Comment by LeonB
6 years ago
Yes! I’ve looked through these responses exasperated. This is the only one that I agree with. The people who say “why didn’t you just” often have a very limited understanding of the new thing, and naively reduce it to a problem they do understand.
To me, both responses are the same.
Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" comes to mind. You're saying exactly the same thing but in a bureaucratic form.
Reading other posts here the message I get is that a lot of people work in dysfunctional environments in which everyone's at each other's throat or something.
My default assumption would be that obviously my colleague isn't being an asshole...
The majority of times people have said “why don’t you just...” to me the answer is that if they understood what $thing was trying to do they wouldn’t have asked the question. They’re not being “assholes” they’re just headed toward it from a wrong assumption (they’re assumption is that they understand what $thing does, but they don’t.) so my advice to anyone suggesting just do $x is that they need to try to understand what they don’t understand about $thing, don’t even worry about $x.
Sure, so the answer is 'because I'm doing $thing and $x doesn't work'.
They're literally asking _why_.
If you take it as a statement i.e. 'just use $x' then that's a completely different matter.
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