Rephrasing slightly can get across almost the same suggestion with much less chance for condescension: "sshd has some features that may be useful with what you're wanting to accomplish."
Help me ask why you didn't just
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Re: Help me ask why you didn't just
#12They say communication is X% non-verbal. Googling just now I got 93%. So maybe, intentionally or not, it is more than just the words used.
Re: Help me ask why you didn't just
#13"Can you walk me through what you've tried so far?"
Open-ended, as opposed to a leading question (one where the solution is pre-supposed).
Re: Help me ask why you didn't just
#14Really, let's be honest; we want to show off how we would have done it. That's all. How about:
> That's an interesting solution! I don't know whether I would have thought of that. My first thought was to use sshd. Can I show you something?
Re: Help me ask why you didn't just
#15"What was your reason for not using sshd?"
That's my go-to phrase. It implies that I am looking to be educated, and not that I think they messed up.
Re: Help me ask why you didn't just
#16"I'm probably missing something - why didn't you just do X?"
And honestly I think phrasing isn't that important - if you know someone for months or years and aren't usually a dick - people won't automatically assume the worst.
Also this may be cultural. I've worked with English people and with Germans and the level of acceptable criticism and required disclaimers was very different. My own nation (Polish) seems to be somewhere in the middle but closer to Germans.
Re: Help me ask why you didn't just
#17"Why wouldn't sshd do the job here?" Take "you" out of it. The question is about the problem and the solution, not the person.
Re: Help me ask why you didn't just
#18I tend to use “How come you you didn’t use x?” Or even “how come X didn’t/wouldn’t work?”, and let my body language and facial expression indicate genuine curiosity,and maybe even perplexion at the scope of problem. I don’t feel Author considered the non verbal ways of communicating intent. “How come” feels slightly lest antagonistic then simple “why” but that may well be regional differences
"How come" and just "why" coupled with fairly direct phrasing are a lot better than most of the rest of the suggestions elsewhere in the thread as of this posting, most of which seem highly passive-aggressive.
Re: Help me ask why you didn't just
#19I don't mind the phrasing "why didn't you just" too much, but the phrase "why don't we just ... X" drives me crazy. The passive assumption that "just X" is obviously better and simpler than the current idea under discussion is insulting. Part of the problem is it lazily puts the onus on everybody else to explain why the proposal is a bad idea at zero intellectual cost to the proposer. eg:
Why don't we just use a jsonb column and put all the attributes in there instead of inventing a complicated table structure?
My take on this is always: if you so lack understanding of the problem space that you can't understand why everyone is discussing something complicated, stop proposing solutions until you do. When you do understand that, come back with your reasoning:
Although a relational structure is a better way to do this in general, I think in this situation it isn't necessary because the format of the data is intentionally client specific and opaque to our code. We might be able to simplify things a lot by storing it as a jsonb field
Re: Help me ask why you didn't just
#20Either they tried sshd or they didnt. If they did try it, then they have a good response ready to go no matter how you ask. The issue here is if they did not try it. The longer they have worked on it, the more gently I would make the suggestion towards sshd. If they have worked on it for their whole life, I wouldn't provide any help unless asked to and only limited to what they have asked me to do. If they have worked on it for 10 seconds, it would seem to be ok to quickly suggest sshd. For everything in between just be gentle. Maybe consider pondering and prodding as to what they have tried and maybe do not suggest sshd but some sort of encrypted TCP based protocol maybe one that is readily available.... maybe they'll discover it on their own.