Comment by ajuc

> "I'm probably missing something - why didn't you just do X?"

I like to use basically this, combined with brlewis's suggestion to take them out of the phrasing, when I'm erring on the side of being approachable. So maybe "I think I'm missing something here - why not use sshd?". If it's awkward to take them entirely out of the equation, there's the royal company "we" - e.g. "why don't we use sshd?"

Some of Mark's rephrasings are rather over the top. "I'm not clever enough [...]" whoa there, that's a bit much. You're either being sarcastic, or beating yourself up way too much. "There must be a good reason why you [...]" whoa whoa, they might not, and that's fine! There might be a good reason... there might be a bad reason... there might be no reason... and all of those are fine! I ain't judging! I've probably had worse reasons! I just want to understand the problem space.

"I think I'm missing something here" admits to an extremely minor, low stakes, inconsequential "mistake" on my part - the kind that we all make frequently enough in passing as to not even really think of them as mistakes per se. I'm not admitting to some moral failure, just implicitly asking for a minor bit of assistance from my conversational partner to get over a momentary blind spot. It's not judging either of us, the problem, or the solution.

Which all hopefully helps set the tone - for if they feel like they've made a mistake because they didn't think of sshd and realize in retrospect that "they probably should've". Because, like all of us, sometimes they have overlooked the obvious... but that's perfectly OK - because, like I said, it happens to all of us.

> And honestly I think phrasing isn't that important - if you know someone for months or years and aren't usually a dick - people won't automatically assume the worst.

Also agreed.

Yep this is what I say too. The easiest way to prevent this kind of thing, and a large class of similar reactions, is to cast yourself as the 'incompetent nitwit' and speak accordingly.

As a bonus, in the cases where you are the nitwit (often in my case) it saves your teammate from having to do the awkward dance of the inverted problem of the OP: pointing out you are in fact, wrong, without it being taken harshly. If you already tee it up that you are probably incorrect, they can just run with your assumption in the common case where it's a correct assumption :)

> And honestly I think phrasing isn't that important - if you know someone for months or years and aren't usually a dick - people won't automatically assume the worst.

I'm actually quite surprised that you're the first person I've seen mention this, because in my personal experience this is exactly the answer. People seem to receive that question well regardless of it's form when it comes from someone that is known to be relatively open and non-judgemental.