[HN Gopher] The X-Y Problem
___________________________________________________________________
The X-Y Problem
Author : dp-hackernews
Score : 38 points
Date : 2023-01-19 19:17 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mywiki.wooledge.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (mywiki.wooledge.org)
| a_c wrote:
| As the saying goes, half of problem solving is about asking the
| right questions
| scubbo wrote:
| I suspect this will be a highly divisive comment, but - the
| `greycat` character in these vignettes exemplifies the
| "knowledgable asshole" stereotype that does more damage than
| good.
|
| The division is likely to be as to whether this is a good and
| justified thing - "if they couldn't hack it, they don't belong
| here" // "respondents do not owe politeness to dumb questioners"
| - or not. As with many questions, I suspect the answer is
| somewhere in the middle (though closer to the "or not", IMO).
|
| And just so this comment isn't entirely meta-commentary and
| actually delivers some value - a broader guide on "asking
| technical questions" is here:
| http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html (FWIW the "How
| To Answer Questions in a Helpful Way" section supports my
| suspicion that a gentler approach is more productive)
| thethirdone wrote:
| I think I would prefer a greycat to be among the people helping
| me most of the time. Being correct and helpful even if you are
| not nice about it is still pretty good.
|
| I think answerers can be correct, helpful and nice, but getting
| a least two of those is good enough to be worth listening to.
| neilv wrote:
| Maybe more familiar as the response: "What are you _really_
| trying to do? "
|
| Which is a little related to:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Followed immediately by "You don't want to do that. I, some
| internet guy, know what you _really_ want to do even though I
| have no understanding of the constraints you are working under
| or what you 're ultimately trying to accomplish!".
| neilv wrote:
| It used to have better connotations (such as when coming a
| good sysadmin), than it got from the same phrase being used
| on, say, StackOverflow.
| keyanp wrote:
| Though this is a common issue, it is certainly bothersome when
| someone _wrongly_ assumes you are experiencing the XY problem and
| demands a lot of unnecessary information before helping you with
| something.
| TillE wrote:
| Right, it's fine to say that 90% of the time you shouldn't do
| X, but it's important to understand _why_ you 're saying that,
| and why sometimes you really do need to do X.
| pathikrit wrote:
| Why not respond with both X and Y? e.g. for the last 3
| character thing, here would be an appropriate response:
|
| To get the last 3 characters, do `echo ${foo: -3}`. Are you
| trying to get the file extension though? What if the extension
| is not 3 characters e.g. `foo.jpeg`? You then want to do
| `${foo##*.}`
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah this is definitely the best response. Unfortunately most
| people (especially on Stackoverflow) are not as wise as you
| and will just downvote your question and say "you shouldn't
| do that".
| bee_rider wrote:
| Some more probing might still be needed for the second
| solution, how a .tar.gz gets handled might depend on the
| programmer intent, could be different from a .gz
| hypothetically.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Because not every answer is as quick and straightforward as
| your example.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| Definitely frustrating for everyone following as well, since
| answering the question _assuming_ it 's an XY problem is only
| useful to subsequent readers who are trying to solve the same
| problem _and doing it wrong in the same way_.
|
| It is not helpful to people who are trying to solve a different
| problem correctly, who would like an answer to the exact
| question that the original poster asked, nor is it useful to
| people who are trying to solve the same problem but in a
| different, also wrong way - as they will likely never see the
| post.
| hinkley wrote:
| In general people don't want to hear that they have a problem
| from anyone but themselves. I've had so many I Told You So
| moments with certain individuals that at some point you just
| assume everything they ask for has been rendered
| incomprehensible in a game of Telephone, either with other
| people or with themselves. In public policy they call it,
| "Something must be done, this is 'something', so we must do
| it."
|
| Neal Gaiman did a compendium of Norse Mythology, and in it he
| claims that Thor says, "When something weird happens I always
| assume Loki is involved. It saves time." That's the line that
| stuck with me the most out of that entire book.
|
| The people who fall into this category will tune you out while
| you say over and over "this is going to hurt us next year" and
| come in with a Pikachu face a year from now when they find out
| that it's been a year and the chickens have come home to roost.
|
| People, as it turns out, are much more accepting of a team
| delivering consistently 10% slower than expected versus a team
| that delivers to expectations one year and suddenly drops by
| 50% a year later. They can't understand that. They can't
| predict it. It just looks to them like you've stopped doing
| what you are paid to do, rather than the truth which is you
| stopped doing what you were paid to do 2 years ago and you
| didn't jump ship before the consequences showed up.
| db48x wrote:
| It's also really annoying when people cannot recognize that
| they have asked an X-Y question :)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| It's less wasteful of collective time and effort to determine
| up front that the situation is NOT an X-Y problem than to
| traipse down the primrose path presuming it _isn 't_ only to
| subsequently learn that it _is_.
|
| Those who are experienced enough to understand the X-Y problem
| will recognise and acknowledge this. Those who aren't will
| often find reason to take offense.
|
| <shrug>
| KeepFlying wrote:
| How else can I delay needing to actually think through your
| question??
| ithkuil wrote:
| Indeed. I think it even deserves a name. The "XYX problem"?
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Here is the big stumbling block with this, right at this step:
| "Others try to help user with Y, but are confused because Y seems
| like a strange problem to want to solve."
|
| Of course it is strange. If it were common, I would have, in my
| due diligence, already found it. I realize the Internet is filled
| with idiots who cannot or will not use Google, but it sure makes
| everything else fairly hard.
|
| Worst is having to specify, in the question itself, "This is not
| an XY problem," only for someone to try to find some way to
| _make_ it an XY problem (you almost always can, if you try hard
| enough, and not just the degenerate case of "You wouldn't have
| this if you just stopped caring about X.") and then, once you
| have sufficiently proven yourself, those folks are nowhere to be
| found.
| wetpaws wrote:
| This resonates so much. Literally the biggest lesson in my IT
| career was to always ask "what problem you are trying to solve"
| to every question.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Reminiscent of, though not exactly analogous to, the apocryphal
| Henry Ford quote:
|
| "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said
| faster horses."
| gaze wrote:
| From being on both ends of this, just answer the question as
| asked. It's especially irritating when people essentially
| overreach and just decide you're asking the wrong question.
| You're saying "no I'm insisting on being more helpful than you're
| asking me to be." Just answer the damn question and let the
| person run into the next stumbling block. Why be so upset that
| the problem you're now imagining hasn't yet been solved? Your job
| is done.
|
| The most I think that's appropriate to do is to answer the
| question and THEN ask what they're trying to do. If they bite,
| they bite.
|
| Truly where does this end. You could say -- they're asking the
| wrong question for a reason. Sounds like you're not thinking
| about the situation right because you're not staying sharp. Have
| you tried doing sudoku puzzles? Maybe your mind is clouded due to
| anger. How's your relationship with your parents? Have you
| checked for a gas leak in the room you're working in?
| fluoridation wrote:
| You're being silly. Why are "answer the question as stated" or
| "deconstruct the person's entire life to find their ultimate
| problem" the only logically consistent possible courses of
| action?
|
| If someone asks a question that suggests something might have
| been misunderstood, there's nothing wrong with probing a little
| to find the reason for the question. Maybe the person really
| does know something you didn't, but it's much more likely that
| by asking clarifying questions you'll save theirs and your own
| time.
| gaze wrote:
| I was providing a silly example but there is a continuum as
| you've identified. My point is that it's not your place to
| decide how far along this continuum to go. It's the job of
| the person asking the question.
| ecnahc515 wrote:
| I think it is your place, because it's your time being
| taken by people asking questions. It's an often a thankless
| job people do because they want to help. If you think you
| might be doing more harm than good by "just answering the
| question" you're not helping anymore, which then somewhat
| defeats the purpose many people are doing it. But really,
| the simpler reason is that, if your helping out others,
| your giving them your time, so they should respect it, so
| answering some questions while getting help is part of that
| respect.
| ignite wrote:
| The person asking the question is frequently not the person
| with the knowledge to determine this.
|
| The X-Y response shows up frequently on support forums
| where people are asking questions that show they haven't
| yet grasped the system they are working on.
| ketralnis wrote:
| A big reason is that you work at the same company working to
| the same goals. Your "job" is probably more than just answering
| contextless questions.
|
| A questioner asking "how do I get all of the emails from the
| production database?" certainly does warrant some additional
| probing and "what's a regex for valid emails?" might need a
| "don't do that, we need the validity of emails to be consistent
| across services even at the expense of correctness so..."
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I can see why the author would want to write about the X-Y
| problem, but what we really need is a way for those trying to
| answer to quickly discern if an X-Y problem actually exists. When
| it doesn't, the querent finds themselves at an unending cycle of
| attempting the clarify and justify in an insatiable appetite to
| convince them they are solving the wrong problem. The author
| really should be writing about that.
| [deleted]
| prettyStandard wrote:
| Why do you think people have trouble identifying X-Y problems?
| ;)
| gpderetta wrote:
| Parent is saying that the author has an X-Y problem.
| hinkley wrote:
| Parent has suckered you into an X-Y problem conversation.
| prettyStandard wrote:
| I suppose I might have disproved my own disbelief that
| this is a problem.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| That's the Y-X problem...
| evandale wrote:
| The thing that always annoyed me with the last 3 characters
| question is that it assumes everyone knows everything. Relevant
| XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1053/
|
| The noob clearly thought extensions are always 3 characters
| because that's the only thing they've been exposed to. They
| didn't know "how do I get the last 3 characters in a filename?"
| and "how do I get a file extension?" are different questions. It
| may not have occurred to them to ask how to get the extension,
| and to take it further, maybe they don't know everything after
| the . is called an extension.
| menacingly wrote:
| I don't think we need to evangelize what smug gatekeepers already
| far over-apply across many domains
| didgetmaster wrote:
| From the title, I thought it might be just another rant about
| people with certain chromosomes (also called males).
| unwind wrote:
| When I was the most active on Stack Overflow, the recommended
| link for a description of the XY problem was [1]. This was (is?)
| commonly used in a comment to tell a poster that their question
| seems dubious, and might not get high-quality answers.
|
| Now I see that it seems to be a more or less exact copy of the
| OP, which is kind of confusing. Does anyone know the
| background/ownership?
|
| [1]: https://xyproblem.info/
| mcdoogal wrote:
| Your URL (which I've also seen and referenced a lot) sources
| the OP link at the bottom as "Source 2", so it at least seems
| the OP link predates this one.
| prettyStandard wrote:
| Based on these two/four links,
|
| https://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem?action=info
|
| https://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem?action=recall&rev=1
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://xyproble...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20140908180346/https://xyproblem...
|
| Definitely seems to be wooledge when you follow the linked
| sources as well.
| bananapub wrote:
| this link is from a (at least in the past) very active person
| on various IRC Linux and programming help channels who wrote
| the wiki article at least fifteen years ago.
|
| make that sixteen years ago:
| http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem?action=info
| rossdavidh wrote:
| The most important lesson here, is that when you realize that the
| person is asking for X when they wanted Y, make sure to somehow
| say something critical, sarcastic, or dismissive. That way along
| with a bit of knowledge that helps them for a moment, you are
| also delivering a blow to their self-confidence, that will be a
| detriment for the rest of the day (or, if they were already
| lacking in confidence, perhaps many days). This may not work on
| veteran co-workers, but it will work especially well with anyone
| lacking experience or suffering from Imposter Syndrome.
| warkanlock wrote:
| It's only possible to guess beforehand what you want by wasting
| considerable time. Look at modern society and how much time they
| spend pursuing happiness, yet still, nobody knows what they want.
|
| There's a well-known quote from a singer in Argentina that
| claims, "No se lo que quiero pero lo quiero ya." (translated into
| I don't know what I want, but I want it now)
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| This reminds me of the gauss Weinberg scenario where the salesman
| wanted to buy a another fax machine cuz they burnt out the
| previous one.
|
| Or, in other words, we don't have any XY problems, what we have
| are people not properly educated. This is a long-standing problem
| and we do not have to make up a newfangled name for it
| evandale wrote:
| Exactly, the XY problem happens because of ignorance. You can't
| ask X if you don't know X exists.
| chowells wrote:
| That's not what the XY problem is. The XY problem is asking
| for Y because you think it's the only way to solve your
| actual problem X. It's more of a lack of perspective than a
| lack of education. You tunnel-vision on what you think the
| solution will be, and when you go looking for help you you
| ask only about Y, instead of providing the larger context of
| X.
|
| You can't have an XY problem unless you're trying to solve
| problem X. It's not a lack of education, it's a lack of
| perspective on what your real goal is.
| benchaney wrote:
| Something that I think is pretty important to keep in mind is
| that when handling a possible XY problem, the key is
| communication. It is good to ask clarifying questions and
| questions about context when answering a question. It is good to
| provide context and be open to the possibility that your question
| is misguided when asking. Insisting that there isn't or isn't and
| XY problem and being condescending or combative is bad when
| asking/answering. I suspect part of the reason this link is so
| controversial is because the "hero" of the stories screws this up
| horribly.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-01-19 23:02 UTC)