This is the entire game in consulting. Your client comes to you asking for something but with certain expectations in mind. The job of a good consultant is to meet those expectations - stated or not. You learn pretty quickly how to figure out what they’re really asking.
The XY Problem (2014)
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Re: The XY Problem (2014)
#22Someone on HN a year or so back mentioned they like to call this ‘going up the rabbit hole’. It’s a great name, so it stuck with me.
Re: The XY Problem (2014)
#23Nice touch: Angela and Obama instead of Alice and Bob
Re: The XY Problem (2014)
#24But sometimes this happens because the questioner wants to avoid other people's waste of time asking a more specific and limited question instead of a generic one. Often this happens because the environment where the question is asked is highly selective and does not accept too verbose and indirect questions. The solution is to be more open to conversation on both sides.
That isn't my experience at all. In contexts that are highly conversational, people constantly ask XY problems. It's hard to see that the path you went down so far may or may not be correct, so a lot of people just assume their last three determinations in solving their problem were valid.
Conversational environments certainly make it easier to root cause them, but it's often still painful.
Re: The XY Problem (2014)
#25My wife does this all the time. I didn't know there was a name for it!
By now I know to ask her what the actual problem is right up front.
Re: The XY Problem (2014)
#26Sometimes the XY problem occurs because the fact that X is being worked on is a company trade secret and the reporter tries to turn it into Y, which can be disclosed. This isn't always successful.
Re: The XY Problem (2014)
#27This is similar to the "faster horse" quote. If you care about helping someone, it's important to understand what they really need.
That said, I enjoy giving literal answers to things. Sometimes it's a fun challenge, others I'm just being a smartass, and occasionally it's a teaching opportunity. A few times I've done this to younger team members, then set myself a reminder to check on them to see if they figured out why that's not the best way.
Re: The XY Problem (2014)
#28Is there a name for when person A asks B and B thinks A has fallen victim to the XY probem but A really didn't and has indeed an unusual problem at their hands?
Overfitting?
In my experience, people who have proven fairly to themselves that they're in an odd situation can prove it to others pretty easily. "I'm not doing $Z because..."
Re: The XY Problem (2014)
#29The worst XY problem is knowing you want to do Y, even if its strange or whatever, asking how to do it, and people asking you "why do Y? Do X instead". Happens all the time in Stack Overflow. Just answer the fucking question, and then give the lecture on why you think it should be done that way, or why it shouldn't be done at all...
There are a few people who frequently have this complaint, but I don't think it's a real problem. If you actually need to do Y in a situation where most people who think they need to do Y are wrong, it's not everyone else's responsibility to divine that you are the magical case. It's your responsibility to demonstrate that you actually do know what you're doing. This isn't something you do by discussing how unfair ot…
If you're the one asking the question for the first time, yes, you should make it clear in your wording that you know about X and you really want Y.
There are two failure modes though:
1) You really want to do Y, not X. You are not asking the question, just searching for the answer, and find that "how do you do Y?" question, and the answer is "do X instead". Because you're a special case, these answers will likely dominate your search results.
2) You decide to ask the question. You make it very clear that you want to do Y, not X. Your question is closed as a duplicate of the one whose answer was "do X".
Re: The XY Problem (2014)
#30Reminds me of the classic stack overflow answer to "RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags" [1]
1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...