4 ms·

Don't answer the first question

96 points by lalitmaganti 5mo ago

ramon156 5mo ago
This isn't a black-and-white tactic. If you do this with people who know their stuff, they will just take it as you undermining them.
- otterley 5mo ago
  I think it depends on the individual and the culture. In a strong culture, engineers don’t their egos get in the way of healthy conversations and will be capable of defending their position against probing questions without it upsetting them.
  - pdhborges 5mo ago
    How about answering the question and then add details later? IME that tends do work better.
    - sceptic123 5mo ago
      [dead]
  - BeetleB 5mo ago
    > In a strong culture, engineers don’t their egos get in the way of healthy conversations and will be capable of defending their position against probing questions without it upsetting them. Everything is great when you don't have constraints. If I, however, have to spend 30-60 minutes justifying something to you every time I come to you, then you definitely are the problem. Using the wrong tool to solve a problem is not inherently problematic. If it's a one-off and it solves the problem, abusing an existing tools is about the finest engineering imaginable. Sure, if it's a long term solution to something important, I can understand the pushback. As other commenters have said: I'm all for a deeper discussion provided two things: 1. Both of us have the time. 2. You actually answer the question I asked. Not providing an answer is patronizing.
    - otterley 5mo ago
      > If I, however, have to spend 30-60 minutes justifying something to you every time I come to you, then you definitely are the problem That might be true if you’re skilled in whatever the particular subject matter is. But what if you’re not? Have you ever had a colleague that kept trying to solve problems the wrong way? Such people do exist. I don’t personally withhold answers, but when I suspect something is amiss, I ask probing questions in order to better understand the deeper problem underlying the question. Then I collaborate on a better answer, if one exists, with my colleague.
- mathisfun123 5mo ago
  Yes it's called being XYed and it's infuriating when some condescending person decides they know so much better than you that even your question is wrong.
  - otterley 5mo ago
    What if they do, in fact, have the experience to “know better”?
    - mathisfun123 5mo ago
      What if they don't, in fact, have more experience than me? Edit: this is why tech people are insufferable socially. In any other walk of life assuming you know more than someone is a manifestly obvious faux pas.
      - otterley 5mo ago
        This is a hypothetical, not an assumption. I’m interested in your response to the hypothetical. As a side note, experience isn’t a unidimensional value that is directly comparable. You can have more experience than someone else in one dimension, and the other person can have more experience than you in a different dimension. I’d never argue with my mother about how to perform a blood draw.
        mathisfun123 5mo ago
        I already implicitly responded: this should be handled like in any other walk of life - a few probing questions, maybe a preceding dialogue, etc. Admittedly tech people probably don't know how to handle this outside of tech either <shrug>
        BeetleB 5mo ago
        You answered your own question: > experience isn’t a unidimensional value that is directly comparable. You can have more experience than someone else in one dimension, and the other person can have more experience than you in a different dimension. When two such people communicate, it's rarely clear who knows more. Typically, I know more about the task I'm working on, and he knows more about X, and that's why I'm asking him about X. Sure, if he wants to know what I'm working on - happy to engage, provided he doesn't withhold the information I'm asking for. Useful conversation relies on mutual purpose.
- lelanthran 5mo ago
  > If you do this with people who know their stuff, they will just take it as you undermining them. That's because they realise that other party is simply trying to answer the question they wished was asked instead of the question that was actually asked.
deleted 5mo ago
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deleted 5mo ago
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paultopia 5mo ago
While this strategy is fine for clueless users, I suspect that it will lead to immense frustration for the ones with clues
- dgellow 5mo ago
  Can confirm, I had a coworker doing that a while ago and it was incredibly frustrating. After going through the whole quizzing you still end up with no answer to your actual question, as if they were more interested engaging with their own process and not what you were actually asking
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- javawizard 5mo ago
  Exactly. Back when I worked at Google there was an internal page someone put up that denoted what they called "the YX problem": the observation that the XY problem, applied to a sufficiently great extent, creates an environment where more productivity is lost convincing one's interlocutor that X is in fact the correct problem to solve than would be lost by chasing X and having to later pivot to Y if that turned out to be wrong. It's extraordinarily aggravating when it happens. I really wish it was something we talked about more.
- otterley 5mo ago
  In my experience, the ones who most fervently believe they have such “clues” are often the same ones who lack them. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve encountered engineers who become indignant when someone tries to redirect them to safe, scalable, and operable ways to solve problems. What they often want is to have the problem solved their way because it would be less work for them or otherwise advance their own personal interests, regardless of the problems that doing so would create or the risks it would pose. They don’t want a discussion; they want a rubber stamp.
  - marcosdumay 5mo ago
kstenerud 5mo ago
“well the answer to your immediate question is X but that’s a pretty strange thing to ask for because of reason Y. Can you tell me more about the wider problem you’re trying to solve?” This is the right way to answer these questions. SO was famous for the infuriating "You shouldn't do X, so as a favor to you I'm not going to tell you how." or "Before I answer thee, thou must first answer me these questions three!" kinds of answers. Edit: Don't want to take credit for this. It's a quote from the article.
- stavros 5mo ago
  Your way is good because it answers my question first. I've been wanting to do a weird thing X and had to first spend half an hour convincing people that yes, I really do know what I'm doing, so they'd give me the one-liner answer I came for. Ultimately, it should be on me to choose whether I want to risk doing X or whether I want to take up your offer to explain Y, not the "as a favor to you, I'm not going to tell you how" way you described.
  - otterley 5mo ago
    If, as you admit, X was a “weird thing,” what’s wrong with taking the time to persuade your peers that it’s worth pursuing? That’s how you build consensus on a team and construct a decision record to help future teammates and other stakeholders understand it.
    - stavros 5mo ago
      They aren't my peers, and they don't have a stake in it. I'm usually just asking on IRC.
greenmilk 5mo ago
I believe this is the process that defines Julia Evans' writing (and cartooning)!
xnx 5mo ago
Domo is now apparently "Governed Data for AI Agents". The desperation for commodity services and second-tier products to stay relevant is widespread. See also intercom.com "The only helpdesk designed for the AI Agent era".
- nix0n 5mo ago
  I think this comment got attached to the wrong article somehow. Not relevant here but probably relevant to "Enough with the AI FOMO, go slow-mo, says Domo CDO"[0] [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48179029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48179029
  - xnx 5mo ago
    Facepalm. Thank you.
jasonshen 5mo ago
The funny thing is, this works well with people too. Not to literally not answer, but dig into the question or problem they bring up to understand their mental model and whether there was just a miscommunication or an actual disagreement.
- inquist 5mo ago
  > with people too I'm pretty sure the article is about interacting with people.
dematz 5mo ago
Probably a lot of comments will bounce off the title to discuss the XY problem in general, and especially stackoverflow. The article does claim to go further than XY though! "Diagnosing the ask" and "When they’re missing the philosophy" seem to me like traditional XY problem answers - the user doesn't know what the right question is, we need to step back to guide them. "When the product needs to change" on the other hand is about figuring out what users want in order to add it to the product. Which takes a lot of figuring out, because it adds debt and you can add things the wrong way. This feels much less condescending to me than traditional XY where it's just tech support for a dumb user. Instead now figuring out questions from enough users helps direct new features. "When the right path is hidden" I think the text for this one could do more to discuss helping direct the product as well, specifically in terms of documentation, if https://perfetto.dev/docs/getting-started/periodic-trace-snapshots https://perfetto.dev/docs/getting-started/periodic-trace-sna... exists why is it hidden instead of where people find it when wanting to visualize a long trace. If you read the title and just want to talk about XY eh fine, but the article's last sentence is the difference, "Both sides almost always walk away with more than they came in with."
- locknitpicker 5mo ago
  > This feels much less condescending to me than traditional XY where it's just tech support for a dumb user. Instead now figuring out questions from enough users helps direct new features. I don't really agree. I think the blog post tries to put together a case that a textbook XY problem is not a XY problem because they explore a way to force Y onto all users seeking X. It's still condescending to accuse users of being confused and asking the wrong questions. It doesn't make it less condescending if they can claim success in persuading users to give Y a try. A fairer and better way to frame this is to claim they avoid introducing changes to the service by convincing users to accept tradeoffs, such as tolerating a less than satisfying solution today than waiting for an acceptable solution tomorrow. At the end of the day users still do not get what they want. That is a problem, not a reason to pat themselves in the back.
  - ncallaway 5mo ago
    I don't think that's it at all. If a user says: "how do I do X in your product", I think a response of "Hey, there's not a great way to do X right now. We're thinking about the best way to make that work in the product though, and want to better understand what you're trying to do and why you need to do X. Would you mind spending 30-45 minutes talking to us about your specific needs in exchange for a $XX incentive?" strikes me as very different from what you're describing
nekusar 5mo ago
And sometimes, I get some bloviating idiot who DEMANDS that my question is a XY issue, constructs their own strawman, and solves THEIR strawman. No, I had a reason why I asked the way I did. You're just too arrogant and think only your procedure is the "right" one.
lalitmaganti 5mo ago
I do want to clarify my point of view since there does seem to be some interpretation which I didn't entirely anticipate (wholly my mistake): 1. I'm not claiming that every interaction with a user needs to be turned into a full discussion. There are lots of cases where the answer is "this is what you're looking for, here's a link to the docs". In my experience, this has gone down a lot over time because people tend now to rely on AI much more heavily for those sort of questions in the first place so they won't even reach you. But it does happen and in that case, the best thing for both sides is to point to the documentation and move on. 2. If I am going to employ this strategy, I always try and both give the direct answer to the question and, as a separate point, ask them the context. Quoting directly from the post: > well the answer to your immediate question is X but that’s a pretty strange thing to ask for because of reason Y. Can you tell me more about the wider problem you’re trying to solve? 3. This does necessitate that you are in some sense an "knowledgeable" on the problem space someone comes to you with: I would never employ this strategy in an area I didn't already feel I was quite well equipped to give my 2c on. 4. If the person I'm speaking to I know for a fact is already knowledgeable on an area, I would be very hesitant to use this approach because I try and be charitable with assuming that people generally know what they are talking about. While yes, I'm not going to be perfect every time in judging this, I think you can get a pretty good sense from the way they ask their question and how clearly they respond to your initial answer whether they are not (ties to 3 as it requires you are good enough in the space to judge this). 5. If someone pushes back, I will always defer to their read of the situation, I'm not here to make people do what I suggest, I will simply say "well I think you should do/not do A because of B reason but at the end of the day your call" and leave it at that. I think it's a good thing to be able to have respectful discussions on topics even if both sides agree to disagree.
TonyAlicea10 5mo ago
This is in many ways what user experience designers might call "the five whys". People don't express their problem in the form of a problem, but a solution they've thought of. They don't say "I'm hungry, find me a way to get food" they say "I need a ride to the grocery store". I always teach designers to remember that users and stakeholders aren't software designers. So we should pay careful attention to their problems, but not assume their solution is the right one (though it can be). Getting these questions answered without insulting the requester (especially stakeholders) is an important soft skill. You have to make them feel heard, intelligent, and supported.
stronglikedan 5mo ago
> there isn’t an easy way to do that, but what’s leading you to collect traces large enough to want to split? That's basically every first Stack Overflow answer. It was obnoxious then, and it's obnoxious now.

96 points by lalitmaganti 5mo ago

This isn't a black-and-white tactic. If you do this with people who know their stuff, they will just take it as you undermining them.

otterley 5mo ago
I think it depends on the individual and the culture. In a strong culture, engineers don’t their egos get in the way of healthy conversations and will be capable of defending their position against probing questions without it upsetting them.
- pdhborges 5mo ago
  How about answering the question and then add details later? IME that tends do work better.
  - sceptic123 5mo ago
    [dead]
- BeetleB 5mo ago
  > In a strong culture, engineers don’t their egos get in the way of healthy conversations and will be capable of defending their position against probing questions without it upsetting them. Everything is great when you don't have constraints. If I, however, have to spend 30-60 minutes justifying something to you every time I come to you, then you definitely are the problem. Using the wrong tool to solve a problem is not inherently problematic. If it's a one-off and it solves the problem, abusing an existing tools is about the finest engineering imaginable. Sure, if it's a long term solution to something important, I can understand the pushback. As other commenters have said: I'm all for a deeper discussion provided two things: 1. Both of us have the time. 2. You actually answer the question I asked. Not providing an answer is patronizing.
  - otterley 5mo ago
    > If I, however, have to spend 30-60 minutes justifying something to you every time I come to you, then you definitely are the problem That might be true if you’re skilled in whatever the particular subject matter is. But what if you’re not? Have you ever had a colleague that kept trying to solve problems the wrong way? Such people do exist. I don’t personally withhold answers, but when I suspect something is amiss, I ask probing questions in order to better understand the deeper problem underlying the question. Then I collaborate on a better answer, if one exists, with my colleague.
mathisfun123 5mo ago
Yes it's called being XYed and it's infuriating when some condescending person decides they know so much better than you that even your question is wrong.
- otterley 5mo ago
  What if they do, in fact, have the experience to “know better”?
  - mathisfun123 5mo ago
    What if they don't, in fact, have more experience than me? Edit: this is why tech people are insufferable socially. In any other walk of life assuming you know more than someone is a manifestly obvious faux pas.
    - otterley 5mo ago
      This is a hypothetical, not an assumption. I’m interested in your response to the hypothetical. As a side note, experience isn’t a unidimensional value that is directly comparable. You can have more experience than someone else in one dimension, and the other person can have more experience than you in a different dimension. I’d never argue with my mother about how to perform a blood draw.
      - mathisfun123 5mo ago
        I already implicitly responded: this should be handled like in any other walk of life - a few probing questions, maybe a preceding dialogue, etc. Admittedly tech people probably don't know how to handle this outside of tech either <shrug>
      - BeetleB 5mo ago
        You answered your own question: > experience isn’t a unidimensional value that is directly comparable. You can have more experience than someone else in one dimension, and the other person can have more experience than you in a different dimension. When two such people communicate, it's rarely clear who knows more. Typically, I know more about the task I'm working on, and he knows more about X, and that's why I'm asking him about X. Sure, if he wants to know what I'm working on - happy to engage, provided he doesn't withhold the information I'm asking for. Useful conversation relies on mutual purpose.
lelanthran 5mo ago
> If you do this with people who know their stuff, they will just take it as you undermining them. That's because they realise that other party is simply trying to answer the question they wished was asked instead of the question that was actually asked.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

paultopia 5mo ago

While this strategy is fine for clueless users, I suspect that it will lead to immense frustration for the ones with clues

dgellow 5mo ago
Can confirm, I had a coworker doing that a while ago and it was incredibly frustrating. After going through the whole quizzing you still end up with no answer to your actual question, as if they were more interested engaging with their own process and not what you were actually asking
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
javawizard 5mo ago
Exactly. Back when I worked at Google there was an internal page someone put up that denoted what they called "the YX problem": the observation that the XY problem, applied to a sufficiently great extent, creates an environment where more productivity is lost convincing one's interlocutor that X is in fact the correct problem to solve than would be lost by chasing X and having to later pivot to Y if that turned out to be wrong. It's extraordinarily aggravating when it happens. I really wish it was something we talked about more.
otterley 5mo ago
In my experience, the ones who most fervently believe they have such “clues” are often the same ones who lack them. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve encountered engineers who become indignant when someone tries to redirect them to safe, scalable, and operable ways to solve problems. What they often want is to have the problem solved their way because it would be less work for them or otherwise advance their own personal interests, regardless of the problems that doing so would create or the risks it would pose. They don’t want a discussion; they want a rubber stamp.
- marcosdumay 5mo ago

kstenerud 5mo ago

“well the answer to your immediate question is X but that’s a pretty strange thing to ask for because of reason Y. Can you tell me more about the wider problem you’re trying to solve?” This is the right way to answer these questions. SO was famous for the infuriating "You shouldn't do X, so as a favor to you I'm not going to tell you how." or "Before I answer thee, thou must first answer me these questions three!" kinds of answers. Edit: Don't want to take credit for this. It's a quote from the article.

stavros 5mo ago
Your way is good because it answers my question first. I've been wanting to do a weird thing X and had to first spend half an hour convincing people that yes, I really do know what I'm doing, so they'd give me the one-liner answer I came for. Ultimately, it should be on me to choose whether I want to risk doing X or whether I want to take up your offer to explain Y, not the "as a favor to you, I'm not going to tell you how" way you described.
- otterley 5mo ago
  If, as you admit, X was a “weird thing,” what’s wrong with taking the time to persuade your peers that it’s worth pursuing? That’s how you build consensus on a team and construct a decision record to help future teammates and other stakeholders understand it.
  - stavros 5mo ago
    They aren't my peers, and they don't have a stake in it. I'm usually just asking on IRC.

greenmilk 5mo ago

I believe this is the process that defines Julia Evans' writing (and cartooning)!

xnx 5mo ago

Domo is now apparently "Governed Data for AI Agents". The desperation for commodity services and second-tier products to stay relevant is widespread. See also intercom.com "The only helpdesk designed for the AI Agent era".

nix0n 5mo ago
I think this comment got attached to the wrong article somehow. Not relevant here but probably relevant to "Enough with the AI FOMO, go slow-mo, says Domo CDO"[0] [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48179029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48179029
- xnx 5mo ago
  Facepalm. Thank you.

jasonshen 5mo ago

The funny thing is, this works well with people too. Not to literally not answer, but dig into the question or problem they bring up to understand their mental model and whether there was just a miscommunication or an actual disagreement.

inquist 5mo ago
> with people too I'm pretty sure the article is about interacting with people.

dematz 5mo ago

Probably a lot of comments will bounce off the title to discuss the XY problem in general, and especially stackoverflow. The article does claim to go further than XY though! "Diagnosing the ask" and "When they’re missing the philosophy" seem to me like traditional XY problem answers - the user doesn't know what the right question is, we need to step back to guide them. "When the product needs to change" on the other hand is about figuring out what users want in order to add it to the product. Which takes a lot of figuring out, because it adds debt and you can add things the wrong way. This feels much less condescending to me than traditional XY where it's just tech support for a dumb user. Instead now figuring out questions from enough users helps direct new features. "When the right path is hidden" I think the text for this one could do more to discuss helping direct the product as well, specifically in terms of documentation, if https://perfetto.dev/docs/getting-started/periodic-trace-snapshots https://perfetto.dev/docs/getting-started/periodic-trace-sna... exists why is it hidden instead of where people find it when wanting to visualize a long trace. If you read the title and just want to talk about XY eh fine, but the article's last sentence is the difference, "Both sides almost always walk away with more than they came in with."

locknitpicker 5mo ago
> This feels much less condescending to me than traditional XY where it's just tech support for a dumb user. Instead now figuring out questions from enough users helps direct new features. I don't really agree. I think the blog post tries to put together a case that a textbook XY problem is not a XY problem because they explore a way to force Y onto all users seeking X. It's still condescending to accuse users of being confused and asking the wrong questions. It doesn't make it less condescending if they can claim success in persuading users to give Y a try. A fairer and better way to frame this is to claim they avoid introducing changes to the service by convincing users to accept tradeoffs, such as tolerating a less than satisfying solution today than waiting for an acceptable solution tomorrow. At the end of the day users still do not get what they want. That is a problem, not a reason to pat themselves in the back.
- ncallaway 5mo ago
  I don't think that's it at all. If a user says: "how do I do X in your product", I think a response of "Hey, there's not a great way to do X right now. We're thinking about the best way to make that work in the product though, and want to better understand what you're trying to do and why you need to do X. Would you mind spending 30-45 minutes talking to us about your specific needs in exchange for a $XX incentive?" strikes me as very different from what you're describing

nekusar 5mo ago

And sometimes, I get some bloviating idiot who DEMANDS that my question is a XY issue, constructs their own strawman, and solves THEIR strawman. No, I had a reason why I asked the way I did. You're just too arrogant and think only your procedure is the "right" one.

lalitmaganti 5mo ago

I do want to clarify my point of view since there does seem to be some interpretation which I didn't entirely anticipate (wholly my mistake): 1. I'm not claiming that every interaction with a user needs to be turned into a full discussion. There are lots of cases where the answer is "this is what you're looking for, here's a link to the docs". In my experience, this has gone down a lot over time because people tend now to rely on AI much more heavily for those sort of questions in the first place so they won't even reach you. But it does happen and in that case, the best thing for both sides is to point to the documentation and move on. 2. If I am going to employ this strategy, I always try and both give the direct answer to the question and, as a separate point, ask them the context. Quoting directly from the post: > well the answer to your immediate question is X but that’s a pretty strange thing to ask for because of reason Y. Can you tell me more about the wider problem you’re trying to solve? 3. This does necessitate that you are in some sense an "knowledgeable" on the problem space someone comes to you with: I would never employ this strategy in an area I didn't already feel I was quite well equipped to give my 2c on. 4. If the person I'm speaking to I know for a fact is already knowledgeable on an area, I would be very hesitant to use this approach because I try and be charitable with assuming that people generally know what they are talking about. While yes, I'm not going to be perfect every time in judging this, I think you can get a pretty good sense from the way they ask their question and how clearly they respond to your initial answer whether they are not (ties to 3 as it requires you are good enough in the space to judge this). 5. If someone pushes back, I will always defer to their read of the situation, I'm not here to make people do what I suggest, I will simply say "well I think you should do/not do A because of B reason but at the end of the day your call" and leave it at that. I think it's a good thing to be able to have respectful discussions on topics even if both sides agree to disagree.

TonyAlicea10 5mo ago

This is in many ways what user experience designers might call "the five whys". People don't express their problem in the form of a problem, but a solution they've thought of. They don't say "I'm hungry, find me a way to get food" they say "I need a ride to the grocery store". I always teach designers to remember that users and stakeholders aren't software designers. So we should pay careful attention to their problems, but not assume their solution is the right one (though it can be). Getting these questions answered without insulting the requester (especially stakeholders) is an important soft skill. You have to make them feel heard, intelligent, and supported.

stronglikedan 5mo ago

> there isn’t an easy way to do that, but what’s leading you to collect traces large enough to want to split? That's basically every first Stack Overflow answer. It was obnoxious then, and it's obnoxious now.