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Comment by hvass | Hacker News Reader

I understand where you are coming from but usually a naive and simple 'just', especially coming from an outsider can be exactly what you need. Maybe you are so entangled in the problem that you've lost the proverbial forest.

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I agree completely. Going a step further, as OP has and shutting down potential helpful new perspectives and solutions by implementing a "jar" is reprehensible. When I've been mired in a complex problem for hours and I'm not any closer to a solution than when I started out, helpful "can you just" perspectives is often the key to unlocking a new line of thought that allows me to come up with the solution. Implementing a jar is like having someone pay you to ignore their often helpful perspectives. It's reprehensible.

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.

Not even necessarily an outsider. In my experience "Can't you just ..." is what the rubber duck [1] starts saying if explaining the problem wasn't enough to be enlightened and it starts talking back. Simple solutions to complicated seeming problems are usually from coworkers not directly involved with the issue that say "can't you just..".

[1] For those not following, Google 'rubber duck debugging'. Colleagues are the best rubber ducks.

Can you cite an example from your own experience where someone saying 'can you just' worked for you?

Has that never happened to you? You are stuck on a problem for what feels like forever. It's complex and difficult to keep completely in your mind at once. You've hit it from every facet that you can think off. Then you explain it to someone that knows very little of the problem and they throw out a little perspective, maybe preceded with a "Can you just..." and it may not be the solution, but your mind sort of jump starts down a different path than it had before.

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.

Nothing easy to explain, since they're in a specialized domain, but I can say that sometimes other people's insights can be annoying, but they can also be quite helpful. Anyone who doesn't know that first hand might have problems working well with others.

I've used a small handful of carefully thought-out "justs" myself.

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.

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