[HN Gopher] Just don't
___________________________________________________________________
Just don't
Author : moks
Score : 567 points
Date : 2022-11-08 12:57 UTC (10 hours ago)
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(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?
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