The Eighth Dirty Word – “Just”
blog.forrestthewoods.com
blog.forrestthewoods.com
Sure, many common patterns of speech can be insulting if you're this uncharitable in your interpretation. Just like the speaker should consider how the listener will interpret their words, the listener should consider the speaker's intent, and give them benefit of the doubt. Communication is a two-way street. A more charitable interpretation would be that the "just"-sayer is actually asking a question: "Can you explain to me why you didn't do X, I feel I'm missing something". The difference between that question and "why didn't you just do X?" is more a reflection of the tone of the conversation and the speaker's mood than of the speaker's opinion of you.
Personally I'm always worried about how the least charitable listener might understand my words, but while it's a useful communication skill, it's also a curse: it puts a barrier of distrust between me and the people I'm speaking with, and often results in overly-formal sounding communication. And, of course, the least charitable listener will interpret formality as pretentiousness.
But another problem with the idea of banning speech is that "just" recognizes that there are levels of complexity, effort, and risk. No, there is never a solution so simple that it is zero effort and risk. But there are certainly some solutions that have more or less effort and risk than others. And if you're asking if you could just do something else, you're implying that the something else is less effort or risk - not zero effort or risk.
I have worked with people that have a similar approach as never say "just" in that they insist that every problem is hard and should never be trivialized. That's a reasonably wise stance to take as a default in software development, but kills the recognition that some approaches are, in fact, easier than others.
An understanding gap is more like a model gap; the people between which the gaps exist usually have entirely different domains with different useful models. An understanding gap might exist between a salesperson and a developer, or a chemist and a biologist; there might be shared reference points to serve as foundations for bridging the gap, but they're much further up the ontological hierarchy, as it were, and may require entire reconstruction from first principles in the worst cases. This leads to interesting conversation and personal development, for sure, but it's also not a way to quickly resolve what may be a pressing issue. Closing an understanding gap might take a four-year degree, or at the very least, weeks or months of reading and learning.
I agree that getting mad about it is not the way to go; but this latter case is where 'just' is most dangerous; to get a bit Rumsfeldian, the unknown unknowns on the part of the 'juster' often run very deep, and would require extensive education to mend.
A bit like asking a golfer why he doesn't just hit the ball straight on the green every drive. It's instinct to attempt, but difficult to explain why it's not going to work. Not to mention if I had to explain every time why I can't just hit the green, I'd get pretty pissed off with people asking!
The number of times I have had, over the course of months, to explain again and again why you can't "just" remove feature X from project Y to make it doable in less than D days it is currently estimated to. One day, I would commit to do it because at that moment I didn't remember that specific bit while being quizzed in an unrelated meeting that veered into offtopic armchair solution designing by bored "solution architects" (i.e. middle manager who last looked at code a decade ago)
Therefore, when I'm in a position where I want to throw out a quick "can you just", I try to phrase it differently, because I know how frustrating that comment can be.
I don't see competitiveness here. I want to see my teammates as people and empathize with them as such.
Is it always the case? No
Is it frequently the case? Yes
The reason I found is that the person doing the explaining is:
* hand waving over some complicated detail (e.g "just get the info from the accounting software", but there's no API for that software)
* thinking fuzzy (e.g. conflicting requirements "just update the struct" when doing so adds a race condition or is updating an immutable object)
* forgetting that computers and humans have different notions of "easy". (e.g "You just have to pick the person's faces out of the image") (I should probably update my example here)
It's almost always worth further exploration into what the other person means by "just do..." as an up-front exercise.
I have learned over the years that Simple means: no one has spent time thinking about it.
Simple means you are going to have to implement it alone, and take business decisions that aren't yours to take (and have to maintain the associated unstable code). On top of that people are going to question your abilities for taking so long.
I see this "Can you just..." business similar to the advice that you just stop working on the problem that you can't solve and think about something else for a while. Take a nap, go for a walk, have a drink. Wait until tomorrow. Often times the problem isn't that the problem is difficult to solve or that it's complex (it is), but rather that you are too mired in it to come up with the solution. "Can you just... " suggestions often pull me out of the trees so I can see the forest.
I'm basically a marketer and I work with a lot of programmers who just finished school. We're building websites. I have really basic programming experience.
Sometimes a feature request comes in but without enough budget to really do it the right way.
So I have come up with logical workarounds after the programmers said it couldn't be done. And these instances have not caused any conflict.
Like for example, instead of making a huge slow product database, I built a huge list of URLs and then they parsed the product number in it, and output the tech specs to the page. The mfr's product numbers were encoding the tech specs.
That said, I also see people up the ladder flinging "justs" left and right and causing immense failure and suffering.
I guess another way to put this is... I'm more interested in finding the solution than I am in making sure that everyone around me thinks that my domain is special and complex and that they don't share it with me.
[1] For those not following, Google 'rubber duck debugging'. Colleagues are the best rubber ducks.
If you have people being a jerks too often then you are missing healthy environment.
Personally, when I'm asking a series of "just" questions I'm expecting one of the following scenarios to happen:
1. Less likely - the problem gets solved with a stroke of insight / fresh idea
2. More likely - I get better understanding of the problems involved, why it is more complex than it seems at first, and ultimately "level up" my expertise, which benefits the company.
Besides, just because you take away the word doesn't mean they can't say it. Removing the word just makes it harder to recognize when people do it.
Can you just solve the problem you know about and worry about the edge cases you suspect you'll run into later? How do you know that solving for that problem is important? Don't try to build a complete system in one go, build something that just solves part of the problem.
Try not to take outside input so personally. Give your ego a little break. (Hopefully) your coworkers are all here to solve the same big problems.
Sometimes a solution gets disqualified for a wrong reason, or w/out looking at all ways it could work.
This happened to me enough times that now I try to put my ego aside and patiently go through my thinking again and again and each time the explanation (and problem) becomes more clear.
Edit: shortened.
On the other hand if a producer/project managers says "can you just" day after day frustration is inevitable. It's easy to complain about producers though. Striking the right balance with peers is more nuanced.
I know people can feel offended by many words, but unless you stop to try and understand the intention of those words you don't deserve to say you are offended.
This is the crux of all the passive aggression of the last two decades that has finally blown into this out of control ideological debate about being politically correct.
Are you offended? Did you at least make an attempt to understand my motives and intentions?
This isn't to say if words from the offender are in their mind "kind" that it isn't offensive. This is about the listener being a participant in human exchange of communication.
If you use it while speaking to me about my work or in my garage, I will stop you and ask you to rephrase your sentence. I know this sounds like a dick move, but it doesn't change the information conveyed just the connotations. Most people will laugh and leave it out. The other people are perfectly free to go talk to someone else ;- )
Tone policing, now with real life ticket fees!
It's quick for the person to say. It says nothing about whether it's quick to answer.
In general, and you can call this condescending but I'm willing to go there and say that the word "just" and all it's related questions comments and statements are the best way to show you genuinely, for better or worse, have no idea what you're talking about and I can't think of any scenario improved by a layman's understanding of it.