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Just don’t

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Re: Just don’t

#301

Post by jakelazaroff »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #200
kweinber wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds really patronizing. I would be careful with that phrasing. People who don’t want their problem solved often know the solutions and don’t like the tradeoffs or change they entail. It is often not a knowledge problem.

It also implicitly discounts one of the most valuable processes: verbal processing. Some people, myself included, find themselves verbalizing a problem and the tensions in every choice and monitoring the logic and emotional response present in saying it out loud. In this way, listening and solving aren't too dissimilar. Simply listening can give the speaker an appropriate environment in which to solve their problem.…

> It also implicitly discounts one of the most valuable processes: verbal processing.

Not really. The question, more generally, is: what should my role be in this conversation? Should I be an active participant in solving the problem? Or should I support you as you work through it?

Re: Just don’t

#302

Post by dshpala »

I don't mind receiving "just", in my view "what do you think" is far worse.

You can just brush "just" away (which is kind of expected), but "what do you think" implies some kind of reasoned answer. Which then can be debated, even if the original idea was bogus from the start.

Re: Just don’t

#303

Post by smoe »

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…

I found, often it is actually faster, after a very brief discussion, to just do what the client wants and let them (or you) realize that they were in the wrong. Then reverse it without being smug "I told you so" about it.

E.g years ago on a complex web form I got the feedback from my client's client, that because their boss was colorblind and couldn't recognize the yellow/orange borders for missing required fields (iirc), those fields should be greyed out instead. I wrote back something on the line of "Very valid reason to make a change, but my concern with greying them out is, that this is how commonly deactivated/disabled fields are shown in which you can't enter anything at all". I got told that this doesn't matter, I have to grey them out. Which I did without additional comment, sent them the new version and couple of hours got the response to undo it again and find another solution. In the end everyone was happy.

Obviously in this case it was something that only took a few minutes that can easily be reversed, but I often see people spending way more time debating on things (and not seldomly getting unnecessarily emotional) than it would take to just try out a couple different solutions and giving people something more tangible.

Re: Just don’t

#304

Post by quesera »

j6zauas4gz wrote: post #285
sagaro wrote: post #281

Seems like a recipe for creating snowflakes. People should just grow a thicker skin and move on with their lives instead of taking offense and getting depressed that someone told them "just"

I dont think you are right about that, but for the sake of this comment lets assume that you are right and that this will create snowflakes. Even if that's true on the macro scale its still incredibly useful to keep in mind the impact your language has on the mind of the person you are communicating with. If my goal is to get the person I am communicating with to do a thing, most of the time idgaf about whether or no…

I agree with you, because in the real world I do need to talk to people -- and people come in all psychological shapes and sizes!

But on the flip side, there are few things I personally dislike more than being spoken to by someone who is being cautious of my feelings.

It's slow. It's tedious. Most of them are bad at it. And honestly it's more disrespectful to imagine that you are going to upset me, than to just bravely take that risk.

I concede that I'm the weird one. But we do exist.

Re: Just don’t

#305

Post by MadcapJake »

vasco wrote: post #262
kelseyfrog wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for bringing this up. This was a life lesson that unfortunately had to be spelled out for me in a very embarrassing way. My ultimate takeaway is to now default to listening without advice. The result are on average better as people who want to vent are more put-off by advice givers than advice seeks who receive a good listener. It's also made me quite a bit more appreciative of times when I need to vent and…

What do you do though? Just stand there quietly nodding? When I try to do this I end up basically saying "that sucks", "hmm hmm", "yeah", etc which is very frustrating to me as I'd hate someone doing that to me. Or worse, sometimes I get the feeling that those "that need a listener" actually want mindless agreement with whatever the situation was or I feel like I'll be reinforcing insecurities. Let's say someone is t…

This is hard for me too. If it's a big complicated thing, I try to recapitulate what they said which then leads to them feeling more listened to. That way, I stay busy and feel like I am engaged without trying to solution for them. If it's a simpler thing, this advice doesn't work and can feel condescending. Ymmv.

Re: Just don’t

#306

Post by lazide »

blowski wrote: post #238
Aeolun wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only problem is that you often hear the same variation of the problem multiple times with no action taken to resolve it in between. That frustrates me.

I'm guessing it frustrates you because you like solving problems? You hear someone stuck in a rut and you want to help them out of it? Totally with you on this. I'm a solutions architect by day, and my entire skillset is helping people solve problems. Do a role-play: someone comes to me complaining about how it's really frustrating having to type all this crap into Excel, so I suggest using OCR, or taking a course on…

My challenge is that to be able to usefully respond to people’s rants, I need to empathize with them and expend at least some mental effort to understand their problem.

If they go on a rant about something, that dumps emotional and mental load onto me.

If they don’t resolve, or attempt to resolve it, that means they’ll continue to dump it onto me - and even worse, it will be a boring, already heard it problem with no new information!

If they continue to do that, and I continue to listen, I’m essentially their emotional garbage dump and enabling their lack of dealing with their actual problem and frustrations.

Even worse, it is often hard for me to get my mind off an unresolved problem. So then it bugs me.

I like solving problems because then I have a lot fewer things bugging me. They almost always result in progress in other ways too, and accomplishing things, which is nice.

Even worse still if it’s the kind of problem they are making for themselves, or are intentionally not trying to solve. Of which there are many.

Eventually, I just don’t want to be around them, or get progressively more blunt with changing the subject because it makes it exhausting and unpleasant for me being around them.

Some people seem to be able to just ignore the emotional affect or load, and get whatever they want from the convo, and I can do so if I exert effort to do so.

But life is too short for this kind of BS on the regular.

Re: Just don’t

#307

Post by dr_dshiv »

actionablefiber wrote: post #17
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…

I go with "my first impulse is to suggest..." which IMO adds the diplomatic nuance of admitting an incomplete understanding of the problem and/or the person experiencing the problem. You either get a "good suggestion, I'll try that" as a response or you get "you might think it's a good idea but I already considered it and XYZ problems occurred" and you can work from there.

“Naively, I’d be thinking about trying…”

Re: Just don’t

#308

Post by thegrimmest »

goodpoint wrote: post #294
thegrimmest wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think my post is a complaint, more an expression of desire. It has also spawned an interesting discussion, which seems to be the idea here.

That's exactly a complaint.

This is a bit pedantic. I did qualify the word complaint with the word "idle". A broad enough definition encompasses any desire for change in the world. There must be a distinction between statements which invite meaningful conversation and those which do not[1].

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIJYO4u5iug

Re: Just don’t

#309

Post by CharlesW »

vsareto wrote: post #179
dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is not wrong but it's not always useful. Being more kind in your language when giving help will carry your point across more clearly. Consider a junior engineer stressed out by deadlines -- sure, they should listen to you calmly and fix the problem, but it…

I agree with culling 'just' because it rarely adds clarity, but I don't get the emotional impact others are having when they hear it. This blog post is trying to establish that its use definitely means something bad and condescending, but I don't agree with it: >The word “just” is a signal that you’re not taking their problem seriously. It wants to use this (flawed imo) reason to make people feel guilty any time they…

> This blog post is trying to establish that its use definitely means something bad and condescending, but I don't agree with it:

You don't need to. Just don't use it, and you'll be fine.

(^This is an attempt to provide an illustrative example.)

Re: Just don’t

#310

Post by dang »

Jerry Weinberg used to say that when you hear "just" you should substitute "have trouble", and when you hear "should" you should substitute "isn't". So, "just cache the keys" -> "we'll have trouble caching the keys"; "should be easy" -> "isn't easy".

Maybe we could call that Weinberg Substitution or something. Sort of like Russell Conjugation.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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