> you’re not inside their head and don’t understand what they see and feel.
This is also information worth communicating. The newcomer to the project is expected to be ignorant of the problems and the mental set of those addressing them, in any reasonable setting. To confess your own ignorance and declare your readiness to learn in that situation is better, I think, than to pretend knowledge you do not actually posses.
"Just do this?" questions are re-phrasable as "Would this work?" questions, if the language environment is prickly.
Anecdotally, I've been having pretty bad anxiety this year from work that I feel should be easy but turns out to have many unexpected wrinkles. In retrospect, it seems like there may have been a lot of "justs" when discussing early solutions.
I've started to take a step back when approaching problems to better understand potential obstacles, but this was still a pretty big toll on my confidence.
I am going through the same thing this year. You're doing the right thing in reevaluating. Have confidence knowing that even if your previous work didn't go how you wanted it to, stopping and taking a look at _how_ you do that work is a sign of progress towards a point where your work meets and exceeds your expectations.
I really wish there was a version of "just" and "only", that has the connotation of there is one and only one thing, but not the connotation of that being trivial.
Something that expresses "there is 1 thing and that makes it a big deal!"
PJ Eby used your sentiment in writing about self improvement, where some instruction might say "write a list of three things you are grateful for" and instead what people do is "complain that their life isn't good, wallow in self pity, consider things they want but don't have, write a list of three things they feel obliged to be grateful for but aren't really, roll their eyes at the idea that such a thing could possibly help, etc. etc." and he said "just write a list of three things you are grateful for, and don't drag that other baggage along".
See also, telling people to "just get out of bed" in The Article which means "move legs, lift bodyweight" not "find purpose in life and reason to go on living, discover religion, and only then excitedly jump out of bed cured and full of joie de vivre". And not "reject getting up because it won't cure you and you don't want to be cured anyway because life is shitty".
Rhetorical tricks to reframe problems are annoying to me. More so when I find myself reflexively doing it. For example, calling something simple. Or referring to a desired feature as "making it easy."
I think often you can be specific. Don't push for the team to make a feature easy. Push for the number of steps necessary for something to be reduced. Or to enable undo/redo.
I wish I had an easy exit for the "just" advice here. I don't, sadly. Empathy is the best I can come up with.
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 politely decline well-meaning but frustratingly useless advice.
Or to an overweight person: "you know you'd be a lot healthier if you just lost weight" or "why don't you get a gym membership" or "it's just calories in minus calories out, bro"? Gee, thanks, you're the first person ever to tell me that I should lose weight and it's just a matter of diet and exercise, like every fat person on the planet doesn't already know. It's like saying to a smoker, "You know that's bad for you. You should quit." That sort of comment is almost entirely self-serving.
> "you know you'd be a lot healthier if you just lost weight"
Not least because weight loss is unlikely to make someone much healthier unless they have type 2 diabetes, severe hypertension, or are way beyond "overweight". There is a substantial population-level association between obesity and morbidity, but it's heavily influenced by those who are extremely obese (which tends to come with a variety of other issues not immediately relevant to the average fat person).
obviously the actual weight matters, but on average this advice is poor.
Across the spectrum of over weight people (from mildly to extremely obese) there are a range of health markers from blood pressure, HDL/LDL/Triglycerides, insulin sensitivity, leptin/ghrelin, sex hormones (and PE/ED), blood sugar, cortisol, inflammation, arterial calcification (on and on the list goes) that are all positively improved by returning to healthy "normal" (not average) weights.
Layne Norton's book "Fat Loss forever" and youtube channel are excellent resources to begin understanding.
At least in this case, any advice would be helpful. But it also depends on the person. If the person has been trying several things, and is curious to learn more and work on the suggestion, even small help can make a huge difference.
When it comes to things like working out in the gym, or nutrition. There are often some small optimisation/hacks you can do on top of the things you are already doing that can significantly move the needle in terms of gains. If you are walking, something like carrying weights in a backpack could help you burn extra calories. If you are already doing push ups, introducing you to burpees can make a whole world of difference. Similarly if you are already doing Kettlebells, a complex could significantly move the needle in terms of gains.
Beyond this, learning itself requires lots of humility. You must be prepared to be offended in one way or other to learn any person, in any way. Chances are high nearly every one you meet has some idea about how to make progress but not the entire idea. You need to take in feedback from several people piece together some kind of a coherent strategy to win.
> At least in this case, any advice would be helpful.
It's not clear what you mean by "this case". It's a rare case where "any advice would be helpful."
> Beyond this, learning itself requires lots of humility. You must be prepared to be offended in one way or other to learn any person, in any way.
The mistake you're making is assuming that the person is having this discussion with you because he wants to learn for you. And that, after all, is the point of several other comments in this thread.
It was definitely years before I understood what people meant by "I don't want your advice or solution. I want you to listen."
Losing weight is a simple equation of calories in vs out. The reason people are not losing weight is not because they don't understand that. If you want to help, don't suggest ways they can reduce calorie intake or burn more calories. Understand what the barriers are that's preventing them from acting. It's almost never a lack of knowledge about nutrition/exercise.
Most people don’t want you to solve their issues. They just want you to listen and understand them. If someone asks for advice, that’s another thing entirely. But I’ve learned over the years that just listening and appreciating what someone else is feeling is the most helpful thing you can do.
This is one of those personality differences that I find utterly fascinating. I think you're right that most people feel the way you say, but I feel the exact opposite! If I'm talking about a problem, it's because I haven't figured out how to solve it and would be happy for ideas. Otherwise why talk about it? You're certainly not interested in my problems, and it's by definition a problem for me, so it's not like I enjoy just talking about it for no reason.
It was definitely a learning curve realizing that most people don't feel how I do about this. Still baffles me to this day, but I've learned to put that aside and just shut up because I guess people want that.
I'm the same way. Not to over-generalize, but in my experience that feeling is a big
1) guy thing
2) engineering-type thing
3) type-A-personality thing
and god help you if you're all three!
All three of those groups are overrepresented on HN, too, so at least you're probably in good company :D
I just learned that I need to stifle my automatic "problem-solving mode" when it comes to personal interactions, and all of my conversations got way better. Glad I was at least able to learn pretty early in my life!
For real? Like if in the course of a conversation, somebody brings up that they've been struggling with depression and have a hard time getting up in the morning, you actually interpret that as a request for instructions they can follow, in order to become happy again?
I just find that a little hard to believe. If it's actually true, well, I dunno, I'm sorry for you?
I mean, that's a rather extreme example. It's hard to say how I'd react in that situation, I'd probably feel uncomfortable and mumble and try to get out of the conversation, lol.
Personally I like both. Listen first, listen completely and then offer suggestions. While some people will let you get a few lines in and then start blurting out useless suggestions without hearing the full situation.
It may be the most helpful thing for them, but listening to someone else's problems could be emotionally taxing to the person listening. Double so, if the listener has a feeling that he's there just to listen, and that the person talking about the problem just wants to offload their issue to the listener, and is not at all interested about what the listener have to say about the topic.
If you want someone to just listen, go get a psychologist. They are at least paid to listen to other people's problems, and have tools not to take stuff personally and not to feel bad about it. And they get paid in the end.
In such situation, one should do what is the best for them. Not sticking around or running away may be unnatural and thus also emotionally taxing. Giving advice and trying to help, even if the person just wanted to vent, is not bad.
You [1] came to me with your problem. Now it's not only your problem, it's also my problem, since you shared it with me. I want that problem to go away, and will help you or give you advice how to deal with it. Then I will feel better. If I just listen to you, it may be the best thing for you, but for me it is the wrong thing to do, since I'm not made that way.
I you just want to vent so that you can feel better, don't make me feel worse because of that. Find someone else.
[1] "You" and "me" used for clarity, since "they" & "them" is confusing.
This is a lesson I am continually still trying to put in practice. I had the initial ah-ha moment from White Men Can't Jump.
See. if I'm thirsty. I don't want a glass of water, I want you to sympathize. I want you to say, "Gloria, I too know what it feels like to be thirsty. I too have had a dry mouth." I want you to connect with me through sharing and understanding the concept of dry mouthedness.
What about the complaint bothers you? Is it annoying the person never attempts to improve? Is it making you feel bad you can't help? Is it bringing your own mood down?
If you don't know the person, it is not your responsibility to help them with a chronic problem you don't understand. So just let that go. Feeling guilt because someone else hurts is not a good motivation for assisting them. You're going to cause more damage because helping them is about you, not them.
You also aren't obligated to be someone else's therapist or support. It is always appropriate so set boundaries and decide how much attention you're willing to give them. Doing something out of obligation means you're just tolerating a problem. Try to avoid "tolerating" things, try weighing consequences and choose your level of involvement instead. (Easier said than done.)
Basically, you have to think beyond "ugh" and figure out why you're bothered and decide how to act. In some circumstances (like work), you're just stuck with it and you'll have to carefully set boundaries.
I think that's a very good question. I'll give an anecdote from group therapy.
There was one member of my group who was having a difficult time motivating himself to make a particular change he wanted to make. I had long since learned the dangers of "advice giving", so really just asked why he felt it was so hard to make that change. He definitely had a lot of backstory that could explain his underlying fear.
However, this pattern went on for about 9 months (him complaining about not being able to make this change, the rest of the group offering support). Finally, at one point I said "Bob, I really care about you, but to be honest, you've been complaining about your situation for months now and you aren't actually doing anything to change it. I understand where your fear comes from, but if you're not going to even try to do something different, I don't really want to hear about it anymore."
The next week he came in having made the first step toward his goal. Point being I had a much bigger motivating impact on him once I let him know how he was affecting my feelings (of course, after we had a lot of time to build up trust) than if I had said "just do x, y, z".
I think you've unintentionally explained why your advice-giving worked in that moment, too -- Bob knew you were coming from a place of good faith!
You weren't "just"-ing him -- you knew the intricacies of his situation, and it's a lot easier for someone to take advice to heart if they can trust that you actually know the context.
> are you then justified to offer unsolicited advice, or do you have to just listen (i.e. be their outlet)?
You've exhibited what the book Crucial Conversations calls A Fool's Choice. There are other options. The recommended one would be to express to them the pain you have in always hearing it, and exploring with them their need to always talk to you about it.
They have a need, which is causing them to express it to you (perhaps in a suboptimal manner). You have your own needs, but are having trouble expressing your needs. It's a skill to learn, and it won't come easy, but it is learnable.
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 and family. If I got talking to a stranger at a bus stop and they told me about how their arthiritis was giving them gyp this morning I would be sympathetic, I wouldn't tell them to do more stretches and eat more fish. Assume my comment is with good intentions, please.
> 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.
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.
You're sort of changing the subject to an easier situation.
There is a big difference between a group gathering for therapy, and having someone engage you in 'conversation' where they're cornering you to complain about their ailment.
Still, even in real life, giving unsolicited advice never works in my opinion. It's basically as useless as complaining about something and thinking it will magically change without doing anything different.
Note I have seen the following be useful:
1. Is the person really just saying "I want a hug" with their complaining? If so, and you care about this person, just give them a hug.
2. Depending on your relationship with the person, and if you can accept any blowback, it's also fine to say "I'm sorry, I don't want to be a receptacle for your complaining today."
3. Ask the person if they want help fixing the problem.
You can’t tell if someone is looking for advice or support and connection. If you assume, like you suggest, you’re going to get it wrong sometimes. I’d personally never waste someone’s time with my problem if I didn’t genuinely respect and value their perspective. I’d also consider advice to be support though. Not everyone is looking for silent head nodding.
> You can’t tell if someone is looking for advice or support and connection.
You can always ask. Seriously! Some communications books literally recommend you ask whether they want support/connection/advice.
And you will rarely go wrong if you commiserate. So: Commiserate first, and then say "I have some ideas on what may help, ... " and what follows is context dependent.
If it's a chronic health issue that you have not dealt with: "but you probably know more about this than I do and probably don't want to hear yet another idea."
If it's a chronic health issue that you have dealt with: "and they solved a similar problem I had, but I'm not sure your situation is the same as mine."
Trust me - if they want to hear your solution, they will then ask.
If it's very generic advice that people commonly treat as a panacea (e.g. diet, exercise, supplements, meditation, mindfulness), better to commiserate and keep your advice to yourself.
I have a chronic condition that comes up lot because it dominates my life. It touches everything I do, so bringing it up is unavoidable.
Early on I liked people trying to help. But after years of working on the issue, I've learned how specialized my situation is and how useless most advice is for me.
But friends & family don't have anything to offer besides the usual armchair advice. When I open up to someone new I always have to go through the phase of defending why I can't "just" do X, and that gets very tiring.
I'll get someone to understand that neither they nor I know how to improve my situation, but people eventually forget why X is off the table and I have to defend my decisions all over again.
I don't want to whine about it - I don't need to vent, and I've looked into everything anyone's thought of. It's just that this is an inextricable part of what's going on with me. If I can't talk about this with a person, I can't really talk about my life at all.
I think there's a misunderstanding in what I'm saying, or perhaps people aren't understanding that listening is actually quite a skill to practice and is really quite draining. It isn't free to ask people to listen to you, there is a cost associated with it.
Asking people to listen but then they can't input is something I find incredibly arrogant, egotistical, selfish, basically it's a terrible human trait and I'm surprised there are so many apologists in this thread that defend this kind of behaviour.
Again, I'm not talking about off the cuff "how was your day" "oh my angina is playing up again" "WELL THEN YOU SHOULD DO THIS AND THAT" kinds of conversations... I think that is obvious.
I mean the 30 minute ones where someone is sounding off to you about their problems. Yeah, I am going to give you "advice" (as in, this is a problem lets figure out how to solve it). I'm genuinely surprised this is seen as A Bad Thing. Especially given our community is one of hackers and yanno, people who get hired to solve problems...
Yeah, there could be a communication gap here. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're talking about truly excessive situations.
The mild versions of the patterns you're objecting to don't seem problematic.
As someone who's problem might be unfixable, sometimes I just need a sounding board and don't expect actionable advice. And sometimes people just want to vent, but I try to save that for my therapist.
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.
You're right about that. People who try to fix others do so because they don't want to feel the other person's pain because, it hurts, it's unpleasant and they don't know what to say. They genuinely want the other person to get better but fail to see how it may make them feel worse by suggesting a fix.
To me, someone saying "wow that sucks" tells me this person doesn't bother to think about what I said and is barely spending brain space on listening to me, instead choosing to blurt out a generic platitude. Their response lack a proof of work. Whereas if someone answers with something that clearly demonstrates that they feel engaged in my struggle, enough to spend some brain power on it to form a useful opinion or come up with some ideas, that's much better.
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).
Part of the reason why some of these suggestions conflict is because a lot of people with "migraines" have never been diagnosed, and are just complaining about a bad tension headache. Then many people are misdiagnosed. Finally, there are several theories about causes of migraine.
Still, 100% true that people are usually unhelpful with their flippant medical advice.
> "Just cut out caffeine/just try some caffeine when you feel one coming on!"
The very "best" part of my journey was seeing a migraine specialist very early on. I told him that I thought maybe caffeine had something to do with it. He brusquely told me that caffeine had nothing to do with it. Twenty years later, I went to the same guy, because I had learned some new things. Again, I mentioned how much caffeine I was drinking, and he cut me off, and, again, brusquely told me that this was my whole problem. When confronted with the contradiction, he mumbled some things, and I got out of there. I was peeved. He retired not long after.
Another, very-thoughtful doctor I saw, explained that the East Coast / West Coast research hospitals are actually divided on the issue of how much caffeine contributes to migraines, so it's not like it's exactly clear.
In my experience, I can confidently say that caffeine withdrawal headaches and migraines are 2 different animals, but they can present with the same intensity of pain at times, so it is confusing.
As a chronic pain sufferer, the quickest way for me to dismiss someone from my life is when they tell me: “You should just try marijuana,” often with some stupid and incorrect statement like, “it’s more potent than opiates!”
You’re saying you don’t want to have panic attacks and brain fog on top of your chronic pain? Now I’m going to spend several minutes informing you about indica and/or CBD, which you definitely have never heard of before.
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, because even though "just making it landscape" solves this same problem in Excel, when the client was sending out Excel files as packing slips... the current system is not Excel".
I couldn't find a way to get the client to get from "just make it landscape" to listening to me ask "what is the warehouse actually trying to pencil in?" and "how much space do they need? Are they penciling in notes globally at the top of the document or on a line-item basis next to each SKU?"
To the client I was wasting their time because "just make it landscape".
Needless to say working with this client is challenging on an interpersonal level. The work itself is fun though, and it's improving my EQ handling a client like this.
Even better, since it's an open question instead of a suggestion; the suggestion itself can already be condescending or insulting someone's intellect. Even though sometimes it IS that simple, see Occam's Razor.
But really, "have you tried turning it off and on again", while a funny quote, can be quite condescending as opposed to "What have you tried".
The only caveat I'd offer is that sometimes this is not a good question to ask ("what have you tried?") because it can be interpreted as "are you doing anything about it?" Edge case, true, but still worth being intentional about.
Asking "what have you tried?" suggests that the answer to the question will lead to the answer to the problem.
But the person seeking help already knows what they have tried, and they don't have an answer.
So in the absolute best case, it's a useless question, you're just trying to get them to rubber duck it. In a less-than-great case, it'll be taken as a suggestion that they need your guidance in basic critical thinking and troubleshooting.
In my view, the very limited potential upside (successful Socratic rubber ducking) is not worth the significant potential downside (insulting them by suggesting they already have the answer, they're just not smart enough to see it).
People are not equal in (sub-(sub-))domain experience. And we all can be distracted or dumb sometimes. Consider how powerful rubber ducking is : it works even when you're not talking to another person ! (And you might not think about doing it in a stressful situation.)
It just needs to be done tactfully. And in case it was a stupid mistake, defuse the ego issues by telling an anecdote about how you've made a similar one. (It's even helpful if it was a dangerous mistake : telling how you got punished, but the world didn't end.)
> In my view, the very limited potential upside (successful Socratic rubber ducking)
It depends on the situation - if you're not familiar with the person asking, and you're talking with them one-on-one, it can be a chance for them to establish their dignity so you can triage their request properly.
If I'm looking after a shopping website and someone tells me they can't put things in their basket, I might usually start by asking with some pretty basic questions.
By giving them a chance to tell me they can't put things in their basket on pages X and Y but can on Z, and it only happens when using Firefox, and that they've tested with multiple accounts, these browser versions and OSes, with and without plugins/ad blockers, and they've got confirmation from several other people - probably I'm going to skip asking them to clear their cookies and I'll launch straight into reproducing it myself.
On the other hand, if I'm looking after a shopping website with clumsy warehouse staff and a customer tells me they ordered two widgets and only received one, probably I don't need any more info from the customer - and resolving the problem rather than batting it back to the customer would be good customer service.
The answer to that question is quite likely to lead to the answer to the problem. There usually are a multitude of different possible causes, and the answer to "what have you tried?" eliminate many of them, and the second valuable thing is that when they say what exactly happened when they tried that thing (other than that "it didn't help"), you may have different conclusions from that observation that they did.
That's why you preface it with "just to be sure". Depending on the situation, "what have you tried" can come before or after (or in the middle, if several obvious known failures exist).
Mmmm, well, I'm all about being accommodating and gracious to people under stress, but as this is all generally in the context of a professional interaction, there are some expectations of those who are being asked questions. If you don't want to be pestered with my every guess about what you may have already done, likely hitting several things you have, you really ought to be able to answer the question "what have you tried" with something a bit more specific.
I'm not asking for total accuracy. I've certainly experienced on both sides accidentally giving the impression something was tried that in fact wasn't and all sorts of such verbal errors and mistakes. But you do need to give something in response to that question.
> but as this is all generally in the context of a professional interaction
Odds are the person you are talking to have tried several dozens of things, 2/3 of what they don't even remember anymore.
Asking "what have you tried" is very often an unprofessional display of power disguised as a time-waster question. The one exception when the person answering has not had time to try several dozen options.
Nah, it is a basic "getting to know" question. "I rebooted the machine" will get one response, "I cleared the cache and local storage; and also reproduced in incognito window" will get the other and "I am not going to answer that, also you are unprofessional" will get yhe third type.
Withholding useful information and being rude about it is not the best way to get help.
> but as this is all generally in the context of a professional interaction, there are some expectations of those who are being asked questions.
The expectation is that they speak the same language. Whether they understand what I'm asking is on me, and helping them understand what I'm asking is also on me.
"What have you tried?" is such challenging question, because you don't know the technical skill of the person involved. Will they use the same terminology as you? Do they know what upload/download mean? Servers? Anything?
And then there is the case of someone coming to you after trying many things. They won't necessarily have a list of things they've tried.
What I find most useful is going back and confirming assumptions.
"What have you tried" assumes a lot. It assumes a problem, it assumes a direction of the problem, and it also guides you into thinking of the solutions rather than the problem, even if subconsciously.
Always start by verifying assumptions. That, and going to the source. Both of these revolve around going to the source and verifying.
In the context of a professional interaction, which I remind you is the context and which I explicitly refreshed, I think everything you said is fully covered. We wouldn't be talking in the first place if there wasn't a problem.
If not... frankly, in the context of a professional interaction, if someone starts making the bizarre excuse that it's just too hard to tell me what they've already tried, or that it's somehow offensive that I'm asking them this question, I may very well be having a professional interaction with that person's professional manager about their suitability for the professional job. It's not something I've done often, but it has come up, and I've never been the only one raising such questions about an employee when I've had to do that. It's far from the first thing I reach for, but it has come up.
I honestly have no idea what you or the other replier are banging on about with regard to how hard a question this is to answer. Unless you're just being contrary for contrariness' sake. It's a basic question, and as I said up front, I don't expect a 100% accurate recitation of everything up front, I mean, I never expect any statement to necessarily be 100% accurate up front, I expect a process of getting closer to the truth over time, but the idea that someone would just be unable to answer any questions about what they've already done boggles my mind, and the idea that I should maybe feel bad about asking it is just insane.
If you, personally, are having trouble answering that question, you should get better. Take better notes if you can't rely on your memory. But the problem lies with you, not anyone asking the question. There is no way that anyone being paid to solve problems should respond to such a basic question with "I don't really know", let alone offense.
Yep, and that's a good reason to professionally avoid people who become irritated too often.
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.
“CNR, not enough detail, ticket closed, reopen with more information if your problem persists”.
I don't have time to dig information out of people in order to try to help them, if they can't make any effort to help me help them when I ask for more information.
This is of course one of the reasons I'm not generally client facing these days!
I have the opposite problem with many technical support teams these days. I supply them with a full breakdown of what error I encountered, the reproduction code/commands/data, my configuration, what I think happened, how I tested for that, alternative explanations I came up with and tried, traces, trace markers, vendor-standard dumps, and a call to action of the next piece of information I need (usually an explanation of what is exactly happening inside a specific function call that the trace doesn't reveal). I did what I dreamed of receiving when I fielded technical calls back in the day but never did, and am trying to follow all the vendors' own support guidelines of what they want to save everyone time.
There are so many offshore teams these days that I wonder whether the volume of what I supply in my support tickets overwhelms the English as a second language support engineers' total comprehension abilities, between the combined English-to-native language parsing and internalization of the case details itself. About 9 out of 10 times now when I reach offshore engineers, there are responses with blatant signals they simply did not read through even a third of what I painstakingly put together. With English native speakers, it is closer to 1-5% depending upon the vendor.
No shade to the offshore teams, but it adds an unnecessary debugging cycle for them, I suspect they're under insane metrics to uphold incentivizing this behavior and I just politely point out where I already gave them the information they're requesting. Most of the time they simply escalate the case straight towards the development team.
> I suspect they're under insane metrics to uphold incentivizing this behavior
This is likely to be it: perhaps they are effectively paid by the ticket or response (due to how pay/bonus/other structures align) so paying attention to all that information costs them significantly. Their ideal is to get a reply to you ASAP so they'll prioritise tickets where they can bang out a link to an existing knowledge-base article.
> No shade to the offshore teams
In some cases it may also be that they are employing cheaply rather than not carefully, so some of the people aren't great to start with (either technically, in terms of their claims to understand English well, or both), but I think you are right generally to give them more credit than that and suggesting that most of the time it is due to unhelpful metrics & targets (you get what you measure!). That and failing to provide sufficient support/documentation/training to the people trying to help you (sometimes you might know far more than them as they first saw the system last week).
> Most of the time they simply escalate the case straight towards the development team
They are likely not to do this on first response, even if it is very much the right thing to do in a complex case, because of a negative metric deliberately in place to reduce load on dev teams (which may be as under-staffed/under-trained and more over-worked than the support team).
> I have the opposite problem with many technical support teams these days. I supply them
I try to be forgiving about lack of information in the initial request, as long as they are understanding about my response being a curt “I need more information” and a list of example data¹. If I ask for more information and just get a vague response, that is when I knee-jerk hit the CNR button.
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[1] the standard “what was on-screen, details of the form you were editing², what did you do, what did you expect, what happened instead, include error messages³ and data you entered², and at what time did this occur (be as accurate as you can)⁴…”
[2] which parts of this may vary significantly depending on the situation, and providing all possible information may be a waste of their time and mine, which is part of why I try not to mind the initial information being slight vague.
[3] this doesn't tend to vary, as a rule I always want to know any messages that were emitted and feel justified in being immediately irritated when this data isn't included from the start - “I got an error” does not suffice.
[4] this can be as vital as the error/exception messages, sometimes more so, if I need to go diving into logs for further clues.
It's funny, I think hearing somebody say this in person and seeing the exasperation on their face would invite empathy on my part and help me understand their situation (i.e. they're in a bad mood because of this problem), BUT seeing somebody say "Everything, nothing works." in a Slack message would absolutely annoy the f out of me. I'd immediately assume they're not communicating properly. I'm not saying the latter is their fault, but just that communication differs based on medium.
Anyway, the nice thing about in-person conversation (or even over video call) is the conversation can flow a lot more easily, so even if you said "Hey, just do X" and they angrily respond, you can adjust quickly and say "Oh, sorry, I figured we'd go for the most obvious thing first. Okay, let's figure this out." I think opening lines matter way less when it's in person, and tone matters way more. You could say "Oh, just try X" in a friendly manner or "Oh, just try X!" in a condescending manner. In text, it's up to the receiver of the message to interpret.
Depends on the person. I’ve found it effective to ask questions like “would it be helpful to tell me what you’ve tried? Or for me to share my intuitions about how I’d look into this?” Depending on what’s being addressed I may add something like “or is there something else you have in mind?” or even begin with “how can I be most supportive? [And it’s okay if you don’t know right now]”
The reason the examples in OP of 'just do...' irk is because the 'just do...' supposes to be helpful, but any sincere thought given shows that the suggestion isn't helpful.
Instead of giving sympathy/relatedness, it comes across as dismissing the problem. -- I think this can be down to miscommunication; but I think whether something 'sympathises with problem' or 'gives solution' is deeper than a phrasing.
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.
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.
Same here, with a slight variation. I usually say "my first thought is to try ..." or "the first thing that comes to mind for me is ..."
Depending on the situation I might also use the old "Have you tried ..." phrasing.
I also like “could you try…” as a way of acknowledging that it’s a suggestion that may be unworkable for reasons I don’t know, and that I’m willing to hear that.
I try not to frame things as “dumb questions” because I find that junior devs can feel a lot of their questions are “dumb” but really they’re often very good questions and (even if you lead by example) they can be hesitant to ask them. I think it’s generally a good assumption that if someone has a question in mind then it’s worth exploring, so there are no dumb questions.
Fair point. I think as a senior dev (and someone in their mid-40s with a longish career) I want to make a point that I still ask the type of question. But a good thing to be sensitive to.
Yeah absolutely and some of the most senior engineers I have worked with often made a point of asking seemingly obvious questions, to great effect. I think it’s a wonderful thing to demonstrate and I do the same.
This one grates on me as insincere-sounding, to be honest. It can sound a bit like a sarcastic way to state the obvious. “Oh, you’re cold? For my understanding — and I may be way off base here — but is there a reason you haven’t closed the fucking window?” (Obvious extreme example of intentional sarcasm)
I wish more people would ask simple questions with the expectation of getting a complicated answer.
Usually it’s more along the lines of “for my own understanding, why can’t we just ship things as they’re ready instead of waiting for everything in the order to go in one box?”
Same. "My first thought is...but I'm sure I don't understand all the nuances."
Branching way off topic, and paraphrasing Sun Tsu here, but he says to always give your opponent an out unless you plan to completely destroy them. Very rarely in business do you want to or need to destroy someone so I try to soften my suggestions.
The other mantra I repeat almost daily is 'do I want to be right or effective'. It feels great to tell someone an idea you know is 100% right, but does that mean they'll use it? At the end of the day I want to be effective. "Just" feels more like being right, than effective.
Speaking of phrases, early in my career the senior VP of my business unit was a nice, very sharp woman. One of the best executives I've ever met. Listening to her on calls was a master class on EQ and how to deal with people professionally. But, anytime she said 'help me understand...' you knew the hammer was coming.
Everyone here is looking for ways to make unsolicited suggestions in a diplomatic way. Even with extra language this can be irritating to reply to. I’ve learned to first ask if there is anything I can do to help, rather than immediately making suggestions. Often times people are doing just fine working through a problem, and may want to communicate the status without receiving advice on how to solve it.
For interpersonal situations, people often just want to be heard without any advice being given. A simple “I hear what you’re going through and I’m here if you need anything” is way better than finding ways to immediately offer advice, but I believe this applies to professional situations as well.
If you’ve been asked to help troubleshoot or fix a broken system then it’s not really unsolicited.
Often if I’m the person who is stuck I’m totally willing to let a new set of eyes offer all of the “obvious” things that have already tried, because while it’s usually just a rehash, there are occasionally “but what about” cases that haven’t been checked yet. And if we don’t find anything new, at least the helper is now up to speed on what’s already been covered.
Certainly if you have been asked for help then offering advice is fine. But often people will jump straight to offering advice without even establishing that the person wants help, and I wanted to call attention to that behavior.
Are we talking about work or marriage? If someone wants to interrupt another person's work, they should be gracious enough to first try obvious suggestions and explain why that didn't solve the problem. Just listening is great in personal relationships when the focus is on the journey rather than the destination.
As I said I believe this applies equally to professional settings and interpersonal relationships. I don’t see why interrupting someone’s work and offering unsolicited suggestions should be considered gracious. It sounds irritating to me. Listening is very valuable in professional situations!
This is certainly sometimes true, but when someone is explicitly asking for help, making suggestions that are too "obvious" may come off as condescending or, if the other person hadn't tried it, put them on the defensive. For instance you might suggest something like "turn it off and on again" and the other person might say "duh, I already tried that and it didn't work, I wouldn't have come to you otherwise" or worse they might not have tried it but the way you suggest it as a blindingly obvious course of action makes them feel bad for not having tried it.
That has got to be a very rare occurrence. Asking first is in my opinion the best advice. If in rare situations the person is giving a long winded or incoherent answer it should be okay to interrupt, but to avoid asking them what they tried on the off chance they are a poor communicator seems to me a bad tactic.
For a lot of folks, they either just want to be heard/understood, or they may not even recognize if there’s a problem (i.e. they have anosognosia). Imagine someone forcing their opinion when a person is at their most vulnerable, it’s most often perceived as just patronizing/dismissing their concerns, or as an outright attack. Active listening and developing trust first is key.
I would have taken it as "this portrait packing slip has what we need, now scale and rotate and put it on the left of the same size paper" - and then gone over to the warehouse and grabbed a few copies of what they did.
Yeah, just pop over to a client's warehouse (which may not even be in the same city) to chat with some guys you have never seen before - sounds like a plan! I imagine if it would have been as simple as you suggest they would have just done that ;)
I’d suggest a phone call, but yeah dealing with the actual users is far better than some middle manager without a clue how the job actually gets performed.
Marriage has taught me to go even further than that. I now ask "are you telling me to get it off your chest, or you want help solving it?". If the former, I don't offer any solutions whatsoever, in any kind of format.
Another useful thing to say, “oh no that sounds terrible, what are you going to do?” It can help reframe from complaining to strategizing, and that can make people more receptive to outside ideas.
I wouldn’t recommend this. First of all, you shouldn’t provide personal opinions such as “terrible”. Then, asking what they are going to do forces them to confront the problem which they may not be ready to do yet, or may not want to articulate to you.
Usually in the sort of situation where you'd say this, you're just reflecting the speaker's very-clearly-expressed emotional state back at them to demonstrate that you're actively engaged in listening and considering their statements.
It's not something you'd say in response to a text complaint, where there's not enough "bandwidth" to clearly communicate the complainant's emotional state; but it's something CSRs are trained to say on phone calls all the time.
It's also the reason that therapists vastly prefer speaking in person, to video calls, to phone calls; and almost never even consider doing "therapy via text chat." There's not enough bandwidth in text chat to enable a therapist to properly engage with and respond to the emotional content of a client's communication; but with each additional level (voice, video, in-person meeting), that's more possible.
(Interesting consideration, given that: suicide/crisis hotlines should probably consider offering video calls as an option, as the increased bandwidth for emotional content will allow the operator to engage with + potentially help the caller on a deeper level.)
Depends on the person as to whether I'd say that. With an employee who's constantly moaning about everything - I'd absolutely say that.
With my wife? Noooo, it would sound like I'm saying "I'm not interested in your problems unless you have solutions". As her partner, she wants me to share the burden of her problems, even those for which she has no solution.
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. A listener can play a part in helping to solve the problem, but helping foster the environment in which the problem can be solved. Don't mistake this as a silver bullet, but simply recognize that being a listener is an underappreciated role and listener vs solver isn't as dichotomous as it sounds.
> 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?
I think the implication is that by listening passively you can be an active participant. That is to say, speaking the problem out loud causes it to run through alternate pathways in the brain which helps the person sharing their issue resolve their own problem.
As with so many things in life, the hard part is working out if your actions should be motivated by actually helping or feeling like you helped.
Thank you for the reminder -- it does feel like people can be in (at least) two different modes -- with a desire to vent and be heard, or inquiring about a solution. Yet it is not obvious which since the two can sound so similar.
If someone is grieving it's probably time to just listen, but when someone is stuck with a social problem they may be rubber ducking with you rather than considering you to be a good approximation of an oracle ;)
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 someone is there to simply listen.
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 telling you they are fearful for their job, they think they will get fired soon, even though they have nothing specific to point to. As a listener, are you agreeing with this or are you neutral nodding your head? Because my default would be to reply that they should do the best they can and if it comes to that they will surely find better pastures, but then I'm giving advice already.
I hear this advice but I have little clue how to put it into practice, moreover because of what I mentioned above, if I'm telling someone something, I definitely want them to think about it and try and help me with advice, otherwise I feel like they don't even care and would not share again with the same person.
It sounds to me like you want some way to engage with what the other person is sharing. I find that I get a lot of mileage out of asking <i>really dumb questions.</i>
So with your example, I would first accept their feelings - we've all been insecure about jobs from time to time - and then try to probe into them.
"Has your boss been talking about money being tight? Did one of your big customers just drop?"
"Has your boss been talking about your performance? Do you see others on your team being dismissive of your role?"
Questions like this let the counterparty know that a) they matter to you and b) you're hearing what they're saying. I think that's what you're saying you want to convey. I could be way off base here.
You could try to associate this with the rubber duck trick where you just tell your problem to anyone, just to articulate the problem may very well solve it. You don't need input.
In my experience this is also a women-men difference in brain wiring. Men often looks for help when he fails to solve a problem, women always looking for emotional support before solving a problem.
If you give a solution for someone looking for an emotional support or vica-versa you've expreienced one of the main source of frustration in relationships :)
>As a listener, are you agreeing with this or are you neutral nodding your head?
The "trick" I do is to try to set aside whatever train of thoughts I might have had before the person spoke to me, and try to imagine that the thing they talk about is happening to me. And then, voice my reaction to that. So if someone told me that "I'm fearful for my job. I think I might be fired soon", the first that comes to mind is "Oh my god, that's horrible! Why do you think that happens? Have they hinted about this before?"
Now, this maybe works a handful of times in the conversation. A second thing that you can do is trying to imagine the relations of the thing that just got told to you. By relations, I mean relating to anything, how it connects to anything: the speaker's environment, life circumstances, your shared universe, anything. Continuing the example above: "The timing is such a shame, given what's going on in your life, I would have liked it that at least the job is stable".
Third thing, you could discuss the persons possible actions and reactions to the event, and how others in their life have, or will have taken it. Continuing: "Do you have anything else lined up, just in case?" "Could your side gig support you until you find another job?" "How did your spouse take the news?"
And the fourth thing, it's always worth thinking about WHY the other person told you the thing they did. What are you to this other person? A friend? Colleague? Are you their superior? Spouse? Do you relate, in a way, to the thing that they told you? Are you maybe a recruiter, and that's why they tell you that they are fearful for their job? The answers to these questions can bring you closer to your natural response to the situation.
> Let's say someone is telling you they are fearful for their job, they think they will get fired soon, even though they have nothing specific to point to.
As a listener, are you agreeing with this or are you neutral nodding your head?
As a listener, I'm my goal is to create an environment for them to talk about what bothers them in the most vibrant, and exploratory way possible. I realize that's not exactly the most helpful explanation so allow me to go into more detail. There's a few conversational techniques that I pull from heavily when I'm trying to actively listen: conversational orienteering, and open ended questions, non-Sorcratic questioning.
For lack of a better term[1], conversational orienteering is actively being aware of the topic of conversation and its local topology. Given a topic, one should be able to generate several other topics: one that is more abstract, one more specific, and several adjacent. Over time, a listener gets a sense of where a conversation wants to go and uses the conversational topology to orient towards that goal. It took me a bit of practice to be good at picking topics not too far and not too close to the one at hand - too far can make conversations feel disconnected and random, and too close can make someone feel like they are being misunderstood.
Secondly, I don't think open-ended questions needs much explanation, but when someone is venting or needs support, hows, whys, and whens give the speaker much more room to express themselves than 'Do you...'s.
Thirdly, it's important to be non-Socratic in questions and responses. Leading the speaker is much much worse than telling them advice and should be avoided at all cost.
If you've ever worked a problem out verbally, you should be able to recognize that these principles work to cultivate a good verbal environment for the speaker. I don't see them as not helping, so much as creating an environment where they have the best shot at verbally processing their issue. I think it's important to recognize that emotions can get in the way of people being able to take action and that speaking can help diffuse strong emotions so that someone is ready to take a concrete step toward fixing their problem. I've seen that happen a lot. Even just feeling understood can help people feel better about making a real decision.
It's probably also important to point out that there are some people for which verbal processing works really well and some who can complain endlessly. It's important to recognize the difference. For the later, value your time. Maybe give them 15mins of listening and then decide to change the subject, for them verbal processing is not going to help. They probably need to work on issues in a clinical or therapeutic environment you cannot provide.
Hope this gives some insight, and even if it doesn't, feel free to tell me too.
1. If this actually has a term, please let me know. I'm coining one just to be able to talk about it.
There’s a big difference between agreeing with someone, and acknowledging their emotional state.
In these situations people just want to hear you acknowledge that you understand they are in pain, no necessary agree with their cause of action.
If you’re not sure what to ask, then your best course of action is to enquire about why they think they feel a certain way. Why does they job makes them stressful, why does talking with a certain person make them anxious. You’re not rendering judgement on their emotions or feels, you simply acknowledge they are what they are, and that’s normal.
For some specifics the following might be useful:
“Why do you think X makes you anxious”
Once they answer
“Yes, I understand now why that might make you anxious”
Or
“It’s perfectly normal to feel anxious”
If there behaviour is causing issues:
“It’s perfectly normal to feel anxious, that’s ok, but the way you’re dealing with it is causing issues for X. Perhaps we can find a better way for you to cope?”
For more, it’s worth looking at Mental Health First Aid. It can provide a number of very practical tips of dealing with someone in crisis, which are also excellent for helping those that just need to vent to someone.
> There’s a big difference between agreeing with someone, and acknowledging their emotional state.
This has been a key takeaway for me too, also in the context of intimate partner communication.
However, I would say that there can for sure be pitfalls with it— it's easy to believe that you are communicating only acknowledgment of emotional state, but have the listener receive it as signing on to their interpretation of the facts, the overall premise, their assessment of the other players' actions and motivations in the story, and so on.
This can lead to major misunderstandings down the road, when the person presents concrete actions that they are expecting will be taken. They may not be anticipating any pushback on this because previous validation-of-emotional-state conversations led them to believe you were both on the same page, when in fact you have significant concerns (whether it was that they misjudged the situation, escalated it unnecessarily, viewed someone else's actions unfairly, failed to accept a compromise or take possible corrective actions, whatever it is).
At that point, it's probably the type of conflict best taken to a professional to sort out, but I think of these situations when I see relationship coaches on TikTok talking up this kind of emotional validation as being a silver bullet for resolving all conflicts and achieving lasting harmony.
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.
At least personal type conversations, “that sucks” is very very often exactly the right thing to say. Even in work situations it can be a reasonable first response, at least with people not too much further up the org chart than you: “The load balancer latencies have just spiked” “That sucks”. (I’d suggest against using it if CTO comes in yelling about the entire network being cryptolockered though. Unless it’s “That sucks, but I told you so. I quit.”)
It's very cool that you are sensitive to how frustrating saying "that sucks" is for you. Many people are looking for just that, though. It might be informative to try out "that sucks" enough times to see what response it gets from the person you're interacting with. You might be surprised. (I was.)
There’s a fantastic book and tv series by a research psychologist Brene Brown where she talks a lot about how to be on the listening end of these kinds of conversations. Often in these situations the other party just wants to have their emotions validated by someone they trust. Just being there to acknowledge their feelings and see their pain is enough (and trying to do more can sometimes make things worse). I highly recommend checking Brown out, she is quite incredible.
> 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.
Something my sister does, which I hate, is follow up "hello" with a falling-pitch "how are you". This really bothers me every time she does it to me, which is pretty often.
But I have a lot of problems responding to (strangers) asking me how I am, and I've tried her approach of mostly ignoring the question and reflecting back a falling-pitch "how are you", and it seems to work very well. No one ever complains that I ignored their question, and the focus goes back on them, where I want it, instead of me.
If I were to judge this strategy by how I personally feel about it, it would be one of the most grossly offensive things you could say. And it still makes me uncomfortable to use it. But the lesson here appears to be that I shouldn't use myself as a reference for how to interact with other people.
> My ultimate takeaway is to now default to listening without advice.
Eve when it’s not listening to someone who’s venting, that can be really powerful anyway.
The best sys admin I’ve ever work with used to keep a teddy bear on the end of her desk. When people came to her with a question or problem she’d say “talk to the bear”. It’s astounding how often explaining the problem to an inanimate object results in the solution becoming obvious to the person ding the explaining.
(Note, she was really good at not saying in a rude or dismissive way, but she was somewhat on the spectrum and we ran a lot of cover to ensure the CEO didn’t get told to talk to the bear…)
I've had good luck explaining any thorny technical problem to any inanimate object on my desk. Often times, the mere act of doing this makes me really pay attention to my assumptions and the information I have gathered.
Sure, nobody's saying "you're a bad person for offering advice".
In some contexts, though, offering advice can feel like you want to close the person down rather than listen to them, that you think their problems aren't serious enough because you'd solve them easily. I'm guessing you've had at least one occasion where you have a work issue, and your manager is casually dropping solutions that didn't work, and you were frustrated with them as a result.
As such, the consequence of offering solutions is that it can damage your relationships with people, or at least not use an opportunity to strengthen them.
To recenter the conversation - in a personal context idle complaints (ie. venting) are considered rude, and are often accompanied by an apology, for a reason. You're basically monopolizing a person's time, and expressing explicit disinterest in their perspective. Using complaint as a coping mechanism is a fundamentally selfish thing to do[1]. Therefore I don't think we should tolerate it idly. If you want to talk and only be listened to, talk at an inanimate object. If you want to be an equal party in a conversation, speak to a human being.
In a work context, it should (always) be about most efficiently solving the problem at hand. When I have a work issue, I preface my request for support with the steps I have taken to attempt to solve the problem. Anything else wastes the time of everyone involved. When this is done correctly, the first thing to come to the mind of the people I'm asking is often exactly what I'm looking for.
> your manager is casually dropping solutions that didn't work
Casual, useless, unsolicited advice is also a waste of time and energy (see "seagull management"). If my manager did this I would promptly tell them to either dig into the problem properly with me, figure it out themselves, or leave me to it.
> You're basically monopolizing a person's time, and expressing explicit disinterest in their perspective. Using complaint as a coping mechanism is a fundamentally selfish thing to do[1]
Yep, and allowing other person to do all this to you is definitely spoiling. At the same time, a possibility and ability to spoil someone you love - is one of the biggest pleasures in life.
(I’ve shown the video to my wife. She said: “See, you could have done much worse”)
> that you think their problems aren't serious enough because you'd solve them easily
That would be a rather strange reaction. A single brain gets easily stuck on a problem, so if involving the second brain helps that does not mean that the problem was easy. Or that the first brain was defective. (Frankly, I think it was evolutionary “cheaper” to implement the rule “if stuck - consult” than to implement an unstuckable brain).
But we probably all know people who complain about the same things incessantly, with no desire to change them. And at some point it's reasonable to decide if those are people who you really want to continue to invest time into.
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].
Curious, does this apply to romantic partners too? Personally, I'd be sad if my wife didn't share things troubling her that she didn't need my help solving. I like knowing how she's feeling about things.
But at work, I understand this mindset. Though personally, I still actually don't mind hearing people complain. And since I'm a manager, complaints are a very useful signal for me: even if I'm just in listening-mode, they give me more clarity on precisely what's going on in my team.
Of course I don't callously dismiss my romantic partner when she complains. We both also recognize that complaining is fundamentally indulgent, pointless, and selfish, and strive to develop better coping mechanisms. Even when suffering greatly, I am loathe to complain. When I do complain, I am sure to apologize.
As a leader, actionable complaints (read: criticisms) are indeed a very useful signal, and I try my best to pay attention to them.
Do you always feel a need to apologize when indulging in something that makes you feel better? Why is it that you feel you're not entitled to do something selfish that makes you feel better and doesn't hurt anyone else?
If this is actually true then clearly there's no need to apologize. However if I've selfishly imposed a one-sided conversation on someone else in order to soothe myself, of course it's correct to apologize. Who enjoys participating in a one-sided conversation? Most people tolerate them out of sheer politeness.
The whole idea of good manners is to avoid imposing on other people, be that physically, emotionally, or conversationally.
> Most people tolerate them out of sheer politeness
You are projecting. Some people are flattered to be a trusted confidante or emotional support, and glad to be able to help someone they care about. This is situational and dependent on factors (if someone's emotionally leaning on me every second of every day, it's going to get tiring pretty quickly), but even if the experience of the conversation _itself_ isn't exactly pleasant it might still be considered a worthwhile discomfort to go through for the emotional closeness generated (as a parallel - physically exercising isn't (often) pleasant, but the sensation afterwards and the physical well-being generated are considered worthwhile, so the activity is net-desirable even if it's unpleasant in-the-moment). In fact, apologizing for the act might insult the listener, implying that your relationship isn't strong enough to warrant such sharing. Further, the listener might care about the speaker's mood and state of mind so much that, even if the experience is net-negative _for them_, they're still glad to be able to provide that support to someone they love.
This is all subjective - you and your partner might so dislike being vented to, or feel such negligible positive effects from it, that the calculus ends up negative and an apology _is_ genuinely warranted. But it's not necessarily true for all (or even, I'd guess, most) people. You're right that avoiding imposition is good manners, but it is not necessarily the case that sharing feelings with someone is an imposition on them.
Leaning on someone for emotional support unprompted is an imposition, just like relying on someone for financial support. Yes in some cases the imposition is welcome, and fosters closeness and interdependence, but in most cases it is better to be self-sufficient (emotionally and financially).
You'd surely apologize when asking even the closest friend for financial support, why not when asking (or worse, demanding) emotional support?
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 getting quicker with the numpad. Unfortunately, I missed their real problem: they hate their job. Me telling them "here's how you could be better at a job you hate" doesn't really help them, it simply looks uncaring and assumes they haven't already thought of those things.
So I could just nod and say "oh that's sound terrible" every time they mention it. You're right, it might look crass and robotic.
Even better here would be saying "Wow, typing all that crap into Excel, you mentioned it last week as well. Sounds like you really don't enjoy doing that?" and encourage them to expand a bit. Is it the typing? What makes it so frustrating? Do they think it's their job in the first place?
Eventually, they admit to you (maybe they hadn't realised themselves) that they hate this bit of their job, and need to discuss with their manager not doing it any more. (Or maybe they hate the company they work for, and need to find a new job. Or it's actually the keyboard they're using they hate. Or whatever, you need to listen to find out.)
This is how you help them out of their rut. They feel that you're interested in their problem, and when they do find a solution, they'll own it because they found it.
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.
Even better is when there's a agreed upon action and then they just abandon that plan, leading to the same discussion and plan,, only for it to be abandoned again...
Exactly. Being on the receiving end of unsolicited advice is truly annoying, which most posters here seem to be ignoring. Unsolicited advice is annoying, no matter what insincere bullsh*t you wrap it in
What is the point of discussing a problem if you don't want advice? Implicitly whining about something is like giving advice to the listener what to not do or what does not work properly etc.
1. To seek comfort from a fellow human being. 2. To vocalize it in hopes of coming up with your own solution. 3. To vent emotion; “get it off your chest.” 4. To share an aspect of your life with someone you like, love, or respect.
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, unsupported. I hope you get an opportunity to build what was actually needed in the first place (and may deliver results orders of magnitude higher). But somehow I get the feeling you'll end up just giving them work-around landscape and move on. We've all been there.
TRANSLATION: What would need to change in this business to print the warehouse workers' notes on the pdf before it's actually printed. And please don't supply a response that begins with, "Just don't"
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 up with solutions in line with that, rather than “just make it landscape and stop wasting time with questions”.
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.
I was wondering why this answer was rubbing me the wrong way and I realized it is because your answer shows a complete lack of empathy for "the other side". I have worked on warehouses and it is complicated.
>This says volumes about what they think about you and worse, what they think about their business and the problem at hand.
Why is this bad? If someone who is not technical, asks you to explain in detail about how the networking is setup and why is it not possible to just rewire the entire network to support something small, I wonder what your answer would be..
Operations managers in warehouses hone their skill over many years, running a large, very variable labor force efficiently. There are many variations over every single process and they have to keep the flow going while people come and go. If you cannot deal with an abstract request without asking everyone undergo "digital transformation", maybe you are in the wrong business.
shows a complete lack of empathy for "the other side"
I must have misspoke or I'm just not the writer I used to be because this is exactly the opposite of what hundreds of warehouse and shop people have said about me for over 40 years. (about 10% of that work is mentioned here: edweissman.com)
Why is this bad?
Because NO ONE is working the real problem (which is certainly not changing report orientation to leave enough white space for "out of the ERP system" notes). Everyone's dancing around it with semantics, jerry rigs, and workarounds. I.T. should be a trusted business partner. And unsupported's management should be putting them in a position to work the real problem. Instead, they're just another nerd who should shut up, put in a meaningless fix, and stop threatening their managers.
I have worked on warehouses and it is complicated.
Agreed. All the more reason to find out what notes they're adding to reports. Mission critical "notes" outside the system is a giant red flag. I'd rather work the red flag than make people happy. If it's important enough to put on a packing slip, it's probably important enough to be part of the system of record. A good old VSM should identify that and reduce that complication.
this is exactly the opposite of what hundreds of warehouse and shop people have said about me for over 40 years
Just don't. They specifically said "your answer shows a lack of empathy", it wasn't a personal attack. Your post doesn't show 40 years of experience.
I.T. should be a trusted business partner
Agreed, but you also rightfully admit that that's a management problem, and cannot be fixed by either side of the original conversation. So you discarding their work by "differentiating those who sling code from those who do real [work]" or calling users "fleas who used to jump 6 feet" does come across as juvenile.
From past experiences (don't work freelance anymore) I think consultant and contractor cannot be the same person.
For example:
If you are paid to give advice and then develop, wouldn't you recommend the most expensive thing?
Too many times I lost energy and renounced money to recommend not doing extremely dumb stuff instead of doing it.
And I was even wrong in doing so! I'm not the entrepreneur, I'm not the one organizing resources, so I should not have a say unless specifically paid.
If I were to work again as freelance, I would only do either consultancy or contracting, never mix the two
Food for thought: It's quite possible you're not understanding the client well, and are indeed wasting their time.
I've worked with contractors where you know what you want and why, but the developer insists on throwing up a lot of objections on how it won't solve the problem for x or y reason. Changing the orientation of a PDF seems like the kind of request that should be straight forward and not require a lot of heavy lifting to convince a contractor that it's worthwhile.
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 able to confirm because my questions are “wasting their time”, is give the warehouse a place to pencil stuff in next to line items.
So I prepped both versions, portrait and landscape with a SKU Notes column at the side, adjusting the table width and header height, etc and emailed those options over unprompted.
The portrait version shows double the line items per page and probably (?) solves the problem at hand… assuming I guessed right on limited information.
If history with this client is any indication, they will not realize I have offered these viable solutions at all.
A week or so from now the warehouse will complain vaguely that they have “no place to write”.
The client will blame me for the poorly designed packing slip and suggest we “just go back” to the Excel version (which required multiple hours a day of manual data entry by an employee who is no longer at the company and cost untold $ in human error).
I'm assuming you're being serious here. I'd suggest sending an email: Tomorrow I'm going with option #[your favorite]. I think it best solves the problem. Let me know if you'd like something different.
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.
Raising rates seems to help. The more they're paying you, the more they're willing to listen, it seems. Though of course you can never completely escape bad clients.
Argh, that resonates. My general strategy: speak up briefly on how we should do {x}, and then, when I am not heard, do their thing {y}, which usually fails, since if I speak up in the first place it means I probably know what I'm talking about.
Anyway, they can recognize the failure of {y}. Now it's time to make my suggestion again, not in an asshole way, but rather: "I think we should do {x}" as if it's the first time I said it; or "Let's revisit what you're trying to accomplish here."
The happy story would be that people are abashed at my great wisdom and sorrowful that they did not heed it. More accurate story is that no acknowledgement of anything occurs, but they are more receptive in the moment, and even a bit more receptive in the future. Took a long time to arrive at this, sadly, my great wisdom notwithstanding.
Do you really want to be a consultant to people who don't value your input? Maybe you can find someone higher up in the organization to discuss your ideas with? They don't need to be your direct point of contact, but it sounds like you do need their buy-in.
Tangent, but the phrase "client management" makes me imagine asking a client's point-of-contact employee, if I can speak to their manager. I wonder how that would go?
> What the client needs me to do, I suspect without being able to confirm because my questions are “wasting their time”, is give the warehouse a place to pencil stuff in next to line items.
have you thought that maybe this is not the reason at all why they want this ? maybe they have a scanner somewhere that works better with the landscape format ? some regulation to comply with ?
I find it absolutely insufferable when you ask people to do something that you want, and they ask you why ; like, this is not at all why you're being paid unless you're in a R&D position ; if I was in your client's shoes I'd start looking for another contractor that would give me what I ask no question asked. They're paying you for your time, no? If they ask you to dig in a hole and then fill it back after you do it.
If you ask me to implement something and I don't understand why you need it, then I may not do it right, and you may get regressions in this functionality in the future. Developers need to build a mental model of the problem they're solving. If the answer is "we've always done it this way" that's not very compelling especially when we're building a new system! But if you say "this is required because of XYZ", then this is something that I can understand, and more importantly, document as a requirement.
> have you thought that maybe this is not the reason at all why they want this ?
Yes, that is the reason I ask questions about who is using this and what their objectives are.
> They're paying you for your time, no?
No. They're paying me for the value my skillset and experience brings. I don't bill hourly, I bill bi-weekly, 2 weeks in advance.
At any time they can fire me or I can fire them. Most likely we're setting the stage for either of those two outcomes right now, unless we can get our communication in sync.
I'll try to find a replacement client who's interested in communicating the problems they're facing, working with me to come up with solutions, then working with me to iterate on them.
> If they ask you to dig in a hole and then fill it back after you do it.
I'm not currently at the point of desperation that accepting something like this would require.
This is more like something a prison or internment camp might do to mentally break prisoners.
> have you thought that maybe this is not the reason at all why they want this ? maybe they have a scanner somewhere that works better with the landscape format ? some regulation to comply with ?
Sure, which is why asking "why?" is so crucial. Or are you suggesting they try to comply to some regulatory requirement without actually knowing that they're doing so or what regulation must be complied with, so they can actually confirm compliance? Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
I keep meaning to write something about this, but: There are two kinds of "why". One is "I understand what you want but I think it's stupid so I'm going to argue with you." That one is insufferable. The other one is "I don't understand what you want, and I need more information to know what to do." That one is inevitable.
Unfortunately the line between the two is very fuzzy, because every request is underspecified, and we fill in the gaps with context and guessing. And everybody has a different threshold for how sure they want to be that they understand the request, before they go off and implement their best guess about what it's asking for.
You seem to be making things difficult for yourself. Do you have an example of what it used to do from Excel? Just do something similar as your first cut. You implied you knew how Excel printed since you wrote “because even though ‘just making it landscape’ solves this same problem in Excel”.
It sounds like you can’t communicate with your users, which could be the meta-problem that you need to fix.
When you have a problematic person in the middle, sometimes you can set up covert channels of communication (risks, but rewards too). Problematic people are often causing problems within the organisation too, so you can find champions that will route around them.
Edit: Politics are important, but sometimes you are getting paid to solve a problem, perhaps using unofficial nefarious methods. It requires a lot of skill, and you need to avoid traps, but again that is part of what an external developer is paid for?
I like the phrasing "I'm curious if ..." or "I wonder if ..." which hopefully communicates that is is just ;) my humble guess upon first impression of seeing the problem.
Some will, but the most difficult clients won't. Like the grand parent posts, I had to deal with a client who had interesting work, so much room for creating wonderful solution and truly help people. It was all wasted due to interpersonal issues, the entire team (which at some point was just four people, CEO, CTO, financial backer and a developer) felt like a couple that needed serious counseling or maybe a divorce.
These people would ignore everything if it meant change. I don't think they were particularly happy in their weird little world, but best practices meant nothing to them. In their mind what they had was a special little snowflake of a use case (not true btw). Best practices simply didn't apply to them.
A year later I got a similar client. They had one systems administrator who was so scared of losing influence that he'd sabotage any solution you brought forward. Any time you adapted to fit he's last "on just one more thing" he's find a way to rationalize why their particular use case defied best practices.
You know what sucks about using things like "maybe", "let's try x", etc? Is that I do this regularly in my job, but the managers want more assertive answers.
> Needless to say working with this client is challenging on an interpersonal level.
I've had a few people accuse me of being difficult. Usually they were quite difficult themselves to work with; yet were totally unaware of how unreasonable they were.
(Queue the scene from Beauty and the Beast where the Beast accuses Belle of being difficult.)
I noticed later in the thread that you were considering walking away from the customer. If you do this, I think it's best to walk away completely. Don't find a replacement, don't try to keep the business. Just cut the cord as quickly and completely as legally possible.
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.
“just” is a subtle pejorative and unless you’re trying to be insulting, it’s better to rephrase what you’re saying especially if you’re getting negative reactions you don’t want.
Now I got really curious why just making it landscape wouldn’t solve the problem. It would give white space on the side regardless of which document format was used to print the page, wouldn’t it? Is it due to a different size of the printed label?
It's because the PDF is generated from HTML, and the table expands to take up the width of whatever container you give it, whether that's a portrait container or a landscape container.
Landscape just makes a wider table, with no more or less whitespace than portrait or than a billboard (proportionally, that is).
If the goal is to write line-item level notes in the table, then a "SKU Notes" column can be added and Landscape gives it more horizontal space to exist.
But the first step is to confirm that this is indeed the objective because "just make it landscape" wouldn't achieve anything on its own.
If the client is worth enough to you, get on a plane and physically shadow the workers who use your system for a few days. Absolutely nothing can replace direct face to face engagement with real life users.
In this case the person you are speaking with is a boss who either will not or can not articulate his needs. You need to go the the source - the front line users.
I mentor students on research projects. I think it can be fine to use the word “just” in this context exactly to telegraph that I think a particular task should be easy. Student says, “But what about X?” I might say, “Oh, just do Y.” It’s fine if they feel the tension of me knowing how to do something and thinking it’s easy and them not. The key part is providing a supportive environment so that they know they can ask questions. At this point, it’s on them: they can challenge themselves and try to do Y without any help, or they can ask for more guidance. This is what they call a “teachable moment”.
Learning how to differentiate between when it’s reasonable to ask for more help and when it’s not is an important skill to pick up since there’s a dividing line for basically all roles you might find yourself in.
I’m not sure I agree. I’m a very outgoing extroverted person, and even I feel cut-off when someone points out they think something is super easy, especially when it’s really not easy.
Just a few weeks ago at work, one of the TLs told me I should ‘just do X’, and when I pushed back saying it’s going to take a few weeks, he said ‘oh it’s just a couple of lines, I can do it in 10 minutes’. I challenged that. 5 integrations and 2 weeks later we had a first working version, that caused more harm than good in the end because of an assumption that didn’t hold.
I think easy things might be easy in theory, but not necessarily in execution. So when a student comes to you, I suspect they have thought about theory, but find the execution hard because of the knowable unknowns they are not aware of and you are. Many times people don’t even propose things that might seem obvious to them out of fear they might say something stupid. Indicating something is easy in a demeaning fashion is bad. Phrasing it differently has a different effect. E.g. Oh, I think that might be solved with X. It should be relatively straightforward. Look at the work I did <here>, it should match your use case.
You missed the part of my post where I said that I work hard to create an environment where it’s OK to ask questions.
My point is that it’s not just about the language you use. Not saying “just” isn’t a magic bullet. Regardless of the phrasing, there’s a lot more pedagogical work that needs to take place to build a good environment.
Yes you are correct that not saying "just" isn't enough. But saying it often works towards eroding that environment and it's unproductive towards that. That's the point of the post, not that it's a magic bullet.
The main differentiation is whether it's used to trivialise a problem someone may have, especially if you're not in the same situation as the person. The mental health one is great, in that there's so many people that will say things like "just go outside" or "just do yoga" or "just do drugs".
As someone who struggles with depression, I definitely relate to that example. Part of the frustration is that those things are already voiced in my head. The other part of the frustration is that I've already cycled through worse and better periods, and in retrospect, the positive cycles leading out of my worst depressive periods always seem that simple - it always starts with something that seems stupidly trivial like picking up dirty laundry off the floor - which lends credibility to the voice in my head and which makes it oh so agonizingly frustrating when such a simple thing feels impossible.
That's completely fair for face-to-face verbal communications. I was, for some reason, putting it in the context of written text-only exchanges. IME, in that context "just" has a significant chance of carrying very negative baggage compared to a more explicit "I think it would be easier if...".
We just can't address the instability/fragility of correspondents with one-off word play.
Neuroticism, which we all have, is the most important personality/communication style factor and it's the one that the HR approved courses rigorously ignore...
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.
This is how I've seen most professional writers work too, except they edit quick in-place copies of previous iterations in case some path doesn't work out. Should sound somewhat familiar to programmers.
A few months ago, I wrote a blog post[1] about the word "just" that echoes the thesis of Tim's article: avoid using the word "just" if you can, it's reductive.
The corollary to just is "should". It took me a while to accept some things aren't trivial to change and telling myself things should be a certain way is not helpful.
Almost every advice I come across on self-improvement is wrong for me. Very few people have considered my experience and limitations. Most of it is actively harmful to implement.
Funnily enough, the project management strategies I use at work are extremely helpful with this.
Given a problem (a "should"), we need ask "what needs to change", "what is required to change it", and "what is the priority" (urgency X impact). Then we can decide if this needs to be focused on right now.
Interesting how single words can have such an impact. I find it jarring to hear someone begin a sentence with "So", as if they have given the current topic some thought (when 9 times out of 10 they haven't), or to hear them end a statement with ", no?" where turning a positive assertion into a question sounds somewhat underhand.
Many people for whom English is like their third language (coming from Russian or Ukrainian background specifically) tend to abuse “So,” as a sentence opener, like other people may abuse “Well,”.
Same thing with “…, no?”. More cultural than linguistic. I’ve also heard it’s a Mexican quirk, too.
Still annoys me, but I can see where they’re coming from.
> "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. I'm also not an SRE. Fixing issues/helping others isn't about sparing their feelings, it's about effectively solving a problem.
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.
> 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 acquaintance to recruit up the ladder at their new workplace.
> 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 term rewards... ugh)
> It took me decades to build up a complex enough logic tree to handle social interaction.
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.
> 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 for emotion."
Here's the thing. Your co-workers are human. Humans have lizard brains, and sometimes get defensive. In order to maximize productivity and harmony in the workplace, you want to avoid that.
I have a hard time empathizing with this. I understand the principle, but here's where I come from/my experience:
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...
Now they have wasted both of our time and drained me of my lifeforce. Sometimes there are hours of delay between this/we are in different timezones.
Just ask me for what you want, I know you're only talking to me because you want something.
This can be a cultural thing. In particular, if I understand correctly, in India it is considered rude not to make small talk before jumping into work. (I'm slightly autistic too but it's not completely useless. I ended up taking a trip to India at one point, and such trips are much easier if you've put in the effort to understand the culture, and your coworkers everyday lives.) I would suggest trying not to be so brief. Ask about their family, their commute to work, etc - get to know them a little better.
Coming from India, we do not talk like that in our native language. I am guessing it is because we have been repeatedly told that is how americans talk (reinforced by movies and TV shows). Now, I start with just a greeting and jump to the issue.. "Hey P!! Good morning.. I just want to check about issue XXX". It sounds less rude, but does not ask the banal questions.
There is another way to look at this situation (beyond the use of language and specific words).
The takeaway can be as follows: Ask questions before doling out advice/help.
What this means is, you are getting a better understanding of the current situation, you are being sympathetic and by the time you talk, you do so from a position of knowledge and not shooting from the hips.
For e.g., if a colleague is stuck debugging a slow API call, it would be good to ask them.
"Hey, what all have you tried so far to resolve the issue"
If partitioning keys and adding more CPU cores has already been tried, then you could suggest - what about scanning logs for high-latency calls?
I think the point the author is making is not just using the word "just". It is about being thoughtful and sympathetic before trying to solve the problem.
For bonus points, suggest they “should just quickly” do X. Because if you tell someone that a task is quick, you’re not asking as much from them, right? /s
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 didn't know exactly how to express what he was thinking. But that became our standard answer to any programming challenge. "Just straight up code it."
I remember a meeting at FAANG where there was a bunch of discussion about a difficult problem and then a higher-up manager stopped the conversation to interject with
> Guys, we're thinking about this in the wrong way. The solution is to just get the right people together into a room and build the solution.
I had an office mate, who after our abusive and demeaning boss would leave our office, would quote Gene Hackman from Superman III: “I ask you to kill Superman, and you're telling me you couldn't even do that one, simple thing.”
(Sometimes if she was still in earshot he would say it in Spanish which somehow made it even funnier.)
As an engineer, I once opined to a fellow engineer, I wonder how Static Guard works? And he said, "You know what causes static electricity?" Naturally, I said yes. He said, "It makes that go away."
An almost-correct answer if you remember your elementary school science class with charges on glass and amber... Amber being elektron (ἤλεκτρον) and the root of the word electricity. If you coat the amber (or polyester) so it no longer holds a charge, by pairing its charge carriers with molecules that hide them, then you have static guard.
Ppl do this for fun in “souls” video games communities all the time as well.
“This boss can kill you in 2 hits” -> “oh well just don’t get hit”
There’s definitely an aspect that can cheer you on if you are in the right mindset to receive it: everything is in your power, conquer yourself and rise up to the moment
the biggest productivity milestone we've ever hit while doing freelance programming work was to just don't. there certainly already is a solutions for what we were trying to solve, because clients come and go, but the problems are generally the same
And yet in the introductory classes teachers heavily insisted that "obvious","evident","trivial" shouldn't be part of your vocabulary (you would lose points) and when using a shortcut you should always reference it... until you got several levels above it (you wouldn't do it for basic arithmetic when doing calculus of course, OTOH in algebra commutativity is not to be assumed...)
Of course teachers/researchers didn't always follow these best practices themselves...
"The proof is left as an exercise for the reader" is often short-hand for "I don't know how to prove it myself and will defer the question to someone with greater expertise."
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[ 0.58 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] threadThis is also information worth communicating. The newcomer to the project is expected to be ignorant of the problems and the mental set of those addressing them, in any reasonable setting. To confess your own ignorance and declare your readiness to learn in that situation is better, I think, than to pretend knowledge you do not actually posses.
"Just do this?" questions are re-phrasable as "Would this work?" questions, if the language environment is prickly.
Anecdotally, I've been having pretty bad anxiety this year from work that I feel should be easy but turns out to have many unexpected wrinkles. In retrospect, it seems like there may have been a lot of "justs" when discussing early solutions.
I've started to take a step back when approaching problems to better understand potential obstacles, but this was still a pretty big toll on my confidence.
Something that expresses "there is 1 thing and that makes it a big deal!"
"It is sufficient to do the dishes."
?
PJ Eby used your sentiment in writing about self improvement, where some instruction might say "write a list of three things you are grateful for" and instead what people do is "complain that their life isn't good, wallow in self pity, consider things they want but don't have, write a list of three things they feel obliged to be grateful for but aren't really, roll their eyes at the idea that such a thing could possibly help, etc. etc." and he said "just write a list of three things you are grateful for, and don't drag that other baggage along".
See also, telling people to "just get out of bed" in The Article which means "move legs, lift bodyweight" not "find purpose in life and reason to go on living, discover religion, and only then excitedly jump out of bed cured and full of joie de vivre". And not "reject getting up because it won't cure you and you don't want to be cured anyway because life is shitty".
I think often you can be specific. Don't push for the team to make a feature easy. Push for the number of steps necessary for something to be reduced. Or to enable undo/redo.
I wish I had an easy exit for the "just" advice here. I don't, sadly. Empathy is the best I can come up with.
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 politely decline well-meaning but frustratingly useless advice.
Not least because weight loss is unlikely to make someone much healthier unless they have type 2 diabetes, severe hypertension, or are way beyond "overweight". There is a substantial population-level association between obesity and morbidity, but it's heavily influenced by those who are extremely obese (which tends to come with a variety of other issues not immediately relevant to the average fat person).
Across the spectrum of over weight people (from mildly to extremely obese) there are a range of health markers from blood pressure, HDL/LDL/Triglycerides, insulin sensitivity, leptin/ghrelin, sex hormones (and PE/ED), blood sugar, cortisol, inflammation, arterial calcification (on and on the list goes) that are all positively improved by returning to healthy "normal" (not average) weights.
Layne Norton's book "Fat Loss forever" and youtube channel are excellent resources to begin understanding.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUxVCtScf8U
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/43596925-fat-loss-for...
I've yet to find a smoker who doesn't know that quitting would be good for them.
When it comes to things like working out in the gym, or nutrition. There are often some small optimisation/hacks you can do on top of the things you are already doing that can significantly move the needle in terms of gains. If you are walking, something like carrying weights in a backpack could help you burn extra calories. If you are already doing push ups, introducing you to burpees can make a whole world of difference. Similarly if you are already doing Kettlebells, a complex could significantly move the needle in terms of gains.
Beyond this, learning itself requires lots of humility. You must be prepared to be offended in one way or other to learn any person, in any way. Chances are high nearly every one you meet has some idea about how to make progress but not the entire idea. You need to take in feedback from several people piece together some kind of a coherent strategy to win.
It's not clear what you mean by "this case". It's a rare case where "any advice would be helpful."
> Beyond this, learning itself requires lots of humility. You must be prepared to be offended in one way or other to learn any person, in any way.
The mistake you're making is assuming that the person is having this discussion with you because he wants to learn for you. And that, after all, is the point of several other comments in this thread.
It was definitely years before I understood what people meant by "I don't want your advice or solution. I want you to listen."
Losing weight is a simple equation of calories in vs out. The reason people are not losing weight is not because they don't understand that. If you want to help, don't suggest ways they can reduce calorie intake or burn more calories. Understand what the barriers are that's preventing them from acting. It's almost never a lack of knowledge about nutrition/exercise.
It was definitely a learning curve realizing that most people don't feel how I do about this. Still baffles me to this day, but I've learned to put that aside and just shut up because I guess people want that.
1) guy thing
2) engineering-type thing
3) type-A-personality thing
and god help you if you're all three!
All three of those groups are overrepresented on HN, too, so at least you're probably in good company :D
I just learned that I need to stifle my automatic "problem-solving mode" when it comes to personal interactions, and all of my conversations got way better. Glad I was at least able to learn pretty early in my life!
I just find that a little hard to believe. If it's actually true, well, I dunno, I'm sorry for you?
If you want someone to just listen, go get a psychologist. They are at least paid to listen to other people's problems, and have tools not to take stuff personally and not to feel bad about it. And they get paid in the end.
You [1] came to me with your problem. Now it's not only your problem, it's also my problem, since you shared it with me. I want that problem to go away, and will help you or give you advice how to deal with it. Then I will feel better. If I just listen to you, it may be the best thing for you, but for me it is the wrong thing to do, since I'm not made that way.
I you just want to vent so that you can feel better, don't make me feel worse because of that. Find someone else.
[1] "You" and "me" used for clarity, since "they" & "them" is confusing.
See. if I'm thirsty. I don't want a glass of water, I want you to sympathize. I want you to say, "Gloria, I too know what it feels like to be thirsty. I too have had a dry mouth." I want you to connect with me through sharing and understanding the concept of dry mouthedness.
If you don't know the person, it is not your responsibility to help them with a chronic problem you don't understand. So just let that go. Feeling guilt because someone else hurts is not a good motivation for assisting them. You're going to cause more damage because helping them is about you, not them.
You also aren't obligated to be someone else's therapist or support. It is always appropriate so set boundaries and decide how much attention you're willing to give them. Doing something out of obligation means you're just tolerating a problem. Try to avoid "tolerating" things, try weighing consequences and choose your level of involvement instead. (Easier said than done.)
Basically, you have to think beyond "ugh" and figure out why you're bothered and decide how to act. In some circumstances (like work), you're just stuck with it and you'll have to carefully set boundaries.
There was one member of my group who was having a difficult time motivating himself to make a particular change he wanted to make. I had long since learned the dangers of "advice giving", so really just asked why he felt it was so hard to make that change. He definitely had a lot of backstory that could explain his underlying fear.
However, this pattern went on for about 9 months (him complaining about not being able to make this change, the rest of the group offering support). Finally, at one point I said "Bob, I really care about you, but to be honest, you've been complaining about your situation for months now and you aren't actually doing anything to change it. I understand where your fear comes from, but if you're not going to even try to do something different, I don't really want to hear about it anymore."
The next week he came in having made the first step toward his goal. Point being I had a much bigger motivating impact on him once I let him know how he was affecting my feelings (of course, after we had a lot of time to build up trust) than if I had said "just do x, y, z".
You weren't "just"-ing him -- you knew the intricacies of his situation, and it's a lot easier for someone to take advice to heart if they can trust that you actually know the context.
You've exhibited what the book Crucial Conversations calls A Fool's Choice. There are other options. The recommended one would be to express to them the pain you have in always hearing it, and exploring with them their need to always talk to you about it.
They have a need, which is causing them to express it to you (perhaps in a suboptimal manner). You have your own needs, but are having trouble expressing your needs. It's a skill to learn, and it won't come easy, but it is learnable.
"Healing tear"?! Is it a specific tear, or all of them?
Such as, cousin watched a beautiful sunrise, on the same day as seeing a baby being born, while discovering donuts are actually good for you.
That tear, that tear of joy, was saved, and here's a microgram of it, try it, it heals!
(Don't read HN before the focus of coffee, lest this)
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 and family. If I got talking to a stranger at a bus stop and they told me about how their arthiritis was giving them gyp this morning I would be sympathetic, I wouldn't tell them to do more stretches and eat more fish. Assume my comment is with good intentions, please.
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.
There is a big difference between a group gathering for therapy, and having someone engage you in 'conversation' where they're cornering you to complain about their ailment.
Note I have seen the following be useful:
1. Is the person really just saying "I want a hug" with their complaining? If so, and you care about this person, just give them a hug.
2. Depending on your relationship with the person, and if you can accept any blowback, it's also fine to say "I'm sorry, I don't want to be a receptacle for your complaining today."
3. Ask the person if they want help fixing the problem.
You can always ask. Seriously! Some communications books literally recommend you ask whether they want support/connection/advice.
And you will rarely go wrong if you commiserate. So: Commiserate first, and then say "I have some ideas on what may help, ... " and what follows is context dependent.
If it's a chronic health issue that you have not dealt with: "but you probably know more about this than I do and probably don't want to hear yet another idea."
If it's a chronic health issue that you have dealt with: "and they solved a similar problem I had, but I'm not sure your situation is the same as mine."
Trust me - if they want to hear your solution, they will then ask.
If it's very generic advice that people commonly treat as a panacea (e.g. diet, exercise, supplements, meditation, mindfulness), better to commiserate and keep your advice to yourself.
Early on I liked people trying to help. But after years of working on the issue, I've learned how specialized my situation is and how useless most advice is for me.
But friends & family don't have anything to offer besides the usual armchair advice. When I open up to someone new I always have to go through the phase of defending why I can't "just" do X, and that gets very tiring.
I'll get someone to understand that neither they nor I know how to improve my situation, but people eventually forget why X is off the table and I have to defend my decisions all over again.
I don't want to whine about it - I don't need to vent, and I've looked into everything anyone's thought of. It's just that this is an inextricable part of what's going on with me. If I can't talk about this with a person, I can't really talk about my life at all.
Asking people to listen but then they can't input is something I find incredibly arrogant, egotistical, selfish, basically it's a terrible human trait and I'm surprised there are so many apologists in this thread that defend this kind of behaviour.
Again, I'm not talking about off the cuff "how was your day" "oh my angina is playing up again" "WELL THEN YOU SHOULD DO THIS AND THAT" kinds of conversations... I think that is obvious.
I mean the 30 minute ones where someone is sounding off to you about their problems. Yeah, I am going to give you "advice" (as in, this is a problem lets figure out how to solve it). I'm genuinely surprised this is seen as A Bad Thing. Especially given our community is one of hackers and yanno, people who get hired to solve problems...
The mild versions of the patterns you're objecting to don't seem problematic.
As someone who's problem might be unfixable, sometimes I just need a sounding board and don't expect actionable advice. And sometimes people just want to vent, but I try to save that for my therapist.
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.
"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!"
Still, 100% true that people are usually unhelpful with their flippant medical advice.
The very "best" part of my journey was seeing a migraine specialist very early on. I told him that I thought maybe caffeine had something to do with it. He brusquely told me that caffeine had nothing to do with it. Twenty years later, I went to the same guy, because I had learned some new things. Again, I mentioned how much caffeine I was drinking, and he cut me off, and, again, brusquely told me that this was my whole problem. When confronted with the contradiction, he mumbled some things, and I got out of there. I was peeved. He retired not long after.
Another, very-thoughtful doctor I saw, explained that the East Coast / West Coast research hospitals are actually divided on the issue of how much caffeine contributes to migraines, so it's not like it's exactly clear.
In my experience, I can confidently say that caffeine withdrawal headaches and migraines are 2 different animals, but they can present with the same intensity of pain at times, so it is confusing.
Just no.
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, because even though "just making it landscape" solves this same problem in Excel, when the client was sending out Excel files as packing slips... the current system is not Excel".
I couldn't find a way to get the client to get from "just make it landscape" to listening to me ask "what is the warehouse actually trying to pencil in?" and "how much space do they need? Are they penciling in notes globally at the top of the document or on a line-item basis next to each SKU?"
To the client I was wasting their time because "just make it landscape".
Needless to say working with this client is challenging on an interpersonal level. The work itself is fun though, and it's improving my EQ handling a client like this.
Or: "what have you tried?"
But really, "have you tried turning it off and on again", while a funny quote, can be quite condescending as opposed to "What have you tried".
The only caveat I'd offer is that sometimes this is not a good question to ask ("what have you tried?") because it can be interpreted as "are you doing anything about it?" Edge case, true, but still worth being intentional about.
But the person seeking help already knows what they have tried, and they don't have an answer.
So in the absolute best case, it's a useless question, you're just trying to get them to rubber duck it. In a less-than-great case, it'll be taken as a suggestion that they need your guidance in basic critical thinking and troubleshooting.
In my view, the very limited potential upside (successful Socratic rubber ducking) is not worth the significant potential downside (insulting them by suggesting they already have the answer, they're just not smart enough to see it).
It just needs to be done tactfully. And in case it was a stupid mistake, defuse the ego issues by telling an anecdote about how you've made a similar one. (It's even helpful if it was a dangerous mistake : telling how you got punished, but the world didn't end.)
It depends on the situation - if you're not familiar with the person asking, and you're talking with them one-on-one, it can be a chance for them to establish their dignity so you can triage their request properly.
If I'm looking after a shopping website and someone tells me they can't put things in their basket, I might usually start by asking with some pretty basic questions.
By giving them a chance to tell me they can't put things in their basket on pages X and Y but can on Z, and it only happens when using Firefox, and that they've tested with multiple accounts, these browser versions and OSes, with and without plugins/ad blockers, and they've got confirmation from several other people - probably I'm going to skip asking them to clear their cookies and I'll launch straight into reproducing it myself.
On the other hand, if I'm looking after a shopping website with clumsy warehouse staff and a customer tells me they ordered two widgets and only received one, probably I don't need any more info from the customer - and resolving the problem rather than batting it back to the customer would be good customer service.
But the person being asked for help doesn't know. The question "what have you tried" is meant to avoid re-tracing steps that have already been taken.
Few people like being asked open-ended questions when they are irritated.
I'm not asking for total accuracy. I've certainly experienced on both sides accidentally giving the impression something was tried that in fact wasn't and all sorts of such verbal errors and mistakes. But you do need to give something in response to that question.
Odds are the person you are talking to have tried several dozens of things, 2/3 of what they don't even remember anymore.
Asking "what have you tried" is very often an unprofessional display of power disguised as a time-waster question. The one exception when the person answering has not had time to try several dozen options.
Withholding useful information and being rude about it is not the best way to get help.
The expectation is that they speak the same language. Whether they understand what I'm asking is on me, and helping them understand what I'm asking is also on me.
"What have you tried?" is such challenging question, because you don't know the technical skill of the person involved. Will they use the same terminology as you? Do they know what upload/download mean? Servers? Anything?
And then there is the case of someone coming to you after trying many things. They won't necessarily have a list of things they've tried.
What I find most useful is going back and confirming assumptions.
"What have you tried" assumes a lot. It assumes a problem, it assumes a direction of the problem, and it also guides you into thinking of the solutions rather than the problem, even if subconsciously.
Always start by verifying assumptions. That, and going to the source. Both of these revolve around going to the source and verifying.
If not... frankly, in the context of a professional interaction, if someone starts making the bizarre excuse that it's just too hard to tell me what they've already tried, or that it's somehow offensive that I'm asking them this question, I may very well be having a professional interaction with that person's professional manager about their suitability for the professional job. It's not something I've done often, but it has come up, and I've never been the only one raising such questions about an employee when I've had to do that. It's far from the first thing I reach for, but it has come up.
I honestly have no idea what you or the other replier are banging on about with regard to how hard a question this is to answer. Unless you're just being contrary for contrariness' sake. It's a basic question, and as I said up front, I don't expect a 100% accurate recitation of everything up front, I mean, I never expect any statement to necessarily be 100% accurate up front, I expect a process of getting closer to the truth over time, but the idea that someone would just be unable to answer any questions about what they've already done boggles my mind, and the idea that I should maybe feel bad about asking it is just insane.
If you, personally, are having trouble answering that question, you should get better. Take better notes if you can't rely on your memory. But the problem lies with you, not anyone asking the question. There is no way that anyone being paid to solve problems should respond to such a basic question with "I don't really know", let alone offense.
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.
I don't have time to dig information out of people in order to try to help them, if they can't make any effort to help me help them when I ask for more information.
This is of course one of the reasons I'm not generally client facing these days!
There are so many offshore teams these days that I wonder whether the volume of what I supply in my support tickets overwhelms the English as a second language support engineers' total comprehension abilities, between the combined English-to-native language parsing and internalization of the case details itself. About 9 out of 10 times now when I reach offshore engineers, there are responses with blatant signals they simply did not read through even a third of what I painstakingly put together. With English native speakers, it is closer to 1-5% depending upon the vendor.
No shade to the offshore teams, but it adds an unnecessary debugging cycle for them, I suspect they're under insane metrics to uphold incentivizing this behavior and I just politely point out where I already gave them the information they're requesting. Most of the time they simply escalate the case straight towards the development team.
This is likely to be it: perhaps they are effectively paid by the ticket or response (due to how pay/bonus/other structures align) so paying attention to all that information costs them significantly. Their ideal is to get a reply to you ASAP so they'll prioritise tickets where they can bang out a link to an existing knowledge-base article.
> No shade to the offshore teams
In some cases it may also be that they are employing cheaply rather than not carefully, so some of the people aren't great to start with (either technically, in terms of their claims to understand English well, or both), but I think you are right generally to give them more credit than that and suggesting that most of the time it is due to unhelpful metrics & targets (you get what you measure!). That and failing to provide sufficient support/documentation/training to the people trying to help you (sometimes you might know far more than them as they first saw the system last week).
> Most of the time they simply escalate the case straight towards the development team
They are likely not to do this on first response, even if it is very much the right thing to do in a complex case, because of a negative metric deliberately in place to reduce load on dev teams (which may be as under-staffed/under-trained and more over-worked than the support team).
> I have the opposite problem with many technical support teams these days. I supply them
I try to be forgiving about lack of information in the initial request, as long as they are understanding about my response being a curt “I need more information” and a list of example data¹. If I ask for more information and just get a vague response, that is when I knee-jerk hit the CNR button.
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[1] the standard “what was on-screen, details of the form you were editing², what did you do, what did you expect, what happened instead, include error messages³ and data you entered², and at what time did this occur (be as accurate as you can)⁴…”
[2] which parts of this may vary significantly depending on the situation, and providing all possible information may be a waste of their time and mine, which is part of why I try not to mind the initial information being slight vague.
[3] this doesn't tend to vary, as a rule I always want to know any messages that were emitted and feel justified in being immediately irritated when this data isn't included from the start - “I got an error” does not suffice.
[4] this can be as vital as the error/exception messages, sometimes more so, if I need to go diving into logs for further clues.
That's like someone who isn't a C/C++ developer having opinions on C/C++ development.
Or rather, it's like someone who used to be a C/C++ developer having opinions on C/C++ development.
Anyway, the nice thing about in-person conversation (or even over video call) is the conversation can flow a lot more easily, so even if you said "Hey, just do X" and they angrily respond, you can adjust quickly and say "Oh, sorry, I figured we'd go for the most obvious thing first. Okay, let's figure this out." I think opening lines matter way less when it's in person, and tone matters way more. You could say "Oh, just try X" in a friendly manner or "Oh, just try X!" in a condescending manner. In text, it's up to the receiver of the message to interpret.
The message is not the meta-message.
The reason the examples in OP of 'just do...' irk is because the 'just do...' supposes to be helpful, but any sincere thought given shows that the suggestion isn't helpful.
Instead of giving sympathy/relatedness, it comes across as dismissing the problem. -- I think this can be down to miscommunication; but I think whether something 'sympathises with problem' or 'gives solution' is deeper than a phrasing.
Same here, with a slight variation. I usually say "my first thought is to try ..." or "the first thing that comes to mind for me is ..."
Depending on the situation I might also use the old "Have you tried ..." phrasing.
Usually it’s more along the lines of “for my own understanding, why can’t we just ship things as they’re ready instead of waiting for everything in the order to go in one box?”
Branching way off topic, and paraphrasing Sun Tsu here, but he says to always give your opponent an out unless you plan to completely destroy them. Very rarely in business do you want to or need to destroy someone so I try to soften my suggestions.
The other mantra I repeat almost daily is 'do I want to be right or effective'. It feels great to tell someone an idea you know is 100% right, but does that mean they'll use it? At the end of the day I want to be effective. "Just" feels more like being right, than effective.
Speaking of phrases, early in my career the senior VP of my business unit was a nice, very sharp woman. One of the best executives I've ever met. Listening to her on calls was a master class on EQ and how to deal with people professionally. But, anytime she said 'help me understand...' you knew the hammer was coming.
A lot of ones I've seen is hand-wavey "be more empathetic" or "there are multiple intelligences" kind of advice.
I'd like to be able to listen in on conversations with challenging DO's and DON'Ts.
e.g. "Why do you think Rajesh reacted this way? What might James have said to elicit a more positive reaction, all other things being the same?"
Not so much intercultural communication as "here's how to give someone an out".
For interpersonal situations, people often just want to be heard without any advice being given. A simple “I hear what you’re going through and I’m here if you need anything” is way better than finding ways to immediately offer advice, but I believe this applies to professional situations as well.
Often if I’m the person who is stuck I’m totally willing to let a new set of eyes offer all of the “obvious” things that have already tried, because while it’s usually just a rehash, there are occasionally “but what about” cases that haven’t been checked yet. And if we don’t find anything new, at least the helper is now up to speed on what’s already been covered.
It's not something you'd say in response to a text complaint, where there's not enough "bandwidth" to clearly communicate the complainant's emotional state; but it's something CSRs are trained to say on phone calls all the time.
It's also the reason that therapists vastly prefer speaking in person, to video calls, to phone calls; and almost never even consider doing "therapy via text chat." There's not enough bandwidth in text chat to enable a therapist to properly engage with and respond to the emotional content of a client's communication; but with each additional level (voice, video, in-person meeting), that's more possible.
(Interesting consideration, given that: suicide/crisis hotlines should probably consider offering video calls as an option, as the increased bandwidth for emotional content will allow the operator to engage with + potentially help the caller on a deeper level.)
Just reaching out is hard, and you want to be as anonymous as possible.
With my wife? Noooo, it would sound like I'm saying "I'm not interested in your problems unless you have solutions". As her partner, she wants me to share the burden of her problems, even those for which she has no solution.
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. A listener can play a part in helping to solve the problem, but helping foster the environment in which the problem can be solved. Don't mistake this as a silver bullet, but simply recognize that being a listener is an underappreciated role and listener vs solver isn't as dichotomous as it sounds.
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?
As with so many things in life, the hard part is working out if your actions should be motivated by actually helping or feeling like you helped.
I think generally the person you’d say this to is already aware how the conversation will go if you don’t clarify beforehand.
If someone is grieving it's probably time to just listen, but when someone is stuck with a social problem they may be rubber ducking with you rather than considering you to be a good approximation of an oracle ;)
"This code is obviously correct, right duck? Look here, this line first does x, then y happens and here... Wait a minute, that doesn't do z at all!"
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 someone is there to simply listen.
Let's say someone is telling you they are fearful for their job, they think they will get fired soon, even though they have nothing specific to point to. As a listener, are you agreeing with this or are you neutral nodding your head? Because my default would be to reply that they should do the best they can and if it comes to that they will surely find better pastures, but then I'm giving advice already.
I hear this advice but I have little clue how to put it into practice, moreover because of what I mentioned above, if I'm telling someone something, I definitely want them to think about it and try and help me with advice, otherwise I feel like they don't even care and would not share again with the same person.
"Oh no, that's terrible! Why are you fearful, are you all right?"
and you remain active by asking follow-up questions. For example to plug gaps in the story:
"Wow! Did your manager say that to your face? Or was it hearsay through that one co-worker?"
and so on. Expressing emotions is also perfectly fine:
"I feel bad. Wish I could do something for you."
I'd only interject long enough to get them talking again. If they need your help they'll have asked it by now :)
So with your example, I would first accept their feelings - we've all been insecure about jobs from time to time - and then try to probe into them.
"Has your boss been talking about money being tight? Did one of your big customers just drop?"
"Has your boss been talking about your performance? Do you see others on your team being dismissive of your role?"
Questions like this let the counterparty know that a) they matter to you and b) you're hearing what they're saying. I think that's what you're saying you want to convey. I could be way off base here.
In my experience this is also a women-men difference in brain wiring. Men often looks for help when he fails to solve a problem, women always looking for emotional support before solving a problem.
If you give a solution for someone looking for an emotional support or vica-versa you've expreienced one of the main source of frustration in relationships :)
>As a listener, are you agreeing with this or are you neutral nodding your head?
The "trick" I do is to try to set aside whatever train of thoughts I might have had before the person spoke to me, and try to imagine that the thing they talk about is happening to me. And then, voice my reaction to that. So if someone told me that "I'm fearful for my job. I think I might be fired soon", the first that comes to mind is "Oh my god, that's horrible! Why do you think that happens? Have they hinted about this before?"
Now, this maybe works a handful of times in the conversation. A second thing that you can do is trying to imagine the relations of the thing that just got told to you. By relations, I mean relating to anything, how it connects to anything: the speaker's environment, life circumstances, your shared universe, anything. Continuing the example above: "The timing is such a shame, given what's going on in your life, I would have liked it that at least the job is stable".
Third thing, you could discuss the persons possible actions and reactions to the event, and how others in their life have, or will have taken it. Continuing: "Do you have anything else lined up, just in case?" "Could your side gig support you until you find another job?" "How did your spouse take the news?"
And the fourth thing, it's always worth thinking about WHY the other person told you the thing they did. What are you to this other person? A friend? Colleague? Are you their superior? Spouse? Do you relate, in a way, to the thing that they told you? Are you maybe a recruiter, and that's why they tell you that they are fearful for their job? The answers to these questions can bring you closer to your natural response to the situation.
As a listener, I'm my goal is to create an environment for them to talk about what bothers them in the most vibrant, and exploratory way possible. I realize that's not exactly the most helpful explanation so allow me to go into more detail. There's a few conversational techniques that I pull from heavily when I'm trying to actively listen: conversational orienteering, and open ended questions, non-Sorcratic questioning.
For lack of a better term[1], conversational orienteering is actively being aware of the topic of conversation and its local topology. Given a topic, one should be able to generate several other topics: one that is more abstract, one more specific, and several adjacent. Over time, a listener gets a sense of where a conversation wants to go and uses the conversational topology to orient towards that goal. It took me a bit of practice to be good at picking topics not too far and not too close to the one at hand - too far can make conversations feel disconnected and random, and too close can make someone feel like they are being misunderstood.
Secondly, I don't think open-ended questions needs much explanation, but when someone is venting or needs support, hows, whys, and whens give the speaker much more room to express themselves than 'Do you...'s.
Thirdly, it's important to be non-Socratic in questions and responses. Leading the speaker is much much worse than telling them advice and should be avoided at all cost.
If you've ever worked a problem out verbally, you should be able to recognize that these principles work to cultivate a good verbal environment for the speaker. I don't see them as not helping, so much as creating an environment where they have the best shot at verbally processing their issue. I think it's important to recognize that emotions can get in the way of people being able to take action and that speaking can help diffuse strong emotions so that someone is ready to take a concrete step toward fixing their problem. I've seen that happen a lot. Even just feeling understood can help people feel better about making a real decision.
It's probably also important to point out that there are some people for which verbal processing works really well and some who can complain endlessly. It's important to recognize the difference. For the later, value your time. Maybe give them 15mins of listening and then decide to change the subject, for them verbal processing is not going to help. They probably need to work on issues in a clinical or therapeutic environment you cannot provide.
Hope this gives some insight, and even if it doesn't, feel free to tell me too.
1. If this actually has a term, please let me know. I'm coining one just to be able to talk about it.
In these situations people just want to hear you acknowledge that you understand they are in pain, no necessary agree with their cause of action.
If you’re not sure what to ask, then your best course of action is to enquire about why they think they feel a certain way. Why does they job makes them stressful, why does talking with a certain person make them anxious. You’re not rendering judgement on their emotions or feels, you simply acknowledge they are what they are, and that’s normal.
For some specifics the following might be useful:
“Why do you think X makes you anxious”
Once they answer
“Yes, I understand now why that might make you anxious”
Or
“It’s perfectly normal to feel anxious”
If there behaviour is causing issues:
“It’s perfectly normal to feel anxious, that’s ok, but the way you’re dealing with it is causing issues for X. Perhaps we can find a better way for you to cope?”
For more, it’s worth looking at Mental Health First Aid. It can provide a number of very practical tips of dealing with someone in crisis, which are also excellent for helping those that just need to vent to someone.
This has been a key takeaway for me too, also in the context of intimate partner communication.
However, I would say that there can for sure be pitfalls with it— it's easy to believe that you are communicating only acknowledgment of emotional state, but have the listener receive it as signing on to their interpretation of the facts, the overall premise, their assessment of the other players' actions and motivations in the story, and so on.
This can lead to major misunderstandings down the road, when the person presents concrete actions that they are expecting will be taken. They may not be anticipating any pushback on this because previous validation-of-emotional-state conversations led them to believe you were both on the same page, when in fact you have significant concerns (whether it was that they misjudged the situation, escalated it unnecessarily, viewed someone else's actions unfairly, failed to accept a compromise or take possible corrective actions, whatever it is).
At that point, it's probably the type of conflict best taken to a professional to sort out, but I think of these situations when I see relationship coaches on TikTok talking up this kind of emotional validation as being a silver bullet for resolving all conflicts and achieving lasting harmony.
It is less about "solving a problem" and more about "figuring out how to feel about the problem".
Validation can help reduce emotional turmoil, distill it into a calmer set of feelings.
The feelings may still be strong. The situation may still suck.
But at least you can be sure of how much it sucks - because someone else you respect, see's it as valid too.
Something my sister does, which I hate, is follow up "hello" with a falling-pitch "how are you". This really bothers me every time she does it to me, which is pretty often.
But I have a lot of problems responding to (strangers) asking me how I am, and I've tried her approach of mostly ignoring the question and reflecting back a falling-pitch "how are you", and it seems to work very well. No one ever complains that I ignored their question, and the focus goes back on them, where I want it, instead of me.
If I were to judge this strategy by how I personally feel about it, it would be one of the most grossly offensive things you could say. And it still makes me uncomfortable to use it. But the lesson here appears to be that I shouldn't use myself as a reference for how to interact with other people.
Eve when it’s not listening to someone who’s venting, that can be really powerful anyway.
The best sys admin I’ve ever work with used to keep a teddy bear on the end of her desk. When people came to her with a question or problem she’d say “talk to the bear”. It’s astounding how often explaining the problem to an inanimate object results in the solution becoming obvious to the person ding the explaining.
(Note, she was really good at not saying in a rude or dismissive way, but she was somewhat on the spectrum and we ran a lot of cover to ensure the CEO didn’t get told to talk to the bear…)
I've had good luck explaining any thorny technical problem to any inanimate object on my desk. Often times, the mere act of doing this makes me really pay attention to my assumptions and the information I have gathered.
(At first I thought “talk to the bear” was some sort of folksy Eastern European way of telling the asker to go to hell)
In some contexts, though, offering advice can feel like you want to close the person down rather than listen to them, that you think their problems aren't serious enough because you'd solve them easily. I'm guessing you've had at least one occasion where you have a work issue, and your manager is casually dropping solutions that didn't work, and you were frustrated with them as a result.
As such, the consequence of offering solutions is that it can damage your relationships with people, or at least not use an opportunity to strengthen them.
In a work context, it should (always) be about most efficiently solving the problem at hand. When I have a work issue, I preface my request for support with the steps I have taken to attempt to solve the problem. Anything else wastes the time of everyone involved. When this is done correctly, the first thing to come to the mind of the people I'm asking is often exactly what I'm looking for.
> your manager is casually dropping solutions that didn't work
Casual, useless, unsolicited advice is also a waste of time and energy (see "seagull management"). If my manager did this I would promptly tell them to either dig into the problem properly with me, figure it out themselves, or leave me to it.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIJYO4u5iug
Yep, and allowing other person to do all this to you is definitely spoiling. At the same time, a possibility and ability to spoil someone you love - is one of the biggest pleasures in life.
(I’ve shown the video to my wife. She said: “See, you could have done much worse”)
I couldn't agree more, I would amend the above with "unless you are sure you are loved by your listener, and are willing to impose on them" =)
That would be a rather strange reaction. A single brain gets easily stuck on a problem, so if involving the second brain helps that does not mean that the problem was easy. Or that the first brain was defective. (Frankly, I think it was evolutionary “cheaper” to implement the rule “if stuck - consult” than to implement an unstuckable brain).
I mean within reason I'm sure it's fine.
But we probably all know people who complain about the same things incessantly, with no desire to change them. And at some point it's reasonable to decide if those are people who you really want to continue to invest time into.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIJYO4u5iug
But at work, I understand this mindset. Though personally, I still actually don't mind hearing people complain. And since I'm a manager, complaints are a very useful signal for me: even if I'm just in listening-mode, they give me more clarity on precisely what's going on in my team.
As a leader, actionable complaints (read: criticisms) are indeed a very useful signal, and I try my best to pay attention to them.
If this is actually true then clearly there's no need to apologize. However if I've selfishly imposed a one-sided conversation on someone else in order to soothe myself, of course it's correct to apologize. Who enjoys participating in a one-sided conversation? Most people tolerate them out of sheer politeness.
The whole idea of good manners is to avoid imposing on other people, be that physically, emotionally, or conversationally.
You are projecting. Some people are flattered to be a trusted confidante or emotional support, and glad to be able to help someone they care about. This is situational and dependent on factors (if someone's emotionally leaning on me every second of every day, it's going to get tiring pretty quickly), but even if the experience of the conversation _itself_ isn't exactly pleasant it might still be considered a worthwhile discomfort to go through for the emotional closeness generated (as a parallel - physically exercising isn't (often) pleasant, but the sensation afterwards and the physical well-being generated are considered worthwhile, so the activity is net-desirable even if it's unpleasant in-the-moment). In fact, apologizing for the act might insult the listener, implying that your relationship isn't strong enough to warrant such sharing. Further, the listener might care about the speaker's mood and state of mind so much that, even if the experience is net-negative _for them_, they're still glad to be able to provide that support to someone they love.
This is all subjective - you and your partner might so dislike being vented to, or feel such negligible positive effects from it, that the calculus ends up negative and an apology _is_ genuinely warranted. But it's not necessarily true for all (or even, I'd guess, most) people. You're right that avoiding imposition is good manners, but it is not necessarily the case that sharing feelings with someone is an imposition on them.
You'd surely apologize when asking even the closest friend for financial support, why not when asking (or worse, demanding) emotional support?
That frustrates me.
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 getting quicker with the numpad. Unfortunately, I missed their real problem: they hate their job. Me telling them "here's how you could be better at a job you hate" doesn't really help them, it simply looks uncaring and assumes they haven't already thought of those things.
So I could just nod and say "oh that's sound terrible" every time they mention it. You're right, it might look crass and robotic.
Even better here would be saying "Wow, typing all that crap into Excel, you mentioned it last week as well. Sounds like you really don't enjoy doing that?" and encourage them to expand a bit. Is it the typing? What makes it so frustrating? Do they think it's their job in the first place?
Eventually, they admit to you (maybe they hadn't realised themselves) that they hate this bit of their job, and need to discuss with their manager not doing it any more. (Or maybe they hate the company they work for, and need to find a new job. Or it's actually the keyboard they're using they hate. Or whatever, you need to listen to find out.)
This is how you help them out of their rut. They feel that you're interested in their problem, and when they do find a solution, they'll own it because they found it.
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.
I may be much slower to adapt. My wife of (almost) 30 years usually starts with explicit “I am telling you this to just get it off my chest”.
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, unsupported. I hope you get an opportunity to build what was actually needed in the first place (and may deliver results orders of magnitude higher). But somehow I get the feeling you'll end up just giving them work-around landscape and move on. We've all been there.
TRANSLATION: What would need to change in this business to print the warehouse workers' notes on the pdf before it's actually printed. And please don't supply a response that begins with, "Just don't"
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 up with solutions in line with that, rather than “just make it landscape and stop wasting time with questions”.
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.
>This says volumes about what they think about you and worse, what they think about their business and the problem at hand.
Why is this bad? If someone who is not technical, asks you to explain in detail about how the networking is setup and why is it not possible to just rewire the entire network to support something small, I wonder what your answer would be..
Operations managers in warehouses hone their skill over many years, running a large, very variable labor force efficiently. There are many variations over every single process and they have to keep the flow going while people come and go. If you cannot deal with an abstract request without asking everyone undergo "digital transformation", maybe you are in the wrong business.
I must have misspoke or I'm just not the writer I used to be because this is exactly the opposite of what hundreds of warehouse and shop people have said about me for over 40 years. (about 10% of that work is mentioned here: edweissman.com)
Why is this bad?
Because NO ONE is working the real problem (which is certainly not changing report orientation to leave enough white space for "out of the ERP system" notes). Everyone's dancing around it with semantics, jerry rigs, and workarounds. I.T. should be a trusted business partner. And unsupported's management should be putting them in a position to work the real problem. Instead, they're just another nerd who should shut up, put in a meaningless fix, and stop threatening their managers.
I have worked on warehouses and it is complicated.
Agreed. All the more reason to find out what notes they're adding to reports. Mission critical "notes" outside the system is a giant red flag. I'd rather work the red flag than make people happy. If it's important enough to put on a packing slip, it's probably important enough to be part of the system of record. A good old VSM should identify that and reduce that complication.
Just don't. They specifically said "your answer shows a lack of empathy", it wasn't a personal attack. Your post doesn't show 40 years of experience.
I.T. should be a trusted business partner
Agreed, but you also rightfully admit that that's a management problem, and cannot be fixed by either side of the original conversation. So you discarding their work by "differentiating those who sling code from those who do real [work]" or calling users "fleas who used to jump 6 feet" does come across as juvenile.
I've worked with contractors where you know what you want and why, but the developer insists on throwing up a lot of objections on how it won't solve the problem for x or y reason. Changing the orientation of a PDF seems like the kind of request that should be straight forward and not require a lot of heavy lifting to convince a contractor that it's worthwhile.
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 able to confirm because my questions are “wasting their time”, is give the warehouse a place to pencil stuff in next to line items.
So I prepped both versions, portrait and landscape with a SKU Notes column at the side, adjusting the table width and header height, etc and emailed those options over unprompted.
The portrait version shows double the line items per page and probably (?) solves the problem at hand… assuming I guessed right on limited information.
So far no reply to any of the 3 solutions.
A week or so from now the warehouse will complain vaguely that they have “no place to write”.
The client will blame me for the poorly designed packing slip and suggest we “just go back” to the Excel version (which required multiple hours a day of manual data entry by an employee who is no longer at the company and cost untold $ in human error).
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.
I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe paying hundreds of dollars an hour is a sort of status symbol?
Anyway, they can recognize the failure of {y}. Now it's time to make my suggestion again, not in an asshole way, but rather: "I think we should do {x}" as if it's the first time I said it; or "Let's revisit what you're trying to accomplish here."
The happy story would be that people are abashed at my great wisdom and sorrowful that they did not heed it. More accurate story is that no acknowledgement of anything occurs, but they are more receptive in the moment, and even a bit more receptive in the future. Took a long time to arrive at this, sadly, my great wisdom notwithstanding.
Not necessarily. You'll just get back, "that's not what I meant by landscape".
Do you really want to be a consultant to people who don't value your input? Maybe you can find someone higher up in the organization to discuss your ideas with? They don't need to be your direct point of contact, but it sounds like you do need their buy-in.
have you thought that maybe this is not the reason at all why they want this ? maybe they have a scanner somewhere that works better with the landscape format ? some regulation to comply with ?
I find it absolutely insufferable when you ask people to do something that you want, and they ask you why ; like, this is not at all why you're being paid unless you're in a R&D position ; if I was in your client's shoes I'd start looking for another contractor that would give me what I ask no question asked. They're paying you for your time, no? If they ask you to dig in a hole and then fill it back after you do it.
Yes, that is the reason I ask questions about who is using this and what their objectives are.
> They're paying you for your time, no?
No. They're paying me for the value my skillset and experience brings. I don't bill hourly, I bill bi-weekly, 2 weeks in advance.
At any time they can fire me or I can fire them. Most likely we're setting the stage for either of those two outcomes right now, unless we can get our communication in sync.
I'll try to find a replacement client who's interested in communicating the problems they're facing, working with me to come up with solutions, then working with me to iterate on them.
> If they ask you to dig in a hole and then fill it back after you do it.
I'm not currently at the point of desperation that accepting something like this would require.
This is more like something a prison or internment camp might do to mentally break prisoners.
This is a recipe for a really crappy career.
Source: my career.
Wow, I really want to avoid working with you on anything.
Sure, which is why asking "why?" is so crucial. Or are you suggesting they try to comply to some regulatory requirement without actually knowing that they're doing so or what regulation must be complied with, so they can actually confirm compliance? Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
Unfortunately the line between the two is very fuzzy, because every request is underspecified, and we fill in the gaps with context and guessing. And everybody has a different threshold for how sure they want to be that they understand the request, before they go off and implement their best guess about what it's asking for.
"I understand what you want me to do, but why do you think you want me to do this, because I suspect it won't achieve your goals."
On second thought, this might be the first type you mentioned.
It sounds like you can’t communicate with your users, which could be the meta-problem that you need to fix.
When you have a problematic person in the middle, sometimes you can set up covert channels of communication (risks, but rewards too). Problematic people are often causing problems within the organisation too, so you can find champions that will route around them.
Edit: Politics are important, but sometimes you are getting paid to solve a problem, perhaps using unofficial nefarious methods. It requires a lot of skill, and you need to avoid traps, but again that is part of what an external developer is paid for?
"Oh, you'd like to do x? Well that's not' best practices' these days."
People will accept any ridiculous thing you say if you pretend it's "best practices."
These people would ignore everything if it meant change. I don't think they were particularly happy in their weird little world, but best practices meant nothing to them. In their mind what they had was a special little snowflake of a use case (not true btw). Best practices simply didn't apply to them.
A year later I got a similar client. They had one systems administrator who was so scared of losing influence that he'd sabotage any solution you brought forward. Any time you adapted to fit he's last "on just one more thing" he's find a way to rationalize why their particular use case defied best practices.
I've had a few people accuse me of being difficult. Usually they were quite difficult themselves to work with; yet were totally unaware of how unreasonable they were.
(Queue the scene from Beauty and the Beast where the Beast accuses Belle of being difficult.)
I noticed later in the thread that you were considering walking away from the customer. If you do this, I think it's best to walk away completely. Don't find a replacement, don't try to keep the business. Just cut the cord as quickly and completely as legally possible.
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.
Landscape just makes a wider table, with no more or less whitespace than portrait or than a billboard (proportionally, that is).
If the goal is to write line-item level notes in the table, then a "SKU Notes" column can be added and Landscape gives it more horizontal space to exist.
But the first step is to confirm that this is indeed the objective because "just make it landscape" wouldn't achieve anything on its own.
Sometimes it's just worth the effort to make a mockup of that so they can see their idea doesn't work.
For context, see Chris Voss’s ‘Never Split the Difference’
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It
https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-De...
In this case the person you are speaking with is a boss who either will not or can not articulate his needs. You need to go the the source - the front line users.
Learning how to differentiate between when it’s reasonable to ask for more help and when it’s not is an important skill to pick up since there’s a dividing line for basically all roles you might find yourself in.
Just a few weeks ago at work, one of the TLs told me I should ‘just do X’, and when I pushed back saying it’s going to take a few weeks, he said ‘oh it’s just a couple of lines, I can do it in 10 minutes’. I challenged that. 5 integrations and 2 weeks later we had a first working version, that caused more harm than good in the end because of an assumption that didn’t hold.
I think easy things might be easy in theory, but not necessarily in execution. So when a student comes to you, I suspect they have thought about theory, but find the execution hard because of the knowable unknowns they are not aware of and you are. Many times people don’t even propose things that might seem obvious to them out of fear they might say something stupid. Indicating something is easy in a demeaning fashion is bad. Phrasing it differently has a different effect. E.g. Oh, I think that might be solved with X. It should be relatively straightforward. Look at the work I did <here>, it should match your use case.
My point is that it’s not just about the language you use. Not saying “just” isn’t a magic bullet. Regardless of the phrasing, there’s a lot more pedagogical work that needs to take place to build a good environment.
What would be lost if you said "I think it would be easier if you did Y instead."?
That would convey the thing you think "would be fine" without any of the negative baggage that use of "just" can carry.
Neuroticism, which we all have, is the most important personality/communication style factor and it's the one that the HR approved courses rigorously ignore...
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... ;).
[1] https://vfoley.xyz/just/
https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/just-is-a-dangerous-word...
Also related IMO is a general tendency to under-think summarization (related to reduction):
https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/so-just-to-sum-that-up-s...
Almost every advice I come across on self-improvement is wrong for me. Very few people have considered my experience and limitations. Most of it is actively harmful to implement.
Funnily enough, the project management strategies I use at work are extremely helpful with this.
Given a problem (a "should"), we need ask "what needs to change", "what is required to change it", and "what is the priority" (urgency X impact). Then we can decide if this needs to be focused on right now.
:)
Same thing with “…, no?”. More cultural than linguistic. I’ve also heard it’s a Mexican quirk, too.
Still annoys me, but I can see where they’re coming from.
"Get off my lawn!"
And a sentence with ", no?" is still an assertion that you think it's right.
Not rising to this bait.
That's the only way I've heard such things used. A claim, but checking that everyone is on the same page.
Maybe it's regional?
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.
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 acquaintance to recruit up the ladder at their new workplace.
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 term rewards... ugh)
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.
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 for emotion."
Here's the thing. Your co-workers are human. Humans have lizard brains, and sometimes get defensive. In order to maximize productivity and harmony in the workplace, you want to avoid that.
There's this thing called tact. Use it.
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.
Now they have wasted both of our time and drained me of my lifeforce. Sometimes there are hours of delay between this/we are in different timezones.Just ask me for what you want, I know you're only talking to me because you want something.
For e.g., if a colleague is stuck debugging a slow API call, it would be good to ask them. "Hey, what all have you tried so far to resolve the issue" If partitioning keys and adding more CPU cores has already been tried, then you could suggest - what about scanning logs for high-latency calls?
I think the point the author is making is not just using the word "just". It is about being thoughtful and sympathetic before trying to solve the problem.
At least, that was my takeaway.
Agreed you could probably phrase it more delicately, though I do think the intent is justified.
One of the downsides of being good at something, is that we make it look easy, so people think it's easy.
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 didn't know exactly how to express what he was thinking. But that became our standard answer to any programming challenge. "Just straight up code it."
> Guys, we're thinking about this in the wrong way. The solution is to just get the right people together into a room and build the solution.
Which was definitely true but also not useful.
(Sometimes if she was still in earshot he would say it in Spanish which somehow made it even funnier.)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NywzrUJnmTo
To play the flute, you just blow in this end, and move your fingers up and down on this end.
In the 70s, people thought of programmers as typists.
“This boss can kill you in 2 hits” -> “oh well just don’t get hit”
There’s definitely an aspect that can cheer you on if you are in the right mindset to receive it: everything is in your power, conquer yourself and rise up to the moment
The lecturers were so good to use that term ("trivially", "evidently", etc.) when it was anything but.
The smartest students were good to follow up.
Everyone else were quiet.
Of course teachers/researchers didn't always follow these best practices themselves...