about if you want to stay close to them. On the | other hand though, I think the inability to talk openly about | problems is why they don't get resolved in the end. | dang wrote: | Jerry Weinberg used to say that when you hear "just" you should | substitute "have trouble", and when you hear "should" you should | substitute "isn't". So, "just cache the keys" -> "we'll have | trouble caching the keys"; "should be easy" -> "isn't easy". | | Maybe we could call that Weinberg Substitution or something. Sort | of like Russell Conjugation. | | https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... | cwkoss wrote: | Is this something quippy, or do people actually believe this? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-11-08 23:00 UTC)