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Comment by sfpotter | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

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