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I get a lot more mileage out of "have you tried..." than "why don't you just...". As a recent example, I wrote a system that auto-generates PDF packing slips from an order form, to send to a warehouse for picking and packing. Yesterday a client told me to "just make it landscape" while I was explaining why "just making it landscape" won't solve the problem of giving the warehouse whitespace to pencil stuff in, becaus…
Interesting how single words can have such an impact. I find it jarring to hear someone begin a sentence with "So", as if they have given the current topic some thought (when 9 times out of 10 they haven't), or to hear them end a statement with ", no?" where turning a positive assertion into a question sounds somewhat underhand.
Same thing with “…, no?”. More cultural than linguistic. I’ve also heard it’s a Mexican quirk, too.
Still annoys me, but I can see where they’re coming from.
Related: if someone has a chronic condition, don't drop on them unsolicited medical advice, especially things like "have you tried yoga?", "you just need more sunshine", "you must try my cousin's healing tea!". You're not their doctor, and they haven't shared all the medical details with you. Your 3-second diagnosis is almost certainly terrible. They've heard it a dozen times already, and it's difficult and tiring to…
Or to an overweight person: "you know you'd be a lot healthier if you just lost weight" or "why don't you get a gym membership" or "it's just calories in minus calories out, bro"? Gee, thanks, you're the first person ever to tell me that I should lose weight and it's just a matter of diet and exercise, like every fat person on the planet doesn't already know. It's like saying to a smoker, "You know that's bad for you…
> "They’re not making good progress, and someone’s asked you if you can help. You look at some graphs and error messages. It’s easy (once again, I speak from experience) to say something like “Could you just cache the hot partition keys?” or “So, just scan the logs for the high-latency signals and frequency-sort them.” > This. Will. Not. Help. I wouldn't have thought to do this and would have appreciated this advice.…
> but any genuinely useful advice/suggestions should be given without regard for emotion. You're at work, not a social club. Aside from just being bad manners, this is a recipe for a hard cap on your career. Work is made up of people, not robots. Being friendly and considerate takes relatively little effort (not none!), and may mean you will be the one who gets the call next time an ex-coworker is looking for an acqu…
You snuck in a just. ;)
My brain doesn't have working emotional processing. It took me decades to build up a complex enough logic tree to handle social interaction. As a result, I find being friendly and considerate taxing. At least I enjoy the challenge communicating correctly, otherwise I wouldn't consider it to be worth the effort. (ADHD and short term rewards... ugh)
> "They’re not making good progress, and someone’s asked you if you can help. You look at some graphs and error messages. It’s easy (once again, I speak from experience) to say something like “Could you just cache the hot partition keys?” or “So, just scan the logs for the high-latency signals and frequency-sort them.” > This. Will. Not. Help. I wouldn't have thought to do this and would have appreciated this advice.…
There is another way to look at this situation (beyond the use of language and specific words). The takeaway can be as follows: Ask questions before doling out advice/help. What this means is, you are getting a better understanding of the current situation, you are being sympathetic and by the time you talk, you do so from a position of knowledge and not shooting from the hips. For e.g., if a colleague is stuck debug…
Agreed you could probably phrase it more delicately, though I do think the intent is justified.
I get a lot more mileage out of "have you tried..." than "why don't you just...". As a recent example, I wrote a system that auto-generates PDF packing slips from an order form, to send to a warehouse for picking and packing. Yesterday a client told me to "just make it landscape" while I was explaining why "just making it landscape" won't solve the problem of giving the warehouse whitespace to pencil stuff in, becaus…
> "have you tried..." Or: "what have you tried?"
The message is not the meta-message.
The reason the examples in OP of 'just do...' irk is because the 'just do...' supposes to be helpful, but any sincere thought given shows that the suggestion isn't helpful.
Instead of giving sympathy/relatedness, it comes across as dismissing the problem. -- I think this can be down to miscommunication; but I think whether something 'sympathises with problem' or 'gives solution' is deeper than a phrasing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
what if they complain about it chronically? are you then justified to offer unsolicited advice, or do you have to just listen (i.e. be their outlet)?
What about the complaint bothers you? Is it annoying the person never attempts to improve? Is it making you feel bad you can't help? Is it bringing your own mood down? If you don't know the person, it is not your responsibility to help them with a chronic problem you don't understand. So just let that go. Feeling guilt because someone else hurts is not a good motivation for assisting them. You're going to cause more…
- 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.
This is great advice. Anecdotally, I've been having pretty bad anxiety this year from work that I feel should be easy but turns out to have many unexpected wrinkles. In retrospect, it seems like there may have been a lot of "justs" when discussing early solutions. I've started to take a step back when approaching problems to better understand potential obstacles, but this was still a pretty big toll on my confidence.