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« Answer the question first ». There are so so many interactions that would go better if people would only do that. Yes, you may well be able to guess that th

« Answer the question first ». There are so so many interactions that would go better if people would only do that. Yes, you may well be able to guess that the asker is taking the wrong approach, and if they only told you what they were really trying to achieve you might be able to tell them what your preferred way of doing that is. But they haven't asked you about that. If I ask "about how much would it cost to build the hull of an oil tanker out of titanium?", there's no need to ask me why I think I want to do such a daft thing, or tell me about all the manufacturing problems it would doubtless involve. Once I hear about the cost I'm going to give up on the idea anyway.

nicbou 6y ago
On the other hand, you might be facing an XY problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem Sometimes it's better to question a person's motives than to hand them a shotgun to shoot themselves in the foot with.
- mjw1007 6y ago
  You very likely are facing an XY problem. It's usually still best to start by answering the question actually asked, and let the asker carry on from there. Very often the answer to the question is "there's no way to do that", or "you'd have to build a whole Z by hand first", and the questioner will then back away from Y on their own.
  - Kalium 6y ago
    When responding with an XY problem with the answer up front, it's always worth bearing in mind that there's a very good chance that whatever you say after that will be blathering into the void. The consequences of this, especially if on StackOverflow or similar, can be hard to foresee. This is perhaps something to be cautious of one-size-fits-all approaches to, especially if the answer could be dangerous in the wrong hands. The universality of `chmod 777` among people with no understanding of UNIX file permissions as a tool to solve all their problems is a great example.
    - jbay808 6y ago
      On Stackoverflow, keep in mind that any other users with similar questions may have them closed as duplicates and redirected to the one you're answering, and even if this user has an XY problem, they might not, so you should answer the question first.
      - Kalium 6y ago
        You're absolutely right! There are potentially a great many readers with exactly the same question, and any response should bear that in mind. At the same time, Stackoverflow and similar public fora are doubly dangerous for the issue I've described. Instead of the possibility of one person mishandling information they're not equipped to contextualize, you have potentially tens of thousands who will stop reading once they get the answer you have helpfully provided first. Again, you're completely correct. Any response should bear in mind the possibly sizable audience. I think it might be the case that there could be scenarios where answering the question as asked first is actually the least helpful thing one could do for this audience. I have personally fallen into this trap, reading the first few sentences of something helpful and getting the dangerous information I was looking for, coming back for the rest only when it blew up in my face.
        jbay808 6y ago
        (I guess it's okay to answer the question last, too, as long as it gets answered).
- wyattpeak 6y ago
  While perhaps true, I think the toxicity of many support boards, especially Stack Overflow, are part of the reason XY problems are pervasive. If you ask a question without presenting your best attempt at a solution, your question will be derided as lazy. If you ask a question presenting a poor solution (of course it's poor, you don't know how to do it), your question will be derided as wrongheaded. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
- skocznymroczny 6y ago
  Yes, but preemptively assuming a XY problem is also not good. Many times I've seen a question "how to make an input field update when I press a button" and the answer is "you should just use React".
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  I struggle with this a lot to be honest. In another comment in this comment section I've mentioned working with a technology; while working with it, I run into an issue and I'd like to resolve the issue. But the issue I'm running into now may be a dealbreaker for continuing to work with the technology; that is, if I were to ask someone neutral, they would tell me the technology isn't suitable for my use case. The main thing with the XY problem is that if I'm told that it's my technology choice, architecture or solution direction is wrong, I have to consider whether to replace, re-architect or rewrite big chunks of my application. I mean in my case it's an investment of days, but there's bigger applications out there where we're talking in work-years. And for a manager, or in my case someone who has to balance his own time for the most part, that's a difficult decision to make that shouldn't be taken lightly. So please, while the XY problem is indeed an issue, start a reply by just answering the question; "how do I do x" SHOULD be a straightforward question in a lot of cases. In the second half of a reply, as this article implies, you can point out that you suspect that the question isn't the real underlying issue. Have the person asking the question decide for themselves what to do with that information.
codetrotter 6y ago
> « Answer the question first ». > There are so so many interactions that would go better if people would only do that. Haha yeah. One of the worst offenders of this that I've seen is the community at discussions.apple.com. So many times have I been googling something that I wonder about macOS and there are results from discussions.apple.com and the responses are not at all helpful; instead they offer irrelevant suggestions. Meanwhile, results from apple.stackexchange.com are consistently great in my experience. (Like a lot of the other SE sites.)
scruffyherder 6y ago
My favourite is a torrent of people telling them to google it, and chiding them for being so lazy. And it’s inevitable that this will be the top result in Google’s results along with many like this. The only thing worse is finding people with the exact same issue and then “I fixed it myself”... with no hint of what they did. Nobody writes for the 3rd party from the future
- mathw 6y ago
  I once had the most intractable, weird problem I'd ever faced up to that point, no help from my colleagues (I only had one and I was very, very much more experienced in that area), spent ages trying to understand it, trying to find answers. I eventually found someone else with the same problem, in a German support forum, who had fixed it... but never explained how. There is an xkcd for this, and it felt like it was written just for me.
the_jeremy 6y ago
That's understandable... but it usually takes a lot longer to calculate that cost than it does to tell you "don't do this, it's silly and would have all these problems". I answer questions on bash/awk/sed in Stack Overflow. You can do a lot of things with those languages, but sometimes people think they know what they want ("how do I do this with 'cut'?") when they could do it much more easily with another utility (awk/sed).
- mjw1007 6y ago
  In the special case of Stack Overflow, I think the overriding concern should be to make sure that the page with the title "How do I do foo with 'cut'" has, as its most visible response, a description of how to do foo with 'cut'. A note afterwards pointing the user to sed or awk is a fine thing, but the purpose of Stack Overflow is to be a curated database of questions and answers, not a support forum.

nicbou 6y ago

On the other hand, you might be facing an XY problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem Sometimes it's better to question a person's motives than to hand them a shotgun to shoot themselves in the foot with.

mjw1007 6y ago
You very likely are facing an XY problem. It's usually still best to start by answering the question actually asked, and let the asker carry on from there. Very often the answer to the question is "there's no way to do that", or "you'd have to build a whole Z by hand first", and the questioner will then back away from Y on their own.
- Kalium 6y ago
  When responding with an XY problem with the answer up front, it's always worth bearing in mind that there's a very good chance that whatever you say after that will be blathering into the void. The consequences of this, especially if on StackOverflow or similar, can be hard to foresee. This is perhaps something to be cautious of one-size-fits-all approaches to, especially if the answer could be dangerous in the wrong hands. The universality of `chmod 777` among people with no understanding of UNIX file permissions as a tool to solve all their problems is a great example.
  - jbay808 6y ago
    On Stackoverflow, keep in mind that any other users with similar questions may have them closed as duplicates and redirected to the one you're answering, and even if this user has an XY problem, they might not, so you should answer the question first.
    - Kalium 6y ago
      You're absolutely right! There are potentially a great many readers with exactly the same question, and any response should bear that in mind. At the same time, Stackoverflow and similar public fora are doubly dangerous for the issue I've described. Instead of the possibility of one person mishandling information they're not equipped to contextualize, you have potentially tens of thousands who will stop reading once they get the answer you have helpfully provided first. Again, you're completely correct. Any response should bear in mind the possibly sizable audience. I think it might be the case that there could be scenarios where answering the question as asked first is actually the least helpful thing one could do for this audience. I have personally fallen into this trap, reading the first few sentences of something helpful and getting the dangerous information I was looking for, coming back for the rest only when it blew up in my face.
      - jbay808 6y ago
        (I guess it's okay to answer the question last, too, as long as it gets answered).
wyattpeak 6y ago
While perhaps true, I think the toxicity of many support boards, especially Stack Overflow, are part of the reason XY problems are pervasive. If you ask a question without presenting your best attempt at a solution, your question will be derided as lazy. If you ask a question presenting a poor solution (of course it's poor, you don't know how to do it), your question will be derided as wrongheaded. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
skocznymroczny 6y ago
Yes, but preemptively assuming a XY problem is also not good. Many times I've seen a question "how to make an input field update when I press a button" and the answer is "you should just use React".
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I struggle with this a lot to be honest. In another comment in this comment section I've mentioned working with a technology; while working with it, I run into an issue and I'd like to resolve the issue. But the issue I'm running into now may be a dealbreaker for continuing to work with the technology; that is, if I were to ask someone neutral, they would tell me the technology isn't suitable for my use case. The main thing with the XY problem is that if I'm told that it's my technology choice, architecture or solution direction is wrong, I have to consider whether to replace, re-architect or rewrite big chunks of my application. I mean in my case it's an investment of days, but there's bigger applications out there where we're talking in work-years. And for a manager, or in my case someone who has to balance his own time for the most part, that's a difficult decision to make that shouldn't be taken lightly. So please, while the XY problem is indeed an issue, start a reply by just answering the question; "how do I do x" SHOULD be a straightforward question in a lot of cases. In the second half of a reply, as this article implies, you can point out that you suspect that the question isn't the real underlying issue. Have the person asking the question decide for themselves what to do with that information.

codetrotter 6y ago

> « Answer the question first ». > There are so so many interactions that would go better if people would only do that. Haha yeah. One of the worst offenders of this that I've seen is the community at discussions.apple.com. So many times have I been googling something that I wonder about macOS and there are results from discussions.apple.com and the responses are not at all helpful; instead they offer irrelevant suggestions. Meanwhile, results from apple.stackexchange.com are consistently great in my experience. (Like a lot of the other SE sites.)

scruffyherder 6y ago

My favourite is a torrent of people telling them to google it, and chiding them for being so lazy. And it’s inevitable that this will be the top result in Google’s results along with many like this. The only thing worse is finding people with the exact same issue and then “I fixed it myself”... with no hint of what they did. Nobody writes for the 3rd party from the future

mathw 6y ago
I once had the most intractable, weird problem I'd ever faced up to that point, no help from my colleagues (I only had one and I was very, very much more experienced in that area), spent ages trying to understand it, trying to find answers. I eventually found someone else with the same problem, in a German support forum, who had fixed it... but never explained how. There is an xkcd for this, and it felt like it was written just for me.

the_jeremy 6y ago

That's understandable... but it usually takes a lot longer to calculate that cost than it does to tell you "don't do this, it's silly and would have all these problems". I answer questions on bash/awk/sed in Stack Overflow. You can do a lot of things with those languages, but sometimes people think they know what they want ("how do I do this with 'cut'?") when they could do it much more easily with another utility (awk/sed).

mjw1007 6y ago
In the special case of Stack Overflow, I think the overriding concern should be to make sure that the page with the title "How do I do foo with 'cut'" has, as its most visible response, a description of how to do foo with 'cut'. A note afterwards pointing the user to sed or awk is a fine thing, but the purpose of Stack Overflow is to be a curated database of questions and answers, not a support forum.