I like to say "I'm curious why you didn't use ______". Curiosity comes with an implied humility and a willingness to learn new information.
Help me ask why you didn't just
111–120 of 363 posts
Re: Help me ask why you didn't just
#112Anyone ready to interpret the question as response 1 woud seem to me about as unbearable to work with as a person asking the question and actually meaning reponse 1. That's a very sad working environment and my Gordian knot solution would be to try to avoid those collaborations altogether.
Re: Help me ask why you didn't just
#113"Is there a particular reason that sshd doesn't work for this?"
Re: Help me ask why you didn't just
#114"At first glance with what little I know about the project, my first thought would be sshd. Please fill me in on the background here so I have more context and can better understand the problem space and chain of logic."
Yes! I’ve looked through these responses exasperated. This is the only one that I agree with. The people who say “why didn’t you just” often have a very limited understanding of the new thing, and naively reduce it to a problem they do understand.
To me, both responses are the same.
Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" comes to mind. You're saying exactly the same thing but in a bureaucratic form.
Reading other posts here the message I get is that a lot of people work in dysfunctional environments in which everyone's at each other's throat or something.
My default assumption would be that obviously my colleague isn't being an asshole...
Re: Help me ask why you didn't just
#115"You probably tried sshd, could you share what problems you ran into?"
Re: Help me ask why you didn't just
#116"What was your reason for not using sshd?" That's my go-to phrase. It implies that I am looking to be educated, and not that I think they messed up.
It also makes them look like a giant idiot if they actually made a mistake by not considering it. Maybe not the best thing to risk.
Re: Help me ask why you didn't just
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There's two parts to the problem. You don't want to sound mocking, but you also don't want to come across as a doofus who thinks their ten seconds of thought is automatically insightful, even as you're the twentieth person to suggest turning if off and on again. 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.
Perhaps.
But if I'm the proverbial twentieth person to ask the same question, it's probably a hint that it should be documented/explained prominently - maybe in a README, maybe as a comment in the source code, maybe some other suitable place.
And maybe it's just me. I'm a team lead and I have constant impostor syndrome. I was airborne into an existing team of junior devs who had no real team lead, but some of the devs know their stuff better than I do. E.g. I don't know modern ES, TypeScript, or React. I can't write CSS for the life of me. I'm mostly a back end Python/Django geek/Linux graybeard. I have since learned to not be afraid to sound like a doofus. I just ask away when I'm reviewing code and I don't understand something in modern ES/TypeScript/JSX/TSX/etc.
Like, if you are generally a nice guy, people you work with will eventually (and rather quickly) figure out that's just how you ask questions and don't mean any mockery.
Re: Help me ask why you didn't just
#118The final suggestions are good, much better than "why didn't you just". The problem comes when your initial thought is actually a good idea, and your colleague could actually have saved some time. This happens a lot in the interaction between senior and junior engineers. For those situations, it's not great to be asking for an explanation on the spot, because then the explanation is just "I'm an idiot/ignorant of that tool".
What's missing, I think, is a question that is not seeking explanation, but improvement. You are not seeking justification of actions, you are identifying an opportunity. This opens up for both an answer starting with "Aha, you might think that, but actually..." and the question "Huh? What is X? How could it be used here?"
Hence, I like
> Could it be made simpler by using `sshd`?
and
> Did you try `sshd`? This seems like it might be a good fit.
Re: Help me ask why you didn't just
#119I would feel offended if anyone would feel the need to go easy on me, just say what you think. And if you are right I will be eternally grateful for being taught a new efficient trick. Do I look like such a weak person to you that you feel like you have to handle my self esteem with silk gloves? Thanks for the insult.
And what is it with this 2 intentions? The third is the obvious correct one where I'm not familiar with sshd or I just didn't think about it. Please educate me. What kind of toxic culture propagates pieces like this text as something of value?? Just say "Why didn't you use sshd?" Anyone mentally pasting some kind of assumption behind that small sentence to bash themselves was just raised wrong. I'm sorry this whole thing just annoys me. Making things up in your head and getting offended by them. argh..
Re: Help me ask why you didn't just
#120My go-to would be "Do you know if sshd would work?" To me, framing it directly as a knowledge question, and to not appear as if you're coming from a place of authority (unless you know both their problem and your solution both well enough to solve it without running into edge cases, and how often does that happen?). They either know or they don't, or potentially have a reason for not trying in the first place. If the…
I like this a lot. I often phrase this question as "can you tell me about the trade offs of your method vs. something that uses sshd?"