17 ms·

The XY Problem

68 points by zajd 11y ago

CuriousSkeptic 11y ago
For a different take on this problem see NVC: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication Also note the crucial symmetry, besides trying to ask X, it is also important to hear X even if Y is spoken.
Amorymeltzer 11y ago
The actual discussion on Meta.SE (http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/66377/229060 http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/66377/229060) is pretty informative, and with some good comments.
minikites 11y ago
Anyone who has worked a computer help desk for more than a week knows this all too well.
- weinzierl 11y ago
  Anyone who has used an computer help desk knows the reverse problem all to well: A: "My sharepoint workflow is broken again, Can you put me through to the sharepoint guys, they helped me yesterday with the same problem." B: "Have you tried turning your computer off and on again?" A: "No, but this is problem with sharepoint". B: "Have You Tried Turning It Off And On Again!" A: "Ok, ok, hang on." 15 Minutes later (big corporate machines can be slow) A: "Didn't help" B: "Ok, we'll reinstall your machine. I'll send you a technician" A: "NO, no, no, nevermind" A (lying voice): "It suddenly seems to be working again"
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - svachalek 11y ago
    Why, yes, yes, I have tried that. Again? If you insist, please wait. Bam! Done! This machine is sooo fast.
  - kamaal 11y ago
    I used to work in a tech support shop for desktop, laptops and other devices a few years back. I had to once explain a furious customer, why their newly purchased desktop doesn't have internet(They had no internet connection). Basically I had to talk to them about how internet works.
davidgerard 11y ago
What would you call geeksplaining answers, the YX Problem? ("I want to do X." "No no no, you want Y." [If I wanted Y, I'd have said 'I want to do Y.'])
- Amorymeltzer 11y ago
  #geeksplaining has massive potential
  - davidgerard 11y ago
    I tried to push the hashtag a coupla years ago but it didn't take off. https://plus.google.com/111502940353406919728/posts/DKDCbDGrhmc https://plus.google.com/111502940353406919728/posts/DKDCbDGr... Note however that everyone immediately chimed in with examples they'd been subjected to.
  - mason240 11y ago
    Yes, because we need another negative preoperative targeted at our community.
    - davidgerard 11y ago
      Considering it's a pretty well justified one, I figure the incentive TO TRY NOT TO DO THAT will be worth it.
      - Zikes 11y ago
        You can't acknowledge the prevalence of the XY Problem and expect geeks not to act on it.
        davidgerard 11y ago
        Oh, absolutely. The overcompensation the other way is a pain in the backside, though, and reminds me why people don't like nerds much. (And I say that as one.)
thyrsus 11y ago
I'm so happy this wasn't about chromosomes. At least, I hope it isn't. :-) ...I'll see myself out.
JoshTriplett 11y ago
The example I've always used is "How do I remove the blade guard from a chainsaw?" In response to which you should very carefully find out what they're really trying to do. Unless you want their next question to be "what kind of knot makes the best tourniquet?", or perhaps "what's the fastest way to dissolve human bones?"
stephengillie 11y ago
This has been described in marketing as the "drill-hole" problem. If you work at a hardware store, and a customer comes in looking for a drill bit, they aren't actually trying to buy a drill bit. They're trying to buy a hole in their wall. Why would they want a hole in their wall? To put a screw or nail into it. Why would they do want a nail or screw in their wall? To hang a picture. And now you can start with all kinds of picture-hanging solutions, some of which don't require the screw or even the hole in the wall. Edit: And this only used 3 of the 5 Whys. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys
- krapp 11y ago
  Let me guess... those picture-hanging solutions the customer really wants just happen to cost more than the drill bit they specifically asked about?
  - stephengillie 11y ago
    Well yes, you could run your business that way. And maybe your customer lives in a building with asbestos or old lathe walls or another reason not to drill holes in the wall. Or maybe the customer just doesn't want to risk putting a nail in the wall because last time it went right into a water pipe and they had to replace their entire entryway - 2 walls, the floor, and rehang the front door.
  - shostack 11y ago
    Possibly yes. I think that's where the sales culture of the company comes into play. At somewhere like Best Buy I'd expect them to push the most expensive option regardless of other considerations. Somewhere else where I trust the sales person, I would expect them to present me with a variety of options based on the defined scope of the problem I'm trying to solve, and be able to communicate the pros and cons of each, with "more expensive" being a con that is presumably outweighed by some of the pros.
- tedunangst 11y ago
  Or they're a carpenter who builds houses for a living. "Why are you trying to build a house? It's so much easier to just buy one."
Kenji 11y ago
I thought this was going to be another post about bro culture in tech and how bad it is. I am pleasantly surprised that I was wrong.
nilkn 11y ago
There's an inverse phenomenon in which the question asker has legitimately found the appropriate solution to their problem, but people are combative and unwilling to help because they insist on knowing the full context, erroneously believing the situation to be an instance of the XY problem. This sometimes leads to a huge digression because explaining the full context is not always as simple as "I want the file extension". I've seen this fairly often on Stack Overflow, where someone is unable to get an answer to their question and instead only gets interrogated. In the worst case, this creates a prominent link in Google results to the question with no answer.
- zajd 11y ago
  Can you provide an example of this? Either way, in a Q&A site like StackOverflow, asking for more context for a problem is rarely an issue in of itself. I find that more often than not people that are put off by that are in fact asking bad questions.
  - fishtoaster 11y ago
    An example that happened to me recently regarding a git problem: I had a few changed files in a working directory. I did `git add -A` to stage them. I then intended to `git stash` those changes, but I accidentally did `git stash pop`. I now have two sets of unrelated changes checked out: one staged and one not. I'd like to just stash the staged changes for now, but I don't know how to do that off the top of my head. Google brings up this answer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14759748/stashing-only-staged-changes-in-git-is-it-possible http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14759748/stashing-only-st... The original poster asks pretty much what I'd like to know: "How can I stash only staged changes?" However, he also provides some background. It sounds like he legitimately has an XY problem here, and the top answer is a long discussion of alternate workflows. However, when I search for something like "git stash only staged", I get a very unhelpful answer.
    - zajd 11y ago
      But that's not what he asks, that's just one of the many questions he puts forth, including this one at the end: "Am I going about this the wrong way? Am I misunderstanding how git can work in other ways to simplify my process?" Which is answered correctly. It could have been a typical XY problem but he adds enough background information that he's able to get a better answer. Great question AND great answer. I'll give you that Google didn't index that question particularly well, but that's not really StackOverflow's fault.
JoshTriplett 11y ago
On the one hand, this is a real problem. On the other hand, the source linked as "source 2" at the bottom demonstrates just how awful, condescending, and elitist geeks can be when lording knowledge over others. It's not hard to be friendly, and those IRC logs are nothing to be proud of.
- virtualsue 11y ago
  This is only too true, and I have no doubt that this behaviour has deeply discouraged people looking for a bit of help to get them up the learning curve.
- blakeyrat 11y ago
  The "helpers" in both examples are awful. Ugh. Also representative of all of my attempts to get support via IRC.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    It varies heavily by channel. It's impressive what you can produce if you decide ahead of time that your community won't be that way. For instance, the Rust community is exceptional; I would never expect to see anything like this there.
gue5t 11y ago
This is my favorite occurrence of the phenomenon: http://www.tech-archive.net/Archive/Development/microsoft.public.win32.programmer.kernel/2007-10/msg00012.html http://www.tech-archive.net/Archive/Development/microsoft.pu...
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  Note the lack of a response actually helping the person. That's an occurrence of needless snark, not a positive demonstration of how to help someone asking for help. Here's a better response: "What kind of information are you looking to obtain? Much of that information is already read by the OS and provided via various APIs."
benagain 11y ago
Even the most seasoned expert could spend a little time getting to know the situation before attempting to jump to the answer. If the user's question is not a precise statment of the issue that needs attention, don't worry, this is normal. In my opinion, it is up to the community to either tease out the real question and prompt the user to make some edits, or flag/downvote and give some useful criticism.
callesgg 11y ago
Why is it called the xy problem? it is not realy a problem... It is a description of a common interaction betwean two persons.
- spacehome 11y ago
  That's a great question. If this is such a common problem, one might reason that people may want to refer to this category of problems occasionally. How would you describe this category of common problems to a third party? Would it take more syllables than "XY Problem"? If so, you've discovered why it can be useful to invent common vocabulary.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

68 points by zajd 11y ago

For a different take on this problem see NVC: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication Also note the crucial symmetry, besides trying to ask X, it is also important to hear X even if Y is spoken.

Amorymeltzer 11y ago

The actual discussion on Meta.SE (http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/66377/229060 http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/66377/229060) is pretty informative, and with some good comments.

minikites 11y ago

Anyone who has worked a computer help desk for more than a week knows this all too well.

weinzierl 11y ago
Anyone who has used an computer help desk knows the reverse problem all to well: A: "My sharepoint workflow is broken again, Can you put me through to the sharepoint guys, they helped me yesterday with the same problem." B: "Have you tried turning your computer off and on again?" A: "No, but this is problem with sharepoint". B: "Have You Tried Turning It Off And On Again!" A: "Ok, ok, hang on." 15 Minutes later (big corporate machines can be slow) A: "Didn't help" B: "Ok, we'll reinstall your machine. I'll send you a technician" A: "NO, no, no, nevermind" A (lying voice): "It suddenly seems to be working again"
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- svachalek 11y ago
  Why, yes, yes, I have tried that. Again? If you insist, please wait. Bam! Done! This machine is sooo fast.
- kamaal 11y ago
  I used to work in a tech support shop for desktop, laptops and other devices a few years back. I had to once explain a furious customer, why their newly purchased desktop doesn't have internet(They had no internet connection). Basically I had to talk to them about how internet works.

davidgerard 11y ago

What would you call geeksplaining answers, the YX Problem? ("I want to do X." "No no no, you want Y." [If I wanted Y, I'd have said 'I want to do Y.'])

Amorymeltzer 11y ago
#geeksplaining has massive potential
- davidgerard 11y ago
  I tried to push the hashtag a coupla years ago but it didn't take off. https://plus.google.com/111502940353406919728/posts/DKDCbDGrhmc https://plus.google.com/111502940353406919728/posts/DKDCbDGr... Note however that everyone immediately chimed in with examples they'd been subjected to.
- mason240 11y ago
  Yes, because we need another negative preoperative targeted at our community.
  - davidgerard 11y ago
    Considering it's a pretty well justified one, I figure the incentive TO TRY NOT TO DO THAT will be worth it.
    - Zikes 11y ago
      You can't acknowledge the prevalence of the XY Problem and expect geeks not to act on it.
      - davidgerard 11y ago
        Oh, absolutely. The overcompensation the other way is a pain in the backside, though, and reminds me why people don't like nerds much. (And I say that as one.)

thyrsus 11y ago

I'm so happy this wasn't about chromosomes. At least, I hope it isn't. :-) ...I'll see myself out.

JoshTriplett 11y ago

The example I've always used is "How do I remove the blade guard from a chainsaw?" In response to which you should very carefully find out what they're really trying to do. Unless you want their next question to be "what kind of knot makes the best tourniquet?", or perhaps "what's the fastest way to dissolve human bones?"

stephengillie 11y ago

This has been described in marketing as the "drill-hole" problem. If you work at a hardware store, and a customer comes in looking for a drill bit, they aren't actually trying to buy a drill bit. They're trying to buy a hole in their wall. Why would they want a hole in their wall? To put a screw or nail into it. Why would they do want a nail or screw in their wall? To hang a picture. And now you can start with all kinds of picture-hanging solutions, some of which don't require the screw or even the hole in the wall. Edit: And this only used 3 of the 5 Whys. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys

krapp 11y ago
Let me guess... those picture-hanging solutions the customer really wants just happen to cost more than the drill bit they specifically asked about?
- stephengillie 11y ago
  Well yes, you could run your business that way. And maybe your customer lives in a building with asbestos or old lathe walls or another reason not to drill holes in the wall. Or maybe the customer just doesn't want to risk putting a nail in the wall because last time it went right into a water pipe and they had to replace their entire entryway - 2 walls, the floor, and rehang the front door.
- shostack 11y ago
  Possibly yes. I think that's where the sales culture of the company comes into play. At somewhere like Best Buy I'd expect them to push the most expensive option regardless of other considerations. Somewhere else where I trust the sales person, I would expect them to present me with a variety of options based on the defined scope of the problem I'm trying to solve, and be able to communicate the pros and cons of each, with "more expensive" being a con that is presumably outweighed by some of the pros.
tedunangst 11y ago
Or they're a carpenter who builds houses for a living. "Why are you trying to build a house? It's so much easier to just buy one."

Kenji 11y ago

I thought this was going to be another post about bro culture in tech and how bad it is. I am pleasantly surprised that I was wrong.

nilkn 11y ago

There's an inverse phenomenon in which the question asker has legitimately found the appropriate solution to their problem, but people are combative and unwilling to help because they insist on knowing the full context, erroneously believing the situation to be an instance of the XY problem. This sometimes leads to a huge digression because explaining the full context is not always as simple as "I want the file extension". I've seen this fairly often on Stack Overflow, where someone is unable to get an answer to their question and instead only gets interrogated. In the worst case, this creates a prominent link in Google results to the question with no answer.

zajd 11y ago
Can you provide an example of this? Either way, in a Q&A site like StackOverflow, asking for more context for a problem is rarely an issue in of itself. I find that more often than not people that are put off by that are in fact asking bad questions.
- fishtoaster 11y ago
  An example that happened to me recently regarding a git problem: I had a few changed files in a working directory. I did `git add -A` to stage them. I then intended to `git stash` those changes, but I accidentally did `git stash pop`. I now have two sets of unrelated changes checked out: one staged and one not. I'd like to just stash the staged changes for now, but I don't know how to do that off the top of my head. Google brings up this answer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14759748/stashing-only-staged-changes-in-git-is-it-possible http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14759748/stashing-only-st... The original poster asks pretty much what I'd like to know: "How can I stash only staged changes?" However, he also provides some background. It sounds like he legitimately has an XY problem here, and the top answer is a long discussion of alternate workflows. However, when I search for something like "git stash only staged", I get a very unhelpful answer.
  - zajd 11y ago
    But that's not what he asks, that's just one of the many questions he puts forth, including this one at the end: "Am I going about this the wrong way? Am I misunderstanding how git can work in other ways to simplify my process?" Which is answered correctly. It could have been a typical XY problem but he adds enough background information that he's able to get a better answer. Great question AND great answer. I'll give you that Google didn't index that question particularly well, but that's not really StackOverflow's fault.

JoshTriplett 11y ago

On the one hand, this is a real problem. On the other hand, the source linked as "source 2" at the bottom demonstrates just how awful, condescending, and elitist geeks can be when lording knowledge over others. It's not hard to be friendly, and those IRC logs are nothing to be proud of.

virtualsue 11y ago
This is only too true, and I have no doubt that this behaviour has deeply discouraged people looking for a bit of help to get them up the learning curve.
blakeyrat 11y ago
The "helpers" in both examples are awful. Ugh. Also representative of all of my attempts to get support via IRC.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  It varies heavily by channel. It's impressive what you can produce if you decide ahead of time that your community won't be that way. For instance, the Rust community is exceptional; I would never expect to see anything like this there.

gue5t 11y ago

This is my favorite occurrence of the phenomenon: http://www.tech-archive.net/Archive/Development/microsoft.public.win32.programmer.kernel/2007-10/msg00012.html http://www.tech-archive.net/Archive/Development/microsoft.pu...

JoshTriplett 11y ago
Note the lack of a response actually helping the person. That's an occurrence of needless snark, not a positive demonstration of how to help someone asking for help. Here's a better response: "What kind of information are you looking to obtain? Much of that information is already read by the OS and provided via various APIs."

benagain 11y ago

Even the most seasoned expert could spend a little time getting to know the situation before attempting to jump to the answer. If the user's question is not a precise statment of the issue that needs attention, don't worry, this is normal. In my opinion, it is up to the community to either tease out the real question and prompt the user to make some edits, or flag/downvote and give some useful criticism.

callesgg 11y ago

Why is it called the xy problem? it is not realy a problem... It is a description of a common interaction betwean two persons.

spacehome 11y ago
That's a great question. If this is such a common problem, one might reason that people may want to refer to this category of problems occasionally. How would you describe this category of common problems to a third party? Would it take more syllables than "XY Problem"? If so, you've discovered why it can be useful to invent common vocabulary.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]