Comment by adenozine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adenozine | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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.

The perfect response. Thanks for your comment :)

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.

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.

> 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.

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 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’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.

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