Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Just don’t

tbray.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 464 posts

Re: Just don’t

#151

Post by edw519 »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #132
edw519 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is the warehouse actually trying to pencil in? Wow! Great question! This tells me that the root problem here is that development was done before analysis. Broken process. Often broken results. And most certainly broken management. OP is nitpicking semantics while unsupported is identifying something so much larger: an opportunity to avoid OP's conundrum by doing things right in the first place. Best wishes, unsu…

Thanks for the positive feedback! As a consultant or contractor or whatever (client doesn’t know the difference), I need to find a happy medium somewhere between “how can I personally reconfigure the business for you” and “I’m a mindless pair of hands that codes”. I can’t go so far as to change how the warehouse operates. But it wouldn’t hurt to answer my questions about how the warehouse operates and ask me to come…

I can’t go so far as to change how the warehouse operates.

Why not? That's what differentiates those who sling code from those who do real Digital Transformation (not the crap our bosses spout off.)

it wouldn’t hurt to answer my questions about how the warehouse operates and ask me to come up with solutions in line with that

This says volumes about what they think about you and worse, what they think about their business and the problem at hand.

Most users are fleas who used to jump 6 feet but now only jump 3 feet because they can't even imagine any more.

Sorry to hijack the discussion and I didn't mean to suggest you should be doing any more than you are. (Believe me, at my rate, I get the job done and move on.) I just enjoyed seeing someone bring up the bigger picture.

Re: Just don’t

#152

Post by tenebrisalietum »

ISL wrote: post #16

I like to use the word "just", but find that it frequently makes my writing worse. Furthermore, I find that it is often easy to write a sentence that contains the word in order to get a thought out of my head and then simply remove the word. Just give it a try someday... ;).

Adverbs are easily overused.

Re: Just don’t

#153

Post by photochemsyn »

mindcrime wrote: post #136
photochemsyn wrote: post #114

For the case of helping someone with a technical problem, as author notes. words like 'simply', 'merely, 'just' are downplaying the person's efforts and inherently cause unnecessary strife, discouragement, resentment, etc. Sometimes, letting them work through it for a while longer on their own is the better course. In the situation where help is clearly needed, 'let's consider possible solutions' is a better entry po…

In the situation where help is clearly needed, 'let's consider possible solutions' is a better entry point, along with 'let's ensure we don't make it worse' - i.e. take a snapshot of the current situation, store the current working file, etc. Meh. Just goes to show how communication is a very subjective and personal thing. To my ears, both of those phrases would sound extremely condescending and patronizing. If I wer…

So what would you want people to say to you in that situation?

It's also true that at some point, if people are overly prickly, but the problem absolutely has to be solved, then it's going to be 'show me the logs of exactly what you've been doing, now go take a break and let me work on it.' That also will piss people off, most likely.

Re: Just don’t

#154

Post by haberman »

robertlagrant wrote: post #90
quelltext wrote: post #79

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…

We're in a bit of an era of establishing finer- and finer-grained politeness laws, all of which presuppose that the recipient's perception of a communication is all that matters.

And furthermore that the recipient is not capable of moderating their own perception, or communicating directly with a person who offended them to work it out.

Re: Just don’t

#155

Post by unsupp0rted »

2devnull wrote: post #137
unsupp0rted wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I changed the orientation of the PDF as requested. This did not add any white space next to line items, since the line items table uses 98 % width either way, unlike when printing from Excel I guess. This is what I tried and failed to get heard yesterday. Also now in Landscape the cover page header takes up like 50% of the page. But hey “just make it landscape”. What the client needs me to do, I suspect without being…

The next trick to learn is that the customer will still blame you for not telling them that landscape won’t fix it. Then you’ll waste less time the next time your customer asks for something stupid. Fail fast can work well for client management.

Solid advice. I shouldn’t have pushed so hard to get heard. Should have just made it landscape (which took minutes) and let it fail.

The trick is balancing that against wanting to be a consultant to them (i.e. somebody who knows what he’s doing and offers viable solutions that they themselves can’t think of) rather than a mindless pair of hands that gets directed by them to throw code at a wall.

Re: Just don’t

#156

Post by diydsp »

haha yes. mirrors my frustration from senior EEs telling me:

"All you need is a capacitor." or

"That's just a diode." or other people saying,

"Multiplication without an ALU is easy. It's just shifts and adds."

Re: Just don’t

#157

Post by SlickNixon »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #7

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 scaling the output of the system by 77%, rotating it counter clockwise by 90 degrees, and aligning it to the bottom of the page?

Re: Just don’t

#158

Post by diydsp »

ketzo wrote: post #140
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has suffered from migraines for 30 years, I can tell you that everyone just LOVES to tell you ALL the things you're doing wrong to cause them. As though I haven't been to every specialist I can find, and have tried -- literally -- every treatment known to man (except botox, yet).

Oh man, in my experience, migraines in particular are the worst for this because a ton of the common "justs" are actively conflicting "Just cut out caffeine/just try some caffeine when you feel one coming on!" "Just get more exercise/just make sure you're not exerting yourself too hard!" "Just get more sun/just make sure you're wearing sunglasses when you go out!"

"Just follow FDA publications for prototype medical devices and DIY build your own before it comes to market."

Re: Just don’t

#159

Post by 3pt14159 »

"Just" is just like the word "k"

To some people it's seen negatively, like they should have thought of something or other, to others it's a stand-in for "merely" or "simply" but I find "simply" much more condescending.

Speaking generally, I heard the word "just" mostly when working on motorcycles or other hands on things like laying down floor boards or finishing concrete. There's a shared respect for the workers in those environments that ascents to a quick course correction by someone that has a better idea. If I heard someone on a construction site say "simply hammer in the cross beam from the ladder." I'd probably throw the level at them. I don't want politician speak at a job site.

But then I found out about how some people in tech hear the word "just" as a signifier of thinking the person is stupid. So I've toned it down. But sometimes.

Sometimes.

Sometimes, really, just put in a caching layer for your webserver or tell me why I'm wrong.

Re: Just don’t

#160

Post by vsareto »

I'm all for cutting this out with medical advice and such (unsolicited advice, and importantly wrong advice), but this example annoys me:

>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.

It's not fair to ask people for help and then complain about their word usage when trying to help. This is a situation where solicited advice was asked for.

Some people diagnose and troubleshoot by starting simple -- this is especially true if they've been roped into an incident in progress and no one has caught them up. Is it plugged in? Is it turned on? Have you power cycled it? Have you done other simple things that humans tend to forget when dealing with a crisis because we aren't perfect?

>Do not, to quote the OED, “represent as a small thing” the difficulty of something you’re asking someone else to do, when you’re not inside their head and don’t understand what they see and feel.

Why don't you turn this around and consider that there may not be any bad intentions from someone when you hear the word 'just'. It's possible it's just a habit of speaking they've developed. You are not in their heads just like they are not in yours.

If you want to work it out like adults, then talk about the phrasing and see if you can come to an agreement. That will help you see if they are being condescending rather than reacting to hearing the word 'just' used.

Post reply on HN