Comment by quelltext | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quelltext | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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