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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 f

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.

andsoitis 4y ago
> "have you tried..." Or: "what have you tried?"
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  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".
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    Yep, exactly. The only caveat I'd offer is that sometimes this is not a good question to ask ("what have you tried?") because it can be interpreted as "are you doing anything about it?" Edge case, true, but still worth being intentional about.
    - torstenvl 4y ago
      Asking "what have you tried?" suggests that the answer to the question will lead to the answer to the problem. But the person seeking help already knows what they have tried, and they don't have an answer. So in the absolute best case, it's a useless question, you're just trying to get them to rubber duck it. In a less-than-great case, it'll be taken as a suggestion that they need your guidance in basic critical thinking and troubleshooting. In my view, the very limited potential upside (successful Socratic rubber ducking) is not worth the significant potential downside (insulting them by suggesting they already have the answer, they're just not smart enough to see it).
      - BlueTemplar 4y ago
        People are not equal in (sub-(sub-))domain experience. And we all can be distracted or dumb sometimes. Consider how powerful rubber ducking is : it works even when you're not talking to another person ! (And you might not think about doing it in a stressful situation.) It just needs to be done tactfully. And in case it was a stupid mistake, defuse the ego issues by telling an anecdote about how you've made a similar one. (It's even helpful if it was a dangerous mistake : telling how you got punished, but the world didn't end.)
      - michaelt 4y ago
        > In my view, the very limited potential upside (successful Socratic rubber ducking) It depends on the situation - if you're not familiar with the person asking, and you're talking with them one-on-one, it can be a chance for them to establish their dignity so you can triage their request properly. If I'm looking after a shopping website and someone tells me they can't put things in their basket, I might usually start by asking with some pretty basic questions. By giving them a chance to tell me they can't put things in their basket on pages X and Y but can on Z, and it only happens when using Firefox, and that they've tested with multiple accounts, these browser versions and OSes, with and without plugins/ad blockers, and they've got confirmation from several other people - probably I'm going to skip asking them to clear their cookies and I'll launch straight into reproducing it myself. On the other hand, if I'm looking after a shopping website with clumsy warehouse staff and a customer tells me they ordered two widgets and only received one, probably I don't need any more info from the customer - and resolving the problem rather than batting it back to the customer would be good customer service.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    That's why you preface it with "just to be sure". Depending on the situation, "what have you tried" can come before or after (or in the middle, if several obvious known failures exist).
- huhtenberg 4y ago
  "Everything, nothing works". Few people like being asked open-ended questions when they are irritated.
  - jerf 4y ago
    Mmmm, well, I'm all about being accommodating and gracious to people under stress, but as this is all generally in the context of a professional interaction, there are some expectations of those who are being asked questions. If you don't want to be pestered with my every guess about what you may have already done, likely hitting several things you have, you really ought to be able to answer the question "what have you tried" with something a bit more specific. I'm not asking for total accuracy. I've certainly experienced on both sides accidentally giving the impression something was tried that in fact wasn't and all sorts of such verbal errors and mistakes. But you do need to give something in response to that question.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      > but as this is all generally in the context of a professional interaction Odds are the person you are talking to have tried several dozens of things, 2/3 of what they don't even remember anymore. Asking "what have you tried" is very often an unprofessional display of power disguised as a time-waster question. The one exception when the person answering has not had time to try several dozen options.
      - theamk 4y ago
        Nah, it is a basic "getting to know" question. "I rebooted the machine" will get one response, "I cleared the cache and local storage; and also reproduced in incognito window" will get the other and "I am not going to answer that, also you are unprofessional" will get yhe third type. Withholding useful information and being rude about it is not the best way to get help.
    - 4y ago
- aloisdg 4y ago
  Been there. People hate that https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251309/comments-cant-contain-that-content-what-have-you-tried https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251309/comments-can...
- rgoulter 4y ago
  I'm less optimistic about whether phrasing helps. 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.
actionablefiber 4y ago
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.
- JJMcJ 4y ago
  Similar to correcting a big shot's mistaken notion, where you might say something like "Curiously, that turns out not to be the case."
- mindcrime 4y ago
  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.
  - hamburglar 4y ago
    I also like “could you try…” as a way of acknowledging that it’s a suggestion that may be unworkable for reasons I don’t know, and that I’m willing to hear that.
    - thecrumb 4y ago
      "could we try"
      - woopwoop24 4y ago
        not always a we
        4y ago
bombcar 4y ago
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.
- rob74 4y ago
  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 ;)
  - cmmeur01 4y ago
    I’d suggest a phone call, but yeah dealing with the actual users is far better than some middle manager without a clue how the job actually gets performed.
blowski 4y ago
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.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  This is soooo important ! (And not just in marriage...)
- 2devnull 4y ago
  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.
  - SnowHill9902 4y ago
    I wouldn’t recommend this. First of all, you shouldn’t provide personal opinions such as “terrible”. Then, asking what they are going to do forces them to confront the problem which they may not be ready to do yet, or may not want to articulate to you.
    - derefr 4y ago
      Usually in the sort of situation where you'd say this, you're just reflecting the speaker's very-clearly-expressed emotional state back at them to demonstrate that you're actively engaged in listening and considering their statements. It's not something you'd say in response to a text complaint, where there's not enough "bandwidth" to clearly communicate the complainant's emotional state; but it's something CSRs are trained to say on phone calls all the time. It's also the reason that therapists vastly prefer speaking in person, to video calls, to phone calls; and almost never even consider doing "therapy via text chat." There's not enough bandwidth in text chat to enable a therapist to properly engage with and respond to the emotional content of a client's communication; but with each additional level (voice, video, in-person meeting), that's more possible. (Interesting consideration, given that: suicide/crisis hotlines should probably consider offering video calls as an option, as the increased bandwidth for emotional content will allow the operator to engage with + potentially help the caller on a deeper level.)
dr-detroit 4y ago
edw519 4y ago
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"
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  Thanks for the positive feedback! 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”.
  - edw519 4y ago
    I can’t go so far as to change how the warehouse operates. Why not? That's what differentiates those who sling code from those who do real Digital Transformation (not the crap our bosses spout off.) it wouldn’t hurt to answer my questions about how the warehouse operates and ask me to come up with solutions in line with that This says volumes about what they think about you and worse, what they think about their business and the problem at hand. Most users are fleas who used to jump 6 feet but now only jump 3 feet because they can't even imagine any more. Sorry to hijack the discussion and I didn't mean to suggest you should be doing any more than you are. (Believe me, at my rate, I get the job done and move on.) I just enjoyed seeing someone bring up the bigger picture.
nostromo 4y ago
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.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  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. So far no reply to any of the 3 solutions.
  - jcheng 4y ago
    Not sure why, but now I really want to know how this turns out!
    - martinflack 4y ago
      At least the conversation hasn't progressed to printing it upside down or on the back...
    - unsupp0rted 4y ago
      If history with this client is any indication, they will not realize I have offered these viable solutions at all. A week or so from now the warehouse will complain vaguely that they have “no place to write”. The client will blame me for the poorly designed packing slip and suggest we “just go back” to the Excel version (which required multiple hours a day of manual data entry by an employee who is no longer at the company and cost untold $ in human error).
SlickNixon 4y ago
Have you tried scaling the output of the system by 77%, rotating it counter clockwise by 90 degrees, and aligning it to the bottom of the page?
yboris 4y ago
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.
reaperducer 4y ago
A surprisingly successful shortcut for dealing with people who won't listen is to throw out the old "Best practices" canard. "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."
- mrweasel 4y ago
  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.
deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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giantg2 4y ago
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.
gwbas1c 4y ago
> 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.
smoe 4y ago
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.
colechristensen 4y ago
“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.
Max-q 4y ago
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?
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  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.
  - Max-q 4y ago
    Thanks :)
tyingq 4y ago
> "just make it landscape" Sometimes it's just worth the effort to make a mockup of that so they can see their idea doesn't work.
ArcMex 4y ago
Have you tried mirroring? 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-Depended-ebook/dp/B014DUR7L2/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=1C3M4XV2VOXO&keywords=never+split+the+difference+chris+voss&qid=1667995750&sprefix=mever+split+the+%2Caps%2C1062&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-De...
siculars 4y ago
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.

andsoitis 4y ago

> "have you tried..." Or: "what have you tried?"

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
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".
- andsoitis 4y ago
  Yep, exactly. The only caveat I'd offer is that sometimes this is not a good question to ask ("what have you tried?") because it can be interpreted as "are you doing anything about it?" Edge case, true, but still worth being intentional about.
  - torstenvl 4y ago
    Asking "what have you tried?" suggests that the answer to the question will lead to the answer to the problem. But the person seeking help already knows what they have tried, and they don't have an answer. So in the absolute best case, it's a useless question, you're just trying to get them to rubber duck it. In a less-than-great case, it'll be taken as a suggestion that they need your guidance in basic critical thinking and troubleshooting. In my view, the very limited potential upside (successful Socratic rubber ducking) is not worth the significant potential downside (insulting them by suggesting they already have the answer, they're just not smart enough to see it).
    - BlueTemplar 4y ago
      People are not equal in (sub-(sub-))domain experience. And we all can be distracted or dumb sometimes. Consider how powerful rubber ducking is : it works even when you're not talking to another person ! (And you might not think about doing it in a stressful situation.) It just needs to be done tactfully. And in case it was a stupid mistake, defuse the ego issues by telling an anecdote about how you've made a similar one. (It's even helpful if it was a dangerous mistake : telling how you got punished, but the world didn't end.)
    - michaelt 4y ago
      > In my view, the very limited potential upside (successful Socratic rubber ducking) It depends on the situation - if you're not familiar with the person asking, and you're talking with them one-on-one, it can be a chance for them to establish their dignity so you can triage their request properly. If I'm looking after a shopping website and someone tells me they can't put things in their basket, I might usually start by asking with some pretty basic questions. By giving them a chance to tell me they can't put things in their basket on pages X and Y but can on Z, and it only happens when using Firefox, and that they've tested with multiple accounts, these browser versions and OSes, with and without plugins/ad blockers, and they've got confirmation from several other people - probably I'm going to skip asking them to clear their cookies and I'll launch straight into reproducing it myself. On the other hand, if I'm looking after a shopping website with clumsy warehouse staff and a customer tells me they ordered two widgets and only received one, probably I don't need any more info from the customer - and resolving the problem rather than batting it back to the customer would be good customer service.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  That's why you preface it with "just to be sure". Depending on the situation, "what have you tried" can come before or after (or in the middle, if several obvious known failures exist).
huhtenberg 4y ago
"Everything, nothing works". Few people like being asked open-ended questions when they are irritated.
- jerf 4y ago
  Mmmm, well, I'm all about being accommodating and gracious to people under stress, but as this is all generally in the context of a professional interaction, there are some expectations of those who are being asked questions. If you don't want to be pestered with my every guess about what you may have already done, likely hitting several things you have, you really ought to be able to answer the question "what have you tried" with something a bit more specific. I'm not asking for total accuracy. I've certainly experienced on both sides accidentally giving the impression something was tried that in fact wasn't and all sorts of such verbal errors and mistakes. But you do need to give something in response to that question.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    > but as this is all generally in the context of a professional interaction Odds are the person you are talking to have tried several dozens of things, 2/3 of what they don't even remember anymore. Asking "what have you tried" is very often an unprofessional display of power disguised as a time-waster question. The one exception when the person answering has not had time to try several dozen options.
    - theamk 4y ago
      Nah, it is a basic "getting to know" question. "I rebooted the machine" will get one response, "I cleared the cache and local storage; and also reproduced in incognito window" will get the other and "I am not going to answer that, also you are unprofessional" will get yhe third type. Withholding useful information and being rude about it is not the best way to get help.
  - 4y ago
aloisdg 4y ago
Been there. People hate that https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251309/comments-cant-contain-that-content-what-have-you-tried https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251309/comments-can...
rgoulter 4y ago
I'm less optimistic about whether phrasing helps. 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.

actionablefiber 4y ago

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.

JJMcJ 4y ago
Similar to correcting a big shot's mistaken notion, where you might say something like "Curiously, that turns out not to be the case."
mindcrime 4y ago
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.
- hamburglar 4y ago
  I also like “could you try…” as a way of acknowledging that it’s a suggestion that may be unworkable for reasons I don’t know, and that I’m willing to hear that.
  - thecrumb 4y ago
    "could we try"
    - woopwoop24 4y ago
      not always a we
      - 4y ago

bombcar 4y ago

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.

rob74 4y ago
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 ;)
- cmmeur01 4y ago
  I’d suggest a phone call, but yeah dealing with the actual users is far better than some middle manager without a clue how the job actually gets performed.

blowski 4y ago

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.

BlueTemplar 4y ago
This is soooo important ! (And not just in marriage...)
2devnull 4y ago
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.
- SnowHill9902 4y ago
  I wouldn’t recommend this. First of all, you shouldn’t provide personal opinions such as “terrible”. Then, asking what they are going to do forces them to confront the problem which they may not be ready to do yet, or may not want to articulate to you.
  - derefr 4y ago
    Usually in the sort of situation where you'd say this, you're just reflecting the speaker's very-clearly-expressed emotional state back at them to demonstrate that you're actively engaged in listening and considering their statements. It's not something you'd say in response to a text complaint, where there's not enough "bandwidth" to clearly communicate the complainant's emotional state; but it's something CSRs are trained to say on phone calls all the time. It's also the reason that therapists vastly prefer speaking in person, to video calls, to phone calls; and almost never even consider doing "therapy via text chat." There's not enough bandwidth in text chat to enable a therapist to properly engage with and respond to the emotional content of a client's communication; but with each additional level (voice, video, in-person meeting), that's more possible. (Interesting consideration, given that: suicide/crisis hotlines should probably consider offering video calls as an option, as the increased bandwidth for emotional content will allow the operator to engage with + potentially help the caller on a deeper level.)

dr-detroit 4y ago

edw519 4y ago

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"

unsupp0rted 4y ago
Thanks for the positive feedback! 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”.
- edw519 4y ago
  I can’t go so far as to change how the warehouse operates. Why not? That's what differentiates those who sling code from those who do real Digital Transformation (not the crap our bosses spout off.) it wouldn’t hurt to answer my questions about how the warehouse operates and ask me to come up with solutions in line with that This says volumes about what they think about you and worse, what they think about their business and the problem at hand. Most users are fleas who used to jump 6 feet but now only jump 3 feet because they can't even imagine any more. Sorry to hijack the discussion and I didn't mean to suggest you should be doing any more than you are. (Believe me, at my rate, I get the job done and move on.) I just enjoyed seeing someone bring up the bigger picture.

nostromo 4y ago

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.

unsupp0rted 4y ago
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. So far no reply to any of the 3 solutions.
- jcheng 4y ago
  Not sure why, but now I really want to know how this turns out!
  - martinflack 4y ago
    At least the conversation hasn't progressed to printing it upside down or on the back...
  - unsupp0rted 4y ago
    If history with this client is any indication, they will not realize I have offered these viable solutions at all. A week or so from now the warehouse will complain vaguely that they have “no place to write”. The client will blame me for the poorly designed packing slip and suggest we “just go back” to the Excel version (which required multiple hours a day of manual data entry by an employee who is no longer at the company and cost untold $ in human error).

SlickNixon 4y ago

Have you tried scaling the output of the system by 77%, rotating it counter clockwise by 90 degrees, and aligning it to the bottom of the page?

yboris 4y ago

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.

reaperducer 4y ago

A surprisingly successful shortcut for dealing with people who won't listen is to throw out the old "Best practices" canard. "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."

mrweasel 4y ago
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.

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giantg2 4y ago

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.

gwbas1c 4y ago

> 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.

smoe 4y ago

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.

colechristensen 4y ago

“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.

Max-q 4y ago

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?

unsupp0rted 4y ago
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.
- Max-q 4y ago
  Thanks :)

tyingq 4y ago

> "just make it landscape" Sometimes it's just worth the effort to make a mockup of that so they can see their idea doesn't work.

ArcMex 4y ago

Have you tried mirroring? 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-Depended-ebook/dp/B014DUR7L2/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=1C3M4XV2VOXO&keywords=never+split+the+difference+chris+voss&qid=1667995750&sprefix=mever+split+the+%2Caps%2C1062&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-De...

siculars 4y ago

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.