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Help me ask why you don't just…

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Regarding the phrase “why don't you just…”, Mike Hoye has something to say that I've heard expressed similarly by several other people:

Whenever you look at a problem somebody’s been working on for a week or a month or maybe years and propose a simple, obvious solution that just happens to be the first thing that comes into your head, then you’re also making it crystal clear to people what you think of them and their work.

I think this was first pointed out to me by Andy Lester.

I think the problem here may be different than it seems. When someone says “Why don't you just (whatever)” there are at least two things they might intend:

1. Why don't you just use sshd? Surely it's because you're an incompetent nitwit.

2. Why don't you just use sshd? Surely it's because there's some good reason I'm not seeing. Can you please point it out?

Certainly the tech world is full of type 1. But I wonder how many people were trying to communicate type 2 and had it received as type 1 anyway? And I wonder how many times I was trying to communicate sentiment 2 and had it received as sentiment 1?

Mike Hoye doesn't provide any alternative phrasings, which suggests to me that he assumes that all uses of “why didn't you just” are type 1, and are meant to imply contempt. I assure you, Gentle Reader, that that is not the case.

Pondering this over the years, I have realized I honestly don't know how to express my question to make clear that I mean #2, without including a ridiculously long and pleading disclaimer before what should be a short question. Someone insecure enough to read contempt into my question will have no trouble reading it into a great many different phrasings of the question, or perhaps into any question at all. (Or so I think; maybe this is my own insecurities speaking.)

Can we agree that the problem is not only with the word “just”, and that leaving it out does not really solve the problem? I am not asking a rhetorical question here; can we agree?

Why don't you use `sshd`?

seems to me to suffer from all the same objections as the “just”ful version and to be subject to all the same angry responses. Is it possible the whole issue is over a difference in the connotations of “just” in different regional variations of English? I don't think it is and I'll continue with the article assuming that it isn't and that the solution isn't as simple as removing “just”.

Let me try to ask the question in a better better way:

There must be a good reason why you don't use sshd

I don't see why you wouldn't use sshd

I don't understand why you don't use sshd

I'd like to know why you don't use sshd

I'm not clever enough to understand why you don't use sshd

I think the sort of person who is going to be insulted by the original version of my question will have no trouble being insulted by any of those versions, maybe interpreting them as:

There must be a good reason why you don't use sshd. Surely it's because you're an incompetent nitwit.

I don't see why you wouldn't use sshd. Maybe the team you're working with is incompetent?

I don't understand why you don't use sshd. Probably it's because you're not that smart.

I'd like to know why you don't use sshd. Is it because there's something wrong with your brain?

I'm not clever enough to understand why you don't use sshd. It would take a fucking genius to figure that out.

The more self-effacing I make it, the more I try to put in that I think the trouble is only in my own understanding, the more mocking and sarcastic it seems to me and the more likely I think it is to be misinterpreted. Our inner voices can be cruel. Mockery and contempt we receive once can echo again and again in our minds. It is very sad.

So folks, please help me out here. This is a real problem in my life. Every week someone will be telling me what they are working on. I think of what seems like a straightforward way to proceed, and I assume there must be some aspect I do not appreciate, because the person I am talking to has thought about it a lot more than I have. Aha, an opportunity! To home right in on the gap in my understanding!

I want to ask them about it and gain the benefit of their expertise, just because I am interested and curious, and perhaps even because the knowledge might come in useful. But then I run into trouble. I want to ask “Why didn't you just use sshd?” with the understanding that we both agree that that would be obvious to someone who hadn't thought about it carefully, and that I am looking forward to hearing their well-considered reason why not. But that phrasing seems to have a high likelihood of being misinterpreted. What can I say that will signal good faith, so that they will smile, hold up their index finger, and say “Aha! You might think that sshd would be a good choice, but…”. (And sometimes that does happen, and when it does I do not interpret it as “you might think that… because you're an incompetent nitwit.”)

What if I were to say

I suppose sshd wasn't going to work?

Would that be safer? How about:

Naïvely, I would think that sshd would work for that

but again I think that suggests sarcasm.

So what to do? I'm in despair. Andy, any thoughts?

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