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Funny... my roommates and I used "just" for comedic effect in college. I was stuck writing an algorithm and asked my more-experienced roommate for help. He briefly scanned my code and said, "well, you kind of just... code it." I looked at him quizzically and just blurted, "straight up?" "Yep, just straight up code it." Then we all laughed at the absurdity. He wasn't trying to trivialize the problem, to be clear, but…
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> 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…
> Being friendly and considerate takes relatively little effort 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 ter…
Yeah I feel pretty much the same way fwiw :) I wasn't saying one needs to be an outgoing social butterfly, just that being "that smart person that no one wants to talk to" is poison for your career, all emotional considerations aside.
> "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.…
> Not that you should go out of your way to be hurtful, but any genuinely useful advice/suggestions should be given without regard for emotion. You're at work, not a social club. I agree that this could be useful advice and that you should _not_ hesitate to give it if you think it will be useful. However, I think it's rather extreme and short-sighted to say that such advice should be given entirely "without regard fo…
When many of my coworkers message me on Slack for example, they don't just leave me a message asking for what they want, they say "Hey, how are you", or "How was your weekend", or some other silly thing.
I know they don't care about the answer to my question. Now, instead of being able to asynchronously answer their question, I have to spend my own energy (I'm slightly autistic, so it doesn't come easily to me) coming up with some reply to this, so that they THEN ask what they actually want to know.
> [03 AM] COWORKER: Hey gavinray, how was your weekend?
> [10 AM] gavinray: It was decent, what about yours?
> [11 AM] COWORKER: Good. Hey, about ISSUE-123, do you...
Just ask me for what you want, I know you're only talking to me because you want something.
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…
I've learned that 9 times out of 10, if someone is telling you about their problems, they really just want some understanding or compassion. I've found that instead of trying to 'fix' their problem with unsolicited advice, saying something like "Wow, that sucks, I'm sorry you're going through that" leads to a much more positive response.
For instance:
Can't we just apply this small change to remediate the larger problem?
"Just" is an almost perfect linguistic trap to set for oneself. It really does seem like the perfect cousin of "I told you so", a turn of phrase which never wears well in any form.
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…
It depends. If you're complaining to me about your chronic condition then I will feel compelled to give you advice on things that I think might help you. That's the crux. It turns out people just want to be free to whinge about their issues without doing anything about it. That's fine, but don't talk to me about it, then. At the very least, tell me that you just want to whinge. Edit: Obviously this is to my friends a…
Heh, I have to admit I chuckled at that one. To be honest, I felt somewhat similarly earlier in my life. In all seriousness, I highly recommend group therapy. You will discover that no matter how much you feel "compelled" to give advice in moments when people are looking for support and connection, that nobody, and I mean nobody, wants to hear it.
I was inspired by this legendary PR to the Django docs that fixed all kinds of words that "minimize difficulty involved": https://github.com/django/django/pull/11482
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> "have you tried..." Or: "what have you tried?"
"Everything, nothing works". Few people like being asked open-ended questions when they are irritated.
I have been lucky enough so far this was possible.. and if this could not be avoided, one stategy was to try to deflect any specific promise with "I need to research this first", and then ask same question again when the person cools down.
It does mean that irritable people get help slower, but that's how the life is in general anyway.
It's not that there are never valid uses, but 99% of uses that I see tend toward careless and condescending. Sometimes they're part of an "adversarial learning" process in which the person making the suggestion knows it's probably wrong but uses it as a way to be educated without having to ask for it. You'll recognize this one because they'll "just" over and over and over. Other times "just" is an expression of the person's own frustration with the constraints of the problem or the pace of progress, which isn't really helpful either. Often, as tbray points out, it's a way to make light of others' struggles. Only rarely is it constructive, most often as a way to snap someone out of "analysis paralysis" or other kinds of mental looping - and even then there are better alternatives.
And don't get me started on "should" or we'll be here all day. ;)
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 woul…