Just don’t | Hacker News Reader

Just don’t

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842 pointsmoks436 comments

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?

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

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.

"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.

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 _________?"

Same. That's way worse. For technical problems where an obvious and easy solution comes to mind, I'm fine saying something like "just" and fine with having it said to me. I'm expecting to either hear why the obvious solution won't work (learning more about the problem) or, less likely, give them help by pointing out something easy they happened to not think of.

"I'm really struggling to set up external authorization for the /download endpoint."

"Why don't you just use @external on it?"

Hopefully leads to either

"This endpoint needs to...[extra constraints]."

"Ah, gotcha."

or, less likely

"There's an @external?"

"Yeah, let me show you."

There are some differences between this and questions like "Why don't you just go for a walk to stop feeling depressed?". Maybe the biggest difference is these tech solutions are not paradoxical. Someone's depression may be defined by their inability to do something like go for a walk and enjoy it. Suggesting they do that is not helpful.

The questions are also more sincere. Like, I literally want to know why you're not doing the easy solution. I'm actually assuming that there's a good reason, like some extra constraint. That's why am I asking "why not?" instead of speaking in the imperative.

There's also a critical difference of the offered solution being much easier than the one attempted, or very easy overall. I might say "Why don't you just sort it alphabetically?" but I wouldn't say "Why don't you just make a DSL?".

I guess it's just that I think it's okay to act like something is small when you really believe it is for the person you're speaking with.

This. I’ve done the same mistake with a person who, due to their condition could not possibly _recognize_ there’s a problem.

To anyone who doesn’t relate to this - imagine being a perfectly “normal” human being (if there’s even such a thing) and someone walking up to you and saying straight up that you have a problem and need help and here’s the advice etc. The perfectly rational reaction to that would be the opposite of the intention.

On top of that, there’s always room for ourselves to be wrong and the person receiving the advice be right in their circumstance, so forcing our opinion on them just shows our own ignorance and inability to consider other points of view.

> let's consider possible solutions

This really isn't better, it's worse IMO. In a situation where help is needed, obviously we're going to consider possible solutions. What do you think I think we should do, maybe pick up our knitting needles, or go run some water polo drills?

It's more condescending than "just" because it is dressing it up in intellectualized bullshit verbiage. Hey good for you, you're a walking thesaurus.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Your hypothetical conversation is not improved very much by removing the word "just".

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.

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.

If this is your hill, aren't you thinking about the shenanigans?

"Just do it", as described in your post, is a great and productive attitude.

It is, however, rare that telling someone else "just do it" gives them that attitude. I have never seen it happen. I have said "just..." and seen the effect described in the article.

Asking questions, developing an understanding of what may be holding someone else back from "just doing it", then offering them any help you can provide them is much more likely to help them develop the attitude, in my experience.

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.

I used to know someone who would constantly use phrases like "I'm not sure we really understand what is going on here..." but it took me many iterations to decode that in fact, they meant "I'm not sure you really understand what is going on here..." With that decoder ring whole conversations turned decidedly more uncomfortable as it was clear this person was not actually working together for mutual understanding or to learn other people's viewpoints but rather harbored a vague hostility towards people expressed in coded means. That actually made me more suspicious of them, not less.

Do you know that's what they were thinking though? Lots of mistrust can build up when we don't regularly check our assumptions.

I witnessed them do it to other people who were outside "the know" and the joking around in the debriefing made it clear what they thought of them.

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."

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.

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.)

"it's simple, we kill the batman"

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."

An almost-correct answer if you remember your elementary school science class with charges on glass and amber... Amber being elektron (ἤλεκτρον) 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.

This is very reminiscent of a favorite scene from the show Schitt’s Creek.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NywzrUJnmTo

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.

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

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.

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.

> "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).

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...

It can be helpful to tell smokers that.

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.

As a smoker, just no.

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.

> 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.

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)?

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.

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.

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!

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?

I mean, that's a rather extreme example. It's hard to say how I'd react in that situation, I'd probably feel uncomfortable and mumble and try to get out of the conversation, lol.

Well, it's probably a desire for those things. The problem is that the solution doesn't exist, not that giving a valid solution would be bad.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"just listen" isn't necessarily any easier than all the other "just <do the thing>" phrases.

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.

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.

Well, they're not obligated to complain to me about their problems and then get upset if I engage in the conversation.

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".

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.

> 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.

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)

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

I think you misunderstand group therapy.

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.

> You can’t tell if someone is looking for advice or support and connection.

You can always ask. Seriously! Some communications books literally recommend you ask whether they want support/connection/advice.

And you will rarely go wrong if you commiserate. So: Commiserate first, and then say "I have some ideas on what may help, ... " and what follows is context dependent.

If it's a chronic health issue that you have not dealt with: "but you probably know more about this than I do and probably don't want to hear yet another idea."

If it's a chronic health issue that you have dealt with: "and they solved a similar problem I had, but I'm not sure your situation is the same as mine."

Trust me - if they want to hear your solution, they will then ask.

If it's very generic advice that people commonly treat as a panacea (e.g. diet, exercise, supplements, meditation, mindfulness), better to commiserate and keep your advice to yourself.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

To me, someone saying "wow that sucks" tells me this person doesn't bother to think about what I said and is barely spending brain space on listening to me, instead choosing to blurt out a generic platitude. Their response lack a proof of work. Whereas if someone answers with something that clearly demonstrates that they feel engaged in my struggle, enough to spend some brain power on it to form a useful opinion or come up with some ideas, that's much better.

It’s all in the delivery. You can say it in a way the sounds dismissive or compassionate, that’s on you.

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).

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!"

"Just follow FDA publications for prototype medical devices and DIY build your own before it comes to market."

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.

> "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.

"just change your lifestyle" is the best one ever.

Have you tried avoiding sugar? :)

There's a whole subreddit for this https://www.reddit.com/r/thanksimcured/top/?t=month

As a chronic pain sufferer, the quickest way for me to dismiss someone from my life is when they tell me: “You should just try marijuana,” often with some stupid and incorrect statement like, “it’s more potent than opiates!”

Just no.

You’re saying you don’t want to have panic attacks and brain fog on top of your chronic pain? Now I’m going to spend several minutes informing you about indica and/or CBD, which you definitely have never heard of before.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

> 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.

I don’t think the two usages are significantly more or less negative. Body language, intonation, context, etc. are everything here.

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...".

The negative baggage isn't something universal though from looking just at the comments here alone.

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.

Feels odd to gender this suggestion. I find myself doing this as well.

Good advice for stronger written and spoken language, regardless of gender.

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".

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.

> "have you tried..."

Or: "what have you tried?"

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".

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.

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).

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.)

> 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.

But the person seeking help already knows what they have tried

But the person being asked for help doesn't know. The question "what have you tried" is meant to avoid re-tracing steps that have already been taken.

The answer to that question is quite likely to lead to the answer to the problem. There usually are a multitude of different possible causes, and the answer to "what have you tried?" eliminate many of them, and the second valuable thing is that when they say what exactly happened when they tried that thing (other than that "it didn't help"), you may have different conclusions from that observation that they did.

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).

"Everything, nothing works".

Few people like being asked open-ended questions when they are irritated.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

In the context of a professional interaction, which I remind you is the context and which I explicitly refreshed, I think everything you said is fully covered. We wouldn't be talking in the first place if there wasn't a problem.

If not... frankly, in the context of a professional interaction, if someone starts making the bizarre excuse that it's just too hard to tell me what they've already tried, or that it's somehow offensive that I'm asking them this question, I may very well be having a professional interaction with that person's professional manager about their suitability for the professional job. It's not something I've done often, but it has come up, and I've never been the only one raising such questions about an employee when I've had to do that. It's far from the first thing I reach for, but it has come up.

I honestly have no idea what you or the other replier are banging on about with regard to how hard a question this is to answer. Unless you're just being contrary for contrariness' sake. It's a basic question, and as I said up front, I don't expect a 100% accurate recitation of everything up front, I mean, I never expect any statement to necessarily be 100% accurate up front, I expect a process of getting closer to the truth over time, but the idea that someone would just be unable to answer any questions about what they've already done boggles my mind, and the idea that I should maybe feel bad about asking it is just insane.

If you, personally, are having trouble answering that question, you should get better. Take better notes if you can't rely on your memory. But the problem lies with you, not anyone asking the question. There is no way that anyone being paid to solve problems should respond to such a basic question with "I don't really know", let alone offense.

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.

“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!

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> these days

Or rather, it's like someone who used to be a C/C++ developer having opinions on C/C++ development.

"Can you give me three examples of things you've tried that didn't work?"

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.

In a professional work context, you are responsible for managing your own emotions in order to solve the problem at hand.

Depends on the person. I’ve found it effective to ask questions like “would it be helpful to tell me what you’ve tried? Or for me to share my intuitions about how I’d look into this?” Depending on what’s being addressed I may add something like “or is there something else you have in mind?” or even begin with “how can I be most supportive? [And it’s okay if you don’t know right now]”

Been there. People hate that https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251309/comments-can...

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.

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.

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.

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.

"could we try"

not always a we

It doesn't have to be literal.

Oh, I might have to borrow that! I've sometimes used "for my own understanding, is there a reason we're not doing X?"

Similar: I like “maybe a dumb question, but tell me about X”. I am never shy about being possibly redundant or asking “dumb” questions.

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.

Fair point. I think as a senior dev (and someone in their mid-40s with a longish career) I want to make a point that I still ask the type of question. But a good thing to be sensitive to.

Yeah absolutely and some of the most senior engineers I have worked with often made a point of asking seemingly obvious questions, to great effect. I think it’s a wonderful thing to demonstrate and I do the same.

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)

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?”

Similar to correcting a big shot's mistaken notion, where you might say something like "Curiously, that turns out not to be the case."

“Naively, I’d be thinking about trying…”

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.

I wish there were an actual masterclass on how to deal with people professionally.

A lot of ones I've seen is hand-wavey "be more empathetic" or "there are multiple intelligences" kind of advice.

I'd like to be able to listen in on conversations with challenging DO's and DON'Ts.

e.g. "Why do you think Rajesh reacted this way? What might James have said to elicit a more positive reaction, all other things being the same?"

Not so much intercultural communication as "here's how to give someone an out".

Everyone here is looking for ways to make unsolicited suggestions in a diplomatic way. Even with extra language this can be irritating to reply to. I’ve learned to first ask if there is anything I can do to help, rather than immediately making suggestions. Often times people are doing just fine working through a problem, and may want to communicate the status without receiving advice on how to solve it.

For interpersonal situations, people often just want to be heard without any advice being given. A simple “I hear what you’re going through and I’m here if you need anything” is way better than finding ways to immediately offer advice, but I believe this applies to professional situations as well.

If you’ve been asked to help troubleshoot or fix a broken system then it’s not really unsolicited.

Often if I’m the person who is stuck I’m totally willing to let a new set of eyes offer all of the “obvious” things that have already tried, because while it’s usually just a rehash, there are occasionally “but what about” cases that haven’t been checked yet. And if we don’t find anything new, at least the helper is now up to speed on what’s already been covered.

Certainly if you have been asked for help then offering advice is fine. But often people will jump straight to offering advice without even establishing that the person wants help, and I wanted to call attention to that behavior.

Are we talking about work or marriage? If someone wants to interrupt another person's work, they should be gracious enough to first try obvious suggestions and explain why that didn't solve the problem. Just listening is great in personal relationships when the focus is on the journey rather than the destination.

As I said I believe this applies equally to professional settings and interpersonal relationships. I don’t see why interrupting someone’s work and offering unsolicited suggestions should be considered gracious. It sounds irritating to me. Listening is very valuable in professional situations!

This is certainly sometimes true, but when someone is explicitly asking for help, making suggestions that are too "obvious" may come off as condescending or, if the other person hadn't tried it, put them on the defensive. For instance you might suggest something like "turn it off and on again" and the other person might say "duh, I already tried that and it didn't work, I wouldn't have come to you otherwise" or worse they might not have tried it but the way you suggest it as a blindingly obvious course of action makes them feel bad for not having tried it.

Can't you ask "What have you tried so far?". I can't imagine that being taken weirdly.

In some situations could result in a 30 minute speech though.

That's unfortunate but if the user has done something that takes 30 minutes to explain it's probably worth listening.

That has got to be a very rare occurrence. Asking first is in my opinion the best advice. If in rare situations the person is giving a long winded or incoherent answer it should be okay to interrupt, but to avoid asking them what they tried on the off chance they are a poor communicator seems to me a bad tactic.

I appreciate unsolicited feedback. I don't know why people are so anti it...

For a lot of folks, they either just want to be heard/understood, or they may not even recognize if there’s a problem (i.e. they have anosognosia). Imagine someone forcing their opinion when a person is at their most vulnerable, it’s most often perceived as just patronizing/dismissing their concerns, or as an outright attack. Active listening and developing trust first is key.

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.

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 ;)

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.

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.

This is soooo important ! (And not just in marriage...)

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

+1 to this advice. I've heard it as "do you want comfort, or solutions?"

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

> 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.

Or, the way I do it: "do you want me to just listen, or do you want me to offer advice?"

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 ;)

"Rubber ducking." As in speaking to your rubber duck with no expectation of a response? First time seeing this usage. Thanks.

Moreso than that, imagine a rubber duck floating in the water: silently looking at you, nodding in understanding.

I think they’re probably referring to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

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!"

Congratulations, you are one of today's Lucky Ten Thousand! https://xkcd.com/1053/

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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 :)

Also a lot of emotional problems don’t need to be solved, you just need to process the feelings and move forward.

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.

> 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.

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”

“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.

> 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.

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.

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.”)

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.)

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.

I agree and would like to emphasize the word "validation".

It is less about "solving a problem" and more about "figuring out how to feel about the problem".

Validation can help reduce emotional turmoil, distill it into a calmer set of feelings.

The feelings may still be strong. The situation may still suck.

But at least you can be sure of how much it sucks - because someone else you respect, see's it as valid too.

> 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.

Something my sister does, which I hate, is follow up "hello" with a falling-pitch "how are you". This really bothers me every time she does it to me, which is pretty often.

But I have a lot of problems responding to (strangers) asking me how I am, and I've tried her approach of mostly ignoring the question and reflecting back a falling-pitch "how are you", and it seems to work very well. No one ever complains that I ignored their question, and the focus goes back on them, where I want it, instead of me.

If I were to judge this strategy by how I personally feel about it, it would be one of the most grossly offensive things you could say. And it still makes me uncomfortable to use it. But the lesson here appears to be that I shouldn't use myself as a reference for how to interact with other people.

> 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…)

This is why "rubber duck debugging" works.

I've had good luck explaining any thorny technical problem to any inanimate object on my desk. Often times, the mere act of doing this makes me really pay attention to my assumptions and the information I have gathered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

(At first I thought “talk to the bear” was some sort of folksy Eastern European way of telling the asker to go to hell)

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.

Venting is a pretty normal and healthy way of dealing with emotions.

And responding to venting with advice/criticism is also (clearly) perfectly normal right?

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.

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

> 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”)

> 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" =)

> 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).

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.

Then shouldn't you, by your own principles, have kept silent instead of posting that complaining?

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.

That's exactly a complaint.

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

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.

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.

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.

As a leader, actionable complaints (read: criticisms) are indeed a very useful signal, and I try my best to pay attention to them.

Do you always feel a need to apologize when indulging in something that makes you feel better? Why is it that you feel you're not entitled to do something selfish that makes you feel better and doesn't hurt anyone else?

> doesn't hurt anyone else

If this is actually true then clearly there's no need to apologize. However if I've selfishly imposed a one-sided conversation on someone else in order to soothe myself, of course it's correct to apologize. Who enjoys participating in a one-sided conversation? Most people tolerate them out of sheer politeness.

The whole idea of good manners is to avoid imposing on other people, be that physically, emotionally, or conversationally.

> Most people tolerate them out of sheer politeness

You are projecting. Some people are flattered to be a trusted confidante or emotional support, and glad to be able to help someone they care about. This is situational and dependent on factors (if someone's emotionally leaning on me every second of every day, it's going to get tiring pretty quickly), but even if the experience of the conversation _itself_ isn't exactly pleasant it might still be considered a worthwhile discomfort to go through for the emotional closeness generated (as a parallel - physically exercising isn't (often) pleasant, but the sensation afterwards and the physical well-being generated are considered worthwhile, so the activity is net-desirable even if it's unpleasant in-the-moment). In fact, apologizing for the act might insult the listener, implying that your relationship isn't strong enough to warrant such sharing. Further, the listener might care about the speaker's mood and state of mind so much that, even if the experience is net-negative _for them_, they're still glad to be able to provide that support to someone they love.

This is all subjective - you and your partner might so dislike being vented to, or feel such negligible positive effects from it, that the calculus ends up negative and an apology _is_ genuinely warranted. But it's not necessarily true for all (or even, I'd guess, most) people. You're right that avoiding imposition is good manners, but it is not necessarily the case that sharing feelings with someone is an imposition on them.

Leaning on someone for emotional support unprompted is an imposition, just like relying on someone for financial support. Yes in some cases the imposition is welcome, and fosters closeness and interdependence, but in most cases it is better to be self-sufficient (emotionally and financially).

You'd surely apologize when asking even the closest friend for financial support, why not when asking (or worse, demanding) emotional support?

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.

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.

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.

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...

I'm sorry that it frustrates you, that must be difficult.

> 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”.

A very useful and practical question at the right time is "Is there a request in there?"

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

What is the point of discussing a problem if you don't want advice? Implicitly whining about something is like giving advice to the listener what to not do or what does not work properly etc.

1. To seek comfort from a fellow human being. 2. To vocalize it in hopes of coming up with your own solution. 3. To vent emotion; “get it off your chest.” 4. To share an aspect of your life with someone you like, love, or respect.

I learned to announce my point when complaining as in saying "I'm just kvetching, I'm not looking for a answer" or similar phrase.

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"

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”.

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.

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.

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.

this is exactly the opposite of what hundreds of warehouse and shop people have said about me for over 40 years

Just don't. They specifically said "your answer shows a lack of empathy", it wasn't a personal attack. Your post doesn't show 40 years of experience.

I.T. should be a trusted business partner

Agreed, but you also rightfully admit that that's a management problem, and cannot be fixed by either side of the original conversation. So you discarding their work by "differentiating those who sling code from those who do real [work]" or calling users "fleas who used to jump 6 feet" does come across as juvenile.

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

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.

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.

Not sure why, but now I really want to know how this turns out!

At least the conversation hasn't progressed to printing it upside down or on the back...

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).

I'm assuming you're being serious here. I'd suggest sending an email: Tomorrow I'm going with option #[your favorite]. I think it best solves the problem. Let me know if you'd like something different.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

> 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".

wanting to be a consultant to them

Do you really want to be a consultant to people who don't value your input? Maybe you can find someone higher up in the organization to discuss your ideas with? They don't need to be your direct point of contact, but it sounds like you do need their buy-in.

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?

> 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.

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.

> 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.

"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.

> 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.

> 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.

I keep meaning to write something about this, but: There are two kinds of "why". One is "I understand what you want but I think it's stupid so I'm going to argue with you." That one is insufferable. The other one is "I don't understand what you want, and I need more information to know what to do." That one is inevitable.

Unfortunately the line between the two is very fuzzy, because every request is underspecified, and we fill in the gaps with context and guessing. And everybody has a different threshold for how sure they want to be that they understand the request, before they go off and implement their best guess about what it's asking for.

This one might be a third type:

"I understand what you want me to do, but why do you think you want me to do this, because I suspect it won't achieve your goals."

On second thought, this might be the first type you mentioned.

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?

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?

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.

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."

Some will, but the most difficult clients won't. Like the grand parent posts, I had to deal with a client who had interesting work, so much room for creating wonderful solution and truly help people. It was all wasted due to interpersonal issues, the entire team (which at some point was just four people, CEO, CTO, financial backer and a developer) felt like a couple that needed serious counseling or maybe a divorce.

These people would ignore everything if it meant change. I don't think they were particularly happy in their weird little world, but best practices meant nothing to them. In their mind what they had was a special little snowflake of a use case (not true btw). Best practices simply didn't apply to them.

A year later I got a similar client. They had one systems administrator who was so scared of losing influence that he'd sabotage any solution you brought forward. Any time you adapted to fit he's last "on just one more thing" he's find a way to rationalize why their particular use case defied best practices.

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.

> 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.

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.

“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.

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?

It's because the PDF is generated from HTML, and the table expands to take up the width of whatever container you give it, whether that's a portrait container or a landscape container.

Landscape just makes a wider table, with no more or less whitespace than portrait or than a billboard (proportionally, that is).

If the goal is to write line-item level notes in the table, then a "SKU Notes" column can be added and Landscape gives it more horizontal space to exist.

But the first step is to confirm that this is indeed the objective because "just make it landscape" wouldn't achieve anything on its own.

Thanks :)

> "just make it landscape"

Sometimes it's just worth the effort to make a mockup of that so they can see their idea doesn't work.

Have you tried mirroring?

For context, see Chris Voss’s ‘Never Split the Difference’

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It

https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-De...

If the client is worth enough to you, get on a plane and physically shadow the workers who use your system for a few days. Absolutely nothing can replace direct face to face engagement with real life users.

In this case the person you are speaking with is a boss who either will not or can not articulate his needs. You need to go the the source - the front line users.

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...

Is this something quippy, or do people actually believe this?

He was talking specifically about software projects—I forgot to mention that. He was pointing out how phrases like "that should take less than a week" or "let's just fix it this way" tend to mask problems and often indicate wishful thinking. Of course there's a quippy element, but if you pay attention to such language you'll find that these heuristics work a surprising amount of the time.

Interesting, yeah makes more sense when confined to software domain.

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.

> 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.

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'.

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.

> 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.)

> 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.

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/

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.

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?

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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

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

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.

Yeah, plus... sometimes caching the hot partition keys is just the answer to the problem.

> 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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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... ;).

Now you can remove the simply too ;)

I thought about it :).

oh happy day when that word is removed. Pet peeve.

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.

Adverbs are easily overused.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!"

"Precisely one" may cover many of the relevant situations.

"Just do the dishes."

"It is sufficient to do the dishes."

Or maybe instead of "did you just try clearing the cache?", "would clearing the cache solve it?".

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".

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.

i used my imagination and took that to be a very good outcome. can you confirm this is the case?

Confirmed!

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

https://wiki.c2.com/?JustIsaDangerousWord

https://www.excitant.co.uk/just-is-a-dangerous-word/

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.

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.

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"

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.

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.

The issue with that line of thought, where people are justified to take offense to anything and then you ought to watch your language to not offend them to make things productive, is there is no limit to what people can take offense to.

A few days back I saw how using the thumbs up emoji offends people. Eventually, we will all be discussing at the least common denominator, the lowest quality of talk, because everything will offend everyone.

Point is to educate people that it is stupid to take offense to such things, because there are better things to do in life than be offended because someone said some word.

More and more over the years I have come to distrust rules like this. I see it as a bandaid solution. Communicating what is easy and what is difficult is valuable, and not saying just is throwing in the towel. "I can't communicate at well so I'll just be silent". The harder but better strategy is to strive to improve your knowledge. There is also another thing to take away, a sort of principle of caution. When you don't know how hard something is for someone, because it's the first few times you can a certain skill of theirs in action, you should be cautious about assumptions. For instance don't make something out to be easy, and give them a little extra margin. But as you know them better you will have a good estimate of their skill and this will no longer be needed.

Another thing with not saying just, is that it's a strategy for avoiding conflict. Avoiding conflict is a good default, but adopting what amounts to a never engaging in conflict is detrimental. Sometimes conflict is needed. Sometimes you need to subtly or not so subtly tell someone they suck. Sometimes being polite is the kinder move, and sometimes brutal honesty is the kinder move. If someone doesn't know there is a problem then how can you expect them to fix it? If a task should be easy but isn't that's a signal that you have to skill up.

I think it's not about 'just'. It's more about how unsolicited is the advice. How strongly the person in trouble is looking for a solution.

I had a few times the experience that when I had a programming problem it was immensely helpful to tell about it other person, even non-programmer, because it forced me to state what the problem is so clearly that in theory this person should be able to understand. This made me notice some things about the problem I didn't notice before which sometimes enabled me to either find a solution or slightly, acceptably alter the problem so its solution is way easier.

And even if after explaining my problem I'm still stuck, then the advice the person who listened to it gives me, while not being the solution, will activate my mind even further, because trying to explain why this solution won't work can point me out in the direction of how this solution or the problem itself could be developed or adjusted so that it could possibly work. This thinking might reveal to me completely different solution.

So by all means, please say to me "why don't you just ..." when I'm asking. I probably won't do what you say, but it might lead me somewhere and I really do appreciate listening to me and your input as it might be the key factor that will enable me to find solution.

I've learned that sometimes, there's literally nothing you can do to directly solve a problem; you might not even know what the problem is, so how could you come up with solutions to it.

In those cases it helps me to then think that maybe there's something in my circumstances that is creating my problem, rather than it being a problem with me directly.

For example, if your problem is that it's difficult to get out of the house for a daily walk, a solution to "just do it" will not accomplish anything. It's extremely difficult to just start wanting something out of thin air.

However, if instead of focusing on "how do I go for a walk" you think about "what am I doing when I go for a walk", you immediately open up questions that are very easy to act on: Are you dressed comfortably? Is the path you take for your walk enjoyable, or do you have options? Is there too much noise? Maybe headphones would help.

These are things that are easy to try and change, and free you from having to blame yourself for lacking some ill-defined quality of "having willpower" that no-one can even measure.

If there's something you can easily change, but don't want to, then you know it's a problem with you, and you need to deal with it accordingly. But many things are not a problem with you.

I use the walking example because I literally solved my own "I don't want to go for walks" problem by realizing that I was habitually walking along a noisy road and I hated that and not the walking itself; once I found a more pleasant path, the "chore" became something that I could enjoy instead. My problem wasn't "I'm lazy and I hate walking", it was "cars are noisy and the environment is too grey"

To me, things like this often feel inherently patronizing.

In many situations, I feel that "Why don't we just" is the natural choice of words. So if you don't say that, I assume that you are making a conscious effort do say something that isn't what you actually want to express.

It feels like you are tiptoing around me because you thought I couldn't handle how normal people talk.

That reminds me of saying things like "It's not you, it's me" in a breakup. We all know it's bullshit. Stop trying to protect my feelings and tell me what you actually want to say!

All of that is subjective of course.

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...'.

"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.

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/

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...

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.

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.

I think that just too much attention is being paid to somebodys feelings nowadays

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.

this is an interesting technique. it sounds a bit difficult, but i will give it a try.

I'll go one further. 'Just' is never appropriate (except in irony, such as Mr. Bray's article), in my opinion. It signifies some combination of frustration, an opinion of the speaker's mental superiority, and an opinion of the listener's mental inferiority. For these reasons it also often causes listeners to focus on the speaker's opinion or the listener's underlying emotional response, rather than the solution or message you are trying to convey.

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.

"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

I start really simply:

"What have you tried so far?"

And at least half the time, someone just going through their list out loud makes them think of something viable or that they missed. The other half of the time, I can often throw out an additional idea or two and we talk about how to (in)validate solutions.

I once got a rep for "debugging .Net code" despite writing 0 lines of it in the decade before. It's all about asking good questions.

Good simple ideas. I too have been able to help debug rails code, despite not having touched rails in years. "Debugging .net code" is often just like "debugging python code" or "debugging java code"... it's generally the thought process vs any specific syntax. :)

This is a great example of the value of avoiding extraneous adverbs. In the given examples, ‘just’ is never necessary, and avoiding its use avoids condescension.

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".

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.

I've been trying to remove the word 'Just' from my vocabulary.

As the author states when you use it speaking to someone else, it implies a sense of triviality to the person's problems.

When I use it in reference to my self, ie "I was just going to move this over" It implies a sense and feeling of defensiveness. Since realizing these things I find myself more confident when I check my speech and remove just from it.

If you wanna see this applied in a didactic and CS context, we teach this as part of the Software Carpentry instructor training: https://carpentries.github.io/instructor-training/04-experti... (see "Dismissive language")

A good system is solving easy problems quickly so that time can be freed up for rare tricky ones. 9 out of 10 people should just use Glide to manage images in an Android app. The remaining one has a good reason to do something else and has the best chance to be helped by an expert who is not being bugged by 9 others. Heuristics is not bad, it's just not 100%.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Very true, but I've heard native speakers adopt it, too.

"Get off my lawn!"

Where did you get the idea that "So" implies that? I feel like one of us is significantly wrong here but I don't know if it's you or me.

And a sentence with ", no?" is still an assertion that you think it's right.

neither is "significantly wrong" -- it's just an opinon.

Opinions about the definitions of words can be wrong.

And a sentence with ", no?" is still an assertion that you think it's right.

Not rising to this bait.

I have no idea why you think that's bait.

That's the only way I've heard such things used. A claim, but checking that everyone is on the same page.

Maybe it's regional?

In German, "Just do XYZ" would be "Mach doch einfach XYZ" where einfach is the translation of just (and doch is emphasis).

Einfach can also be translated to easy, so the assumption that saying something like this means not taking the other person's problem seriously rings even more true here.

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.

A former boss of mine, who was an extremely hands-off manager, and who was cynical and black-humoured about everything, said (only half tongue-in-cheek) that he didn't do Agile, he preferred the JFDI (Just F*** Do It) methodology. So I just f*** did it.

in the final analysis, was he a good boss?

Yes! And we're still friends.

While it’s all great advice, it doesn’t need to clutter a space dedicated to upstart tech ventures.

This brings to mind a coworker a decade and a half ago. A web designer who decorated his door with drawings and quotes.

My favorite among the things on his door, and the one I can still recount now, read as follows:

    “Can you just…”
    no.

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.

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...

"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."

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.

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.

Sometimes you want to be condescending. Alternatively, sometimes a persuasive piece will use different language than you should ever use to an average coworker.

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.

This banning of the "just" word is one of those "people are fragile" derived behavioral fashions. It's rather annoying to get stuck in the carpet's flowers in this manner. Interlocutors can meet half-way, and always putting the burden on the speaker to not utter anything that might be construed as unpleasant is quite detrimental to efficient communication. But it seems some people find enjoyment and social prestige in spending a lot of time finding things to be offended about.

Infantilizing your listener by continually attempting to neutralize your speech of any unpleasantness seems like a race to the bottom. In the end, we're all so fragile that nothing can be said rapidly, in jest, without having to first pass your speech through an internal thought police filter?

For those that don't get the subtle reference to Nike's slogan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Do_It

There’s a saying “Beware of giving advice before you’re asked, or after.”

My daughter would hear this when she worked in a cafeteria. It typically came with an extravagant request:

"Can I just have a non-fat sugar-free vanilla latte with one pump of hazelnut? Not too hot."

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”.

I love this article, but now I'm worried my "never say just" schtick will seem derivative.

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

Just draw the rest of the owl.

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."

“Just” is a 4 letter word

"This one trick will make you a great communicator"

In my world, "just" is a four-letter word.

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

Great article. It's like people assume that you are some free rational actor, instead of being totally shaped by your history (specially childhood).

Slow news day?

Good post.

Alternatively, if you’re not fit for work, then don’t be at work?

I mean, at what point is it over the line to be useless at a job you’ve agreed to do, and that you demonstrated competence for and interviewed for?

Many times I’ve said things like “just restart the cronjob for this” or “just tag this issue to so-and-so if you can’t get it, they wrote the original” etc.

I’m all for taking care of yourself, but if you can’t handle the literal word “just” then maybe there’s bigger issues riding on your shoulders than my vocabulary.

These types of article are alienating to me, a bit. I’ve lead teams in government sector contracts, private mil, *-int, and many different analytical capacities and I’ve never heard someone criticize me for saying “just restart rstudio” or “just put a cache in and tag the issue to me for later”.

Truly bizarre. I don’t think the youth are this soft. The young folks I work with, granted are graduate age and older for the most part, are often very cordial and respectful and slick. Occasionally I see some hangovers, some sick calls, some romance drama, the usual bullshit, but never anything as microscopic as this.

Just don't feel alienated by articles like these.

I tried to provide a more productive response, but I’m noting for posterity that you got my upvote for succinctly demonstrating the point.

The perfect response. Thanks for your comment :)

Your comment is being intentionally dismissive of the grandparent's post. The false inference is that everyone who uses the word "just" is intending to be dismissive.

That's what I don't like about articles like this. It tries to establish some kind of universal rule that questions like "Could you just cache the hot partition keys?" are automatically rude, without considering any context. Context matters. A person could ask that question in a well-meaning way, and it could even end up being a helpful suggestion! A person could also ask that question in a dismissive and arrogant way. It depends on the person and the relationship between the speaker and the listener. Intent matters.

I’m not myself sensitive to the particular word “just”, but I do understand why many people find it counterproductive in many kinds of usage. Your examples are probably among the more benign: in the first, it seems a clear cut resolution; the latter usage is superfluous and has the same meaning without “just”.

But your attitude is exactly what many people find objectionable. People who are fit, but who may be dealing with something more challenging than you understand, don’t benefit from input dismissing the challenge. More than that, dismissive and demanding, commanding or ignorantly prescriptive input can be a mental and often emotional tax that undermines actually facing the challenge at issue.

A lot of times people will do much better at facing their particular challenges if you just let them find their way, or even if you just defer to how they want you to help (if they even do). This really isn’t so much about the word “just” other than its exemplary utility in getting this dynamic wrong.

I think you have explained it well. Since English is not my first language, I can't even tell that the word 'just' is supposed to be offensive (and probably same with many other speakers of English). However, attitude can easily put off people and that can be done using any set of words.

It is not the word but the context. Don’t be mean to people is probably the message. And Just is a good word to be mean with! But it is also used innocently.

I couldn't disagree more. OP is about a good way to improve your communication skills, which makes more people on the team feel included and productive. This isn't some "kids these days" culture war BS, Dale Carnaige was saying similar things back in 1936.

I think there’s also a pretty big chunk of people who need to work on their interpretation skills. A sentence means to you what you have interpreted it to mean.

> I’ve lead teams

> I’ve never heard someone criticize me

I wonder if there could perhaps be some causal link here.

People in positions of power often suffer from atrophy of their instinct for social acceptability, because people are less likely to call them out.

I’m also a little put off by this article, but in all those examples you could remove the word just and still have the same meaning. It’s not really adding anything.

The way I read it, the parent post does add extra meaning with that word "just", that meaning being "if you don't know how to do X, this is not considered acceptable here", going beyond just the particular problem to the 'meta-level', asserting what the expectations are from people in this role.

That is one way to interpret it, another is “it won’t be hard to do this”. You do not have to leap to the conclusion that something is a personal attack.

Jesus. No.

Even when "just" is a problem, it's not... this.

There are situations where it comes off condescending, and minimises the listener.

But I will say that I sometimes appreciate hearing it when I'm overcomplicating things. It reminds me to keep it simple.

Yeah same ! I don't like hearing the word just, but sometimes it helps to stop over-engineering things, or to find arguments against the one saying "just"

It's not about "say this and you'll break someone forever." It's about getting the best out of those you manage by engendering trust and respect.

When you diminish someone's work or efforts (by any means; not simply by using the word "just"), you demonstrate to them that they can't confide in you, and should hide things from you whenever they can. As these events build up into a regular pattern, people learn that they can't trust you with anything important, and over time lose respect for you, and then your ability to manage them effectively is hampered. The team's performance is lower than it could be due to morale.

Your first line "Alternatively, if you’re not fit for work, then don’t be at work?" changes the contours of this topic into an either/or argument that absolves you of any need for empathy, which is worrying.

It’s an assumption that you’ve made on your own.

I have been to over twenty weddings across my career, all from people I’ve shared a workplace with. I’ve bought baby shower gifts, I’ve been to graduations, birthdays, divorce hearings, rehab graduation, and more. I’d take a bullet for half the people in my contact list.

Work is work. You’re either there to work, or you go somewhere else. You think because you take a sick day, I don’t care about you? Have you ever known someone who never called in, and then one day they called in? That’s someone who needs to be checked on. But for someone who calls and says “hey, I’m taking a mental health day” or “hey, I got too fucked up last night and I can’t navigate the daytime world” those are different situations.

I respect my coworkers and colleagues enough to trust them to ask when they need help. If I say “hey, I need you or someone who can do it soon to just go through all the issues tagged merge and see which owners are here today” or something like that, then that person might say something like “ok, just to clarify, is there any simpler way to do that than by going all the tickets and then going through MS teams?” (ofc not, that would actually make sense)

“Just” is a signal of simplicity. To have apprehension about it is itself a signal of anxiety. These are workable factors.

What’s not workable is for you to say I have no empathy just because I have enough respect to treat my subordinates like adults and not coddle them.

> “Just” is a signal of simplicity.

You are missing a point overall I think - “just” signals simplicity, but it also signals dismissal of the difficulty the other person (receiver of “just”) is having. In that situation, to ask them to “just do it” will not help close the gap on why you think it’s simple and the other person has difficulty.

Because of your dismissal, they would not ask you again about it and could be apprehensive of exploring and closing that gap further themselves, especially when the “just” statement is made in a more public setting (eg. team meeting).

Whenever someone uses “just” as a way to signal simplicity and the other person does not concur, there exists a gap. The more someone dismisses another person’s difficulties, the bigger that gap. “Just” statements offer a solution which can help make progress. But who’s helping address that gap and how? Food for thought.

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...

  > "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.

> 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.

> 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)

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

So it seems we have found a self-referencing loop of assumptions about each others' culture! Interesting.

Spreading https://nohello.net/ around your company may help. I have it set as my status message.

This rocks, thanks for sharing

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.

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.

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. ;)

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