101–110 of 363 posts
"My first thought would be to use X. What do you think of that?"
It seems, to me, humble and asking for clarification if there are obvious reasons for not using. An invitation to be teached. At the same time, if it is a good idea it would be recognized as so (maybe with some awkwardness)
Even being socratic (my preferred slow as hell approach) can sometimes border being patronising.
Plus how did you come to offer help? Requested, vs told to help by a manager, vs offering your opinion off the cuff, vs have asked if they are interested in your ideas. There's a difference between offering your help as a favor, and requesting of them if you can share your thoughts too. That's all going to impact your best approach.
One thing that might work is to ask them to talk you through what they've tried, and pay attention. Even if nothing helps you help them, you are showing that you value their thoughts and effort.
I might use "we" language.. "What if we tried sshd?"
I might even restate the problem to get agreement but without stating the solution, and then build on that agreement "It sounds like you want to be able to access this machine remotely in a secure way that lets you input commands, right?" "Yeah" "So maybe ssh could work?" "Well it's behind a firewall since it's an internal server so you can't ssh in" "What if we could log in securely to a server behind the firewall with ssh from outside, and then ssh from there to the machine you need to access?" etc etc. Getting people to agree predisposes them to keep agreeing.
I disagree; "Why didn't you just use sshd?" is a valid question and can be answered as such. Of course the answer might be "I don't know", but also there might be an answer, and maybe they do know the answer and have a good reason to don't use sshd; I don't know. That is why I ask. Then you can learn.
A key skill in communication is anticipating what the potential outcomes of what you say might be in a particular situation. In this case, the question can be valid, but it can also be completely the wrong thing to ask.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, if "xyz" is one of the approaches they did already try/dismiss, it still comes across as patronising.
Really? I've never considered it patronising. "Have you tried x?" "Yes, that's the first thing I tried." "Hmm, how about y?" "That too." "Well that has me beat. Unless maybe you tried something crazy like z..." "Actually, with a slight modification that might just work well enough for this!"
If they’ve tried it and there is an obvious response, that’s what they’ll say and there was no faux pas.
If they haven’t tried it they will say so and the phrasing still holds up.
It's easy for even very experienced engineers to get sucked into a solution that they don't realize is the wrong path until they've talked it through with someone else. And that's not a sign that they're incompetent nitwits. It might just be that no one ever told them about Obvious Solution X because everyone assumed they already knew it. Is there a good way to basically say "why didn't you consider using sshd and if you didn't because you just blanked or you don't know what sshd is, that's cool, let's talk about it"?
"Why wouldn't sshd do the job here?" Take "you" out of it. The question is about the problem and the solution, not the person.
A slight twist to this approach: "What if we tried using sshd here?" I think this would make it sound like you are on their side/on the same team, and that you are trying to help, not trying to mock them.
When someone has been working on something for a week or more, a naive "What if we tried using sshd here?" fails that latter test pretty hard.