For the case of helping someone with a technical problem, as author notes. words like 'simply', 'merely, 'just' are downplaying the person's efforts and inherently cause unnecessary strife, discouragement, resentment, etc. Sometimes, letting them work through it for a while longer on their own is the better course.
In the situation where help is clearly needed, 'let's consider possible solutions' is a better entry point, along with 'let's ensure we don't make it worse' - i.e. take a snapshot of the current situation, store the current working file, etc. Now you've gone into a collaborative situation, and if there's a solution the person will feel like they've been a part of it, not like they're an idiot who should have been able to figure it out on their own. Makes for a much better working environment, better morale, sense of being on the team, etc.
For the person on the other end, the person who needs help, this is where keeping a log of your activities (in the lab world, this means a detailed and updated lab notebook, maybe a logging app of some kind for programming), so if someone asks the (sometimes irritating) question of 'what have you tried already' you can just point them to it.
For the case of seriously depressed people who can't get out of bed, that's a bit tougher. Cup of psychedelic mushroom tea perhaps, plus someone to hold their hand for a few hours?
In the situation where help is clearly needed, 'let's consider possible solutions' is a better entry point, along with 'let's ensure we don't make it worse' - i.e. take a snapshot of the current situation, store the current working file, etc.
Meh. Just goes to show how communication is a very subjective and personal thing. To my ears, both of those phrases would sound extremely condescending and patronizing. If I were struggling with a problem and someone approached me and said either of those things, I'd be more inclined to say "go f%#@ yourself" than anything else. shrug
Same. That's way worse. For technical problems where an obvious and easy solution comes to mind, I'm fine saying something like "just" and fine with having it said to me. I'm expecting to either hear why the obvious solution won't work (learning more about the problem) or, less likely, give them help by pointing out something easy they happened to not think of.
"I'm really struggling to set up external authorization for the /download endpoint."
"Why don't you just use @external on it?"
Hopefully leads to either
"This endpoint needs to...[extra constraints]."
"Ah, gotcha."
or, less likely
"There's an @external?"
"Yeah, let me show you."
There are some differences between this and questions like "Why don't you just go for a walk to stop feeling depressed?". Maybe the biggest difference is these tech solutions are not paradoxical. Someone's depression may be defined by their inability to do something like go for a walk and enjoy it. Suggesting they do that is not helpful.
The questions are also more sincere. Like, I literally want to know why you're not doing the easy solution. I'm actually assuming that there's a good reason, like some extra constraint. That's why am I asking "why not?" instead of speaking in the imperative.
There's also a critical difference of the offered solution being much easier than the one attempted, or very easy overall. I might say "Why don't you just sort it alphabetically?" but I wouldn't say "Why don't you just make a DSL?".
I guess it's just that I think it's okay to act like something is small when you really believe it is for the person you're speaking with.
So what would you want people to say to you in that situation?
It's also true that at some point, if people are overly prickly, but the problem absolutely has to be solved, then it's going to be 'show me the logs of exactly what you've been doing, now go take a break and let me work on it.' That also will piss people off, most likely.
This. I’ve done the same mistake with a person who, due to their condition could not possibly _recognize_ there’s a problem.
To anyone who doesn’t relate to this - imagine being a perfectly “normal” human being (if there’s even such a thing) and someone walking up to you and saying straight up that you have a problem and need help and here’s the advice etc. The perfectly rational reaction to that would be the opposite of the intention.
On top of that, there’s always room for ourselves to be wrong and the person receiving the advice be right in their circumstance, so forcing our opinion on them just shows our own ignorance and inability to consider other points of view.
This really isn't better, it's worse IMO. In a situation where help is needed, obviously we're going to consider possible solutions. What do you think I think we should do, maybe pick up our knitting needles, or go run some water polo drills?
It's more condescending than "just" because it is dressing it up in intellectualized bullshit verbiage. Hey good for you, you're a walking thesaurus.
Not saying it's not good to learn about how "just" might be perceived or avoided but I am surprised this article is getting so much support. I feel like in the environment I'm in "just" never implied anything negative (e.g. lack of understanding on the receiver's part, making it seem like they should have considered ... but didn't, etc.), rather:
- I don't yet understand why steps x, y, z are necessary. To me it would seem simply/naively doing ... might work but I'm probably missing something.
- Would an (objectively) simpler (though possibly not perfect) solution (which I'm just putting on the table here) suffice here?
- I think we can do ... here and it'll be fine. Should we / let's see if that works, and revisit ? / .
Sure, "just do it" would often be bad, indicating a variety of things like "stop dwelling on this or arguing, do what I say". Or "can you just quickly do this (thing I find trivial but don't understand at all) for me", but in the end it's the context that matters.
Like, I can turn this around as well. The word "don't" is negative and should be avoided at all cost. Better: "could we try ... instead of ..." (see submission title).
Then conclude "don't worry about it" should not be said.
Which to be fair is also true in some contexts but again, context!
EDIT: To be clear it is valuable for me to learn that usage of "just" could be problematic. That's important when not knowing the other party but among coworkers I also happen to have more of a relationship with than just one-off comments, these kind of word choices are not what make or break things. Especially in a diverse environment I assume everyone is acting in good faith and I would only let word choices affect me if the sum of my interactions with a coworker has been negative already and I "know" they are trying to incite an argument.
Just do it is great advice and much of the people that have big problems with it should just do it.
It means don't sit there thinking about how I said "just". Or how it means I think you're dumb. It means just fucking do it. Just do it. Do it.
The people I've enjoyed working the most have just sat down and done it. Difficult things too. Things that took time. They just did the work. So stop thinking about the shenanigans and just do it.
It's sad and funny how much people will fight the words and spend time arguing this is too crass or not kind instead of just doing it.
"Just do it", as described in your post, is a great and productive attitude.
It is, however, rare that telling someone else "just do it" gives them that attitude. I have never seen it happen. I have said "just..." and seen the effect described in the article.
Asking questions, developing an understanding of what may be holding someone else back from "just doing it", then offering them any help you can provide them is much more likely to help them develop the attitude, in my experience.
We're in a bit of an era of establishing finer- and finer-grained politeness laws, all of which presuppose that the recipient's perception of a communication is all that matters.
> all of which presuppose that the recipient's perception of a communication is all that matters
... and assuming that the listener is able to parse and then object to phrasing on the fly. Phrasing can matter, but fine-grained hypercriticism is mostly a useless exercise.
And furthermore that the recipient is not capable of moderating their own perception, or communicating directly with a person who offended them to work it out.
Yeah, agree here. People are pending over backwards parsing language, you can take any word and make the same argument. Even phrases like "consider", "other", "alternative" can be interpreted in wildly different ways, essentially making conversation much more muted and passive agressive.
Meanwhile the core issue is not discussed, which is; maybe we shouldnt inject mental health into words that are meaningless in that context. Maybe this should be handled with direct conversation instead of passive aggressive ways of inserting some kind of special meaning into random words.
I used to know someone who would constantly use phrases like "I'm not sure we really understand what is going on here..." but it took me many iterations to decode that in fact, they meant "I'm not sure you really understand what is going on here..." With that decoder ring whole conversations turned decidedly more uncomfortable as it was clear this person was not actually working together for mutual understanding or to learn other people's viewpoints but rather harbored a vague hostility towards people expressed in coded means. That actually made me more suspicious of them, not less.
Context would matter here, but the above question on its own wouldn’t typically rise to bad faith, even if phrased as written.
The job of the PM often demands creating project schedules, delegating assignments, spurring their team to deliver assigned tasks on time, and managing the team. It very much is their business to have some sense of how long things take, why they take so long, and get a sense whether the bottleneck is a personnel skill or motivation issue or the technical nature of the problem space.
A good faith answer would likely include an explanation why shipping a button took 3 weeks, would likely explain the relevance of those HTTP calls in your use case, and would help to give them a better sense of the work involved so they can better mentally cost out new interface items without creating expectations you’d be unlikely to meet.
> Is it a surprise that people don't all work in the supportive environment that you have?
No, but what I'm saying was that usage of "just" is not the issue, a shitty environment is. If your boss / coworker / PM doesn't use "just" but still constantly makes it seem like a task should be easy to do in other ways (e.g. telling you your estimate is way too high for a task) and puts pressure on you not listening or accepting to your reasoning, is that better than them using the word "just", you explain why and they get that things aren't as simple as they thought? The underlying issue is not the particular choice of word.
You might say as advice "don't presume a task is easy, if you want to avoid people think/misunderstand it can help to avoid the following words:...". But the really important part would be the first part of this advice.
Though to be fair I don't even know if I'd agree with that advice either. Stuff is misunderstood or not well understood all the time. Expectations exist if you want them to or not. Maybe it's better to communicate those expectations.
> "Why so long? It's just a button that does stuff. Can't you just..."
a) The core aspect to address is not the word "just", but that the person asks you something they consider simple. Changing the wording (removing "just" or other such words) doesn't change the actual sentiment.
b) The "just" in the example does emphasize to the listener further that the speaker is underestimating the task at hand or doesn't yet grasp the full context. While I would see this as problematic usage, it precisely is what can help the listener in identifying that they might have to spend some time to address that misconception in their follow-up reply.
Whether it's ultimately super useful or not I don't know, but it does provide extra signal. I personally would rather have someone use "just" if they do in fact think the task is simple/trivial than beating around the bush. I then understand that there could be an issue of misalignment or even disagreement on difficulty. You really do want to get that out of the way instead of each party in silence, paralyzed, thinking "I still don't get why we cannot / need to do X / Y, but I don't want to sound like ...".
And that goes both ways. I have definitely gotten a good reset and ended up agreeing with the speaker that a solution can in fact be simpler albeit not perfect. And if the speaker and I then agree that it's sufficient, why not. I'm digressing. Important is that communication happens in good faith. Politeness likely doesn't fix this if that's not the case.
"Could you just cache the hot partition keys?" probably doesn't carry any negative baggage when it's said by someone you trust to be empathetic to your situation. i.e. You know they aren't underestimating your abilities, you trust they earnestly want to help, and you know you can ask them for help without being judged.
The "Stuck" example is different. The "just" underestimates the difficulty for the listener. So the speaker may respect their abilities and earnestly want to help, but they've underestimated the challenges of their disability -- and overcoming the challenge is not as simple as asking for help.
However, in both cases, the statements work the same without the word "just". Given how little information it adds and the risk of getting it wrong, I think I'll try to use "just" a little less.
I was surprised to see it as well. I think these discussions are healthy and I personally do find them interesting sometimes, so I guess that should make me less surprised that it has traction.
I think it's partially the tone of blame towards the use of "just". While I am interested in micro-optimizations, especially in how I communicate, I suspect most people don't. I don't begrudge anyone who uses "just" in speech though.
Another article / perspective on this would be written to help others understand why they or others use "just" in speech. This would help people interested in optimizing communication see the flaws in the use of the word, while aiding in understanding/empathy for this who are on the receiving end.
I too am a bit surprised, but my reason for upvoting is that I've been using this idiom my whole life and never have thought about it until this moment; getting the history of usage was super interesting. Figuring out _how_ one would figure out the history of usage is interesting! A little gem.
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 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.)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> "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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Agree, although I think more women fall into this habit of speech, due to societal conditioning to appear non-confrontational and direct. It also seems to reflect more negatively on women as a diffident signal. Thus, while it's generally good advice for everyone, it's more important that women pay attention to their use of the word "just".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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 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”.
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.
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.
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 ;)
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
Jerry Weinberg used to say that when you hear "just" you should substitute "have trouble", and when you hear "should" you should substitute "isn't". So, "just cache the keys" -> "we'll have trouble caching the keys"; "should be easy" -> "isn't easy".
Maybe we could call that Weinberg Substitution or something. Sort of like Russell Conjugation.
He was talking specifically about software projects—I forgot to mention that. He was pointing out how phrases like "that should take less than a week" or "let's just fix it this way" tend to mask problems and often indicate wishful thinking. Of course there's a quippy element, but if you pay attention to such language you'll find that these heuristics work a surprising amount of the time.
Readit News
In the situation where help is clearly needed, 'let's consider possible solutions' is a better entry point, along with 'let's ensure we don't make it worse' - i.e. take a snapshot of the current situation, store the current working file, etc. Now you've gone into a collaborative situation, and if there's a solution the person will feel like they've been a part of it, not like they're an idiot who should have been able to figure it out on their own. Makes for a much better working environment, better morale, sense of being on the team, etc.
For the person on the other end, the person who needs help, this is where keeping a log of your activities (in the lab world, this means a detailed and updated lab notebook, maybe a logging app of some kind for programming), so if someone asks the (sometimes irritating) question of 'what have you tried already' you can just point them to it.
For the case of seriously depressed people who can't get out of bed, that's a bit tougher. Cup of psychedelic mushroom tea perhaps, plus someone to hold their hand for a few hours?
Meh. Just goes to show how communication is a very subjective and personal thing. To my ears, both of those phrases would sound extremely condescending and patronizing. If I were struggling with a problem and someone approached me and said either of those things, I'd be more inclined to say "go f%#@ yourself" than anything else. shrug
"I'm really struggling to set up external authorization for the /download endpoint."
"Why don't you just use @external on it?"
Hopefully leads to either
"This endpoint needs to...[extra constraints]."
"Ah, gotcha."
or, less likely
"There's an @external?"
"Yeah, let me show you."
There are some differences between this and questions like "Why don't you just go for a walk to stop feeling depressed?". Maybe the biggest difference is these tech solutions are not paradoxical. Someone's depression may be defined by their inability to do something like go for a walk and enjoy it. Suggesting they do that is not helpful.
The questions are also more sincere. Like, I literally want to know why you're not doing the easy solution. I'm actually assuming that there's a good reason, like some extra constraint. That's why am I asking "why not?" instead of speaking in the imperative.
There's also a critical difference of the offered solution being much easier than the one attempted, or very easy overall. I might say "Why don't you just sort it alphabetically?" but I wouldn't say "Why don't you just make a DSL?".
I guess it's just that I think it's okay to act like something is small when you really believe it is for the person you're speaking with.
It's also true that at some point, if people are overly prickly, but the problem absolutely has to be solved, then it's going to be 'show me the logs of exactly what you've been doing, now go take a break and let me work on it.' That also will piss people off, most likely.
To anyone who doesn’t relate to this - imagine being a perfectly “normal” human being (if there’s even such a thing) and someone walking up to you and saying straight up that you have a problem and need help and here’s the advice etc. The perfectly rational reaction to that would be the opposite of the intention.
On top of that, there’s always room for ourselves to be wrong and the person receiving the advice be right in their circumstance, so forcing our opinion on them just shows our own ignorance and inability to consider other points of view.
This really isn't better, it's worse IMO. In a situation where help is needed, obviously we're going to consider possible solutions. What do you think I think we should do, maybe pick up our knitting needles, or go run some water polo drills?
It's more condescending than "just" because it is dressing it up in intellectualized bullshit verbiage. Hey good for you, you're a walking thesaurus.
- I don't yet understand why steps x, y, z are necessary. To me it would seem simply/naively doing ... might work but I'm probably missing something.
- Would an (objectively) simpler (though possibly not perfect) solution (which I'm just putting on the table here) suffice here?
- I think we can do ... here and it'll be fine. Should we / let's see if that works, and revisit ? / .
Sure, "just do it" would often be bad, indicating a variety of things like "stop dwelling on this or arguing, do what I say". Or "can you just quickly do this (thing I find trivial but don't understand at all) for me", but in the end it's the context that matters.
Like, I can turn this around as well. The word "don't" is negative and should be avoided at all cost. Better: "could we try ... instead of ..." (see submission title).
Then conclude "don't worry about it" should not be said. Which to be fair is also true in some contexts but again, context!
EDIT: To be clear it is valuable for me to learn that usage of "just" could be problematic. That's important when not knowing the other party but among coworkers I also happen to have more of a relationship with than just one-off comments, these kind of word choices are not what make or break things. Especially in a diverse environment I assume everyone is acting in good faith and I would only let word choices affect me if the sum of my interactions with a coworker has been negative already and I "know" they are trying to incite an argument.
It means don't sit there thinking about how I said "just". Or how it means I think you're dumb. It means just fucking do it. Just do it. Do it.
The people I've enjoyed working the most have just sat down and done it. Difficult things too. Things that took time. They just did the work. So stop thinking about the shenanigans and just do it.
It's sad and funny how much people will fight the words and spend time arguing this is too crass or not kind instead of just doing it.
This is my hill I guess.
It is, however, rare that telling someone else "just do it" gives them that attitude. I have never seen it happen. I have said "just..." and seen the effect described in the article.
Asking questions, developing an understanding of what may be holding someone else back from "just doing it", then offering them any help you can provide them is much more likely to help them develop the attitude, in my experience.
... and assuming that the listener is able to parse and then object to phrasing on the fly. Phrasing can matter, but fine-grained hypercriticism is mostly a useless exercise.
"This feature will take about 3 weeks to ship."
"Why so long? It's just a button that does stuff. Can't you just..."
When the other side of the argument is a PM who can't describe what an HTTP call is, it's hard to look at it as a good faith discussion.
The job of the PM often demands creating project schedules, delegating assignments, spurring their team to deliver assigned tasks on time, and managing the team. It very much is their business to have some sense of how long things take, why they take so long, and get a sense whether the bottleneck is a personnel skill or motivation issue or the technical nature of the problem space.
A good faith answer would likely include an explanation why shipping a button took 3 weeks, would likely explain the relevance of those HTTP calls in your use case, and would help to give them a better sense of the work involved so they can better mentally cost out new interface items without creating expectations you’d be unlikely to meet.
No, but what I'm saying was that usage of "just" is not the issue, a shitty environment is. If your boss / coworker / PM doesn't use "just" but still constantly makes it seem like a task should be easy to do in other ways (e.g. telling you your estimate is way too high for a task) and puts pressure on you not listening or accepting to your reasoning, is that better than them using the word "just", you explain why and they get that things aren't as simple as they thought? The underlying issue is not the particular choice of word.
You might say as advice "don't presume a task is easy, if you want to avoid people think/misunderstand it can help to avoid the following words:...". But the really important part would be the first part of this advice.
Though to be fair I don't even know if I'd agree with that advice either. Stuff is misunderstood or not well understood all the time. Expectations exist if you want them to or not. Maybe it's better to communicate those expectations.
> "Why so long? It's just a button that does stuff. Can't you just..."
a) The core aspect to address is not the word "just", but that the person asks you something they consider simple. Changing the wording (removing "just" or other such words) doesn't change the actual sentiment.
b) The "just" in the example does emphasize to the listener further that the speaker is underestimating the task at hand or doesn't yet grasp the full context. While I would see this as problematic usage, it precisely is what can help the listener in identifying that they might have to spend some time to address that misconception in their follow-up reply.
Whether it's ultimately super useful or not I don't know, but it does provide extra signal. I personally would rather have someone use "just" if they do in fact think the task is simple/trivial than beating around the bush. I then understand that there could be an issue of misalignment or even disagreement on difficulty. You really do want to get that out of the way instead of each party in silence, paralyzed, thinking "I still don't get why we cannot / need to do X / Y, but I don't want to sound like ...".
And that goes both ways. I have definitely gotten a good reset and ended up agreeing with the speaker that a solution can in fact be simpler albeit not perfect. And if the speaker and I then agree that it's sufficient, why not. I'm digressing. Important is that communication happens in good faith. Politeness likely doesn't fix this if that's not the case.
"Could you just cache the hot partition keys?" probably doesn't carry any negative baggage when it's said by someone you trust to be empathetic to your situation. i.e. You know they aren't underestimating your abilities, you trust they earnestly want to help, and you know you can ask them for help without being judged.
The "Stuck" example is different. The "just" underestimates the difficulty for the listener. So the speaker may respect their abilities and earnestly want to help, but they've underestimated the challenges of their disability -- and overcoming the challenge is not as simple as asking for help.
However, in both cases, the statements work the same without the word "just". Given how little information it adds and the risk of getting it wrong, I think I'll try to use "just" a little less.
I think it's partially the tone of blame towards the use of "just". While I am interested in micro-optimizations, especially in how I communicate, I suspect most people don't. I don't begrudge anyone who uses "just" in speech though.
Another article / perspective on this would be written to help others understand why they or others use "just" in speech. This would help people interested in optimizing communication see the flaws in the use of the word, while aiding in understanding/empathy for this who are on the receiving end.
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."
(Sometimes if she was still in earshot he would say it in Spanish which somehow made it even funnier.)
> 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.
“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
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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.
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.
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.
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).
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!"
Just no.
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'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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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"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)
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.
"I just want to make sure ..." vs "I want to make sure ..."
"Just letting you know ..." vs "I want to let you know ...", "I want you to know ..."
"This is just one example ..." vs "This is one example ..."
"I'm just going to unblock ..." vs "I'm unblocking ..."
I struggle with this myself, it's a self-effacing learned behavior.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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 ;)
That frustrates me.
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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'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.
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.
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.
Or: "what have you tried?"
Few people like being asked open-ended questions when they are irritated.
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 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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Sometimes it's just worth the effort to make a mockup of that so they can see their idea doesn't work.
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Maybe we could call that Weinberg Substitution or something. Sort of like Russell Conjugation.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...