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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

There's something infuriatingly help-vampirish about asking any question of the form "why don't you do x?".

The pithy answer is because of all the things in the world that someone might propose need doing, I can only do a vanishingly tiny fraction of them. Even the largest, most profitable company in the world can only do a slightly larger tiny fraction of them.

The reason we don't do the things you ask about is because we are focused on doing the things which we've prioritized using our best judgement. The idea that we somehow owe an explanation to internet randos about everything we don't do is indicative of a personality that must not be allowed anywhere near engineers with work to do.

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I'm surprised at the ire around this question. "Why don't you do X" is a great way to understand why someone did Y. A perfectly valid answer might be "X might be better, but Y is fine and it's not the highest priority at the moment." Or the answer might be any of the dozens Brendan Gregg gave (including "for reasons I can't disclose."). Any of these answers might be illuminating to the asker.

Now, admittedly, it's very tone dependent. "Why don't you X" can be asked humbly and with a truly inquisitive tone, or with a sneering tone whose obvious implication is that you must be either ignorant of X or too dumb to see its merits. But in writing, at least, I try to infer the more charitable attitude of genuine curiosity.

This is why I try to never ask "why don't you do X" without making it clear that I'm using it as a forcing function to satisfy my own curiosity, rather than trying to sneer at folks. Often this requires being a bit more verbose, but I've personally always found a bare "why don't you do X?" without any other context to come across as sneering.

But yes, I also try to interpret it charitably as well too. I just also try to make my own curiosity clear on the flip side.

I've known a couple people who characterize others as getting upset for no reason/escalating a situation and I wonder if they were participating in the same conversation I was witnessing? Like seriously, you started it. Plenty of reason to be had.

There's a whole thing called nonviolent communication and the basic premise is that if you spin someone up by choosing your words poorly, that's as much on you as it is on them.

NVC is important, but I like to view it as "reducing the likelihood of inspiring defensiveness". It's definitely a two way street, and the skillfulness with which I communicate is definitely on me, and affects a dynamic.

That said, sometimes even the most skilled communicator might find themselves spining someone up despite their best efforts. At the end of the day all we have is self awareness and good intent, but if the other person is hell bent on being oppositional, that's gonna be very hard to navigate.

Yeah, that's fair - I try to do the same. I've yet to find a particularly elegant way of asking it - it's usually something like "Why didn't you do X here? To be clear, I assume there was a good reason, I'm just curious what it was!"

The 'why' in the question implies that one knew X was a possible solution, or that you should know that X is a possible solution. An alternate to the question might be 'have you tried to do X?'.

Also, if you want to understand why someone did Y, ask deeper questions around why they did Y, don't ask why they didn't pick the other 500,000 possible solutions.

Asking why they used what they did has always ended up in good explanations and less than expected defense of the tool/tech itself. Often it's just because it does the job and whoever used it knew it.

Often I've asked it because I privately thought "why didn't they use X?", but I'm seldom actually interested in hearing why they didn't.

I very often find that my mind jumps to X as a solution. Then when X wasn't picked two things happen.

Firstly, and sadly, I get a bit mentally stuck on X. Secondly I assume I have missed something. Whatever I have missed is probably quite important, since otherwise X was a good choice.

Both of these effects mean that I will probably learn a lot from knowing why someone decided not to do X. So, if I've been mulling the question for a while, and can't get an answer, I think it makes perfect sense to ask "why didn't you do X". After all, that is exactly what I am wondering in good faith.

It sucks that the question is often used sarcastically, because to me it's a very useful question for understanding someone else's process.

It’s true. I built a robot intended to be open sourced and reproduced by others. I wrote the entire stack from scratch in Python. People on the forum asked “why didn’t you use ROS?” which is a perfectly valid question. My answer was that at the time I started the project ROS didn’t support Python 3, ROS is in many ways mostly a system for multi process communication which is something Python already does fine, and I wanted to avoid the learning curve of both learning ROS and learning our system. Also, I wanted to see if I could do it and what it would be like.

But ROS is indeed a popular framework for robotics, so the question is a reasonable one to ask.

If you've say through enough conferences, the ire is because the question usually isn't in good faith. More often than not, it's someone with whatever you call the personality defect that leads them to constantly needing to "show how smart they are" to the room full of people by, presumably in their mind, dunking on the speaker with their wildly naive "what didn't you do X?"

I've also say through Q&A sessions where a guy got up to the microphone to recommend books for the guy giving the presentation to read. It was uncomfortable.

We solved the Q&A issue at our conference by having all attendees (in-person and online) use the same private chat server to funnel questions. We don't allow audience microphones.

> I'm surprised at the ire around this question.

Because even if you exclude the concern trolls who aren't actually interested in your answer, just fighting with you, it is a never-ending stream of people who want to bikeshed your choices devoid of the context that makes it worth even trying to answer.

Life is too short.

I think it's much better to instead ask "Have you tried X?" or "Have you heard of X, it might solve your problem or solve it better?", both of which don't imply that the receiver should have known of those solutions.

I am not sure about this, depending on the tone and context it might very well equally (or even more) imply, that the receiver is an idiot for not doing proper research.

Those make sense if you are trying to advise someone, less if you are trying to learn from someone.

> "Why don't you do X" is a great way to understand why someone did Y.

As the running joke on the TV series goes "Phrasing". Phrasing is the key difference, especially in a textual medium. As you point out, it's the tone.

I've seen "Why don't you do X" phrased in a variety of ways, and the best phrasing I've found seen was along the lines of "I would normally do X in the scenario you've described, but Y was obviously better for your use case, would you mind sharing why?"

The worst possible phrasing of "Why don't you do X" is "Why would you even consider Y, everyone competent knows X is how you do it".

...and then it turns out that actually, Y was the best way to approach the given use case, X wasn't suitable, and now someone looks like a bit of a dick.

> I've seen "Why don't you do X" phrased in a variety of ways, and the best phrasing I've found seen was along the lines of "I would normally do X in the scenario you've described, but Y was obviously better for your use case, would you mind sharing why?"

There are multiple assumptions in that question that could make it crash and burn really badly. What if they actually didn't consider X? What if they do think Y is better, and X is interim? What if they had a lazy reason to prefer Y, and interpret the hyping up of the quality of their decision as calling them out?

Of course they're assumptions. They're assuming that the person doing Y did so in best faith and full knowledge.

As opposed to assuming they're cousin loving inbreds who did Y because they hate every computer scientist ever.

Assuming that doing Y was indeed wrong, and you want to correct that... do you think approaching it with the mindset of "you're a competent person who made the best choice you could see" is going to work better or worse than approaching out as "you're so incompetent, I've met more capable toasters, and you obviously did this because you hate America"?

It's just people skills, my friend. Start your disagreements by assuming the best of your opponent.

Why are you pretending those are the only two options?

And why is this an "opponent"?

How about both not being rude and trying to minimize assumptions?

Consider that they probably looked at X, but don't put them into an extremely awkward position if they didn't. And the same for the other things I pointed out.

It's just people skills, my friend.

In addition to being tone sensitive it is also very dependent on who's asking. If that person is, and that is something I hate, obviously less qualified in whatever field is concerned asks in an inquisitive tone (especially when having more hierarchical power), it's a sure way to knock any respect I had for those down a notch or two (or multiple, depending on circumstances, including my mood).

That being said, I love being challenged. Also by people new or un experienced in my field. Because it's an opportunity to learn. Either because I missed something (naive questions are really great for that), because I have to voice my thoughts and explain my thought process (and discover flaws in it), because the person asking is way better in what ever we are talking about,... you name it. Being challenged just because definitely isn't part of that.

You hate when someone with more power than you uses an inquisitive tone?

What tone do you want?

Some general politeness and respect? Apparently too much to ask these days...

Could you please explain what tone of voice that would be, and why it would not be inquisitive?

I'm extremely confused, and I don't understand your implication that an inquisitive tone won't be respectful or polite.

The comment above mine sums it up pretty well, IMHO. There's general curiosity, a justified demand for an update and the inquisitive version indirectly implying whatever you do might be wrong. The latter, from someone with more authority, is putting you in a defensive position from the get go. It is passive aggressive. And it is borderline hubris from someone with no qualification in the subject matter at question. I especially hate the last version of it, if you don't trust me to do my job properly, why hire me in the first place? Plus, it creates a toxic culture where everyone has to justify every single one of his decisions all the time.

Well I understand now and I think your preference is entirely reasonable but I would suggest different wording in the future. The normal definition for "inquisitive" doesn't imply those things, just curiosity. Asking at all would generally be inquisitive. "inquisition-like", maybe? Or some other word, I don't know what fits best.

(And when it is curiosity, it's less offensive from someone that doesn't know much, which is part of what threw me off so badly.)

Depends on one's connotations of the word "inquisitive." You may be associating to "general inquiry", while the GP is thinking more "the Spanish Inquisition".

I once worked in a department of a fortune 50 which did not have seemingly any need to produce profit or in practice ship any software. Every design came down to debating why don't you do x, for every value of x that the team could come up with.

This lead to the pathological condition whereby adding engineers to the team slowed progress, as it simply created more values for x.

"Not worth it, at least right now" is a perfectly valid answer to this question. Before doing X, someone needs to estimate the benefits of doing it / the costs of not doing it. If there's no clear reason to do X, but there are clear reasons to do Y, then forget X and do Y. If things change and a reason for X appears, then you do X.

Not worth it, at least right now according to what metric? This can be interpreted as a dismissive answer to a colleague. It also presumes that the owner of the project has both full autonomy over the implementation, outcome and the perception of the outcome.

If you piss off enough people over the course of a 6 month to a year project, it's unlikely that the perception of even a game changing win will be positive. As most large companies base promotions off of feedback, pissing off the wrong people will also block development.

When you see tenured members of a team exhibiting certain behaviors, it's often due to those behaviors optimally solving for the incentives of the organization.

Perhaps a previously un-noticed reason for Brooks' Law being true...

Honestly, I have learnt to reply with we think Y was the best option to bring the discussion back on track. In the case where the person insists to try X, I ask them - How would you do it? More often than not, the conversation ends there. If not, I ask the to make a proposal and convince the team to do X.

The question of that form is akin to “proving a negative”

Yup, counter questions are effective, like "why do you think Y would have been better?"

The tech equivalent to "a wizard did it." Sometimes the only way forward is to match the answer to the depth of the question.

Disagree. I regularly ask something like "explain why this is better than x" or "why shouldn't we use x instead?". I'm not asking because I think x is better. I'm asking because it's interesting to hear the reasons a potentially more senior engineer gives, which then helps me learn more about their decision making process. And in some situations it may open a discussion about other things we haven't considered.

I think the premise of the article is dealing more with random drive-by comments where the person is really just advertising x, rather than being genuinely curious.

Infuriating indeed. It’s not just internet randos though, it’s also (for example) engineering executives lacking in self awareness.

Internet randos, executives. Next in line should be fellow programmers "Why the f should I tell you my reasons, if you are competent programmer you should allready know everything".

You don't need to explain to "internet randos", and nobody expects you to. Public posts though will obviously get public commentary.

However it's a great question to understand why certain decisions were made. The best engineers know that most of the work gets done in the planning and decision-making, not by stubbornly diving into something. If it was really the best decision at the time then the merits should stand the test, otherwise the defensiveness to answer is far more suspect than an innocent question.

You're missing the point.

Asking why you did something is a reasonable question. Asking why you did not do something tends know-it-all and/or help-vampire territory.

Why you didn't do something is a completely valid question and often requires much more awareness (that it exists) and introspection (of how it fits) to figure why it wasn't the best choice.

Instead of assuming the asker is a "know-it-all", what if they actually do know more? I've learned more from counter arguments (both hearing and making them) in all aspects of engineering and life in general.

I'll never turn down such a question and actively engage them because it makes me aware of alternatives at the very least, and often helps in future decisions. There are plenty of stories posted on HN of poor decisions that probably could've been avoided if someone considered some alternatives.

Actually engaging with people who ask this question has never led to anything other than getting mired in batting back their own choices presented as obviously better than my choices.

"Why don't you use Reaper?"

"Why not Bitwig?"

"Why not Linux?"

"Why not Ardour?"

"Why not LMMS?"

(the answer is "I spent tens to thousands of hours in each and they all feel like a regression next to Ableton Live and my very stable and productive Windows 11 Pro install")

This is music, but from this thread it sounds like it's the case with most fields. It's always the Standard Alternative Suggestions that assume the askee is an absolute novice who wouldn't be aware of and wouldn't have extensive experience trying or at least considering the entire space of possibilities before settling on a path.

"Why do you assume the asker is a know-it-all?"

Experience. It's cool that you have a different experience where it's not a waste of time.

I’ve asked other engineers a question in this manner, but I was genuinely curious. E.g. why did you implement this this way etc.

For internet randos, this is true. For coworkers, this is useful. There are times where technology outside has outpaced internal tech. For instance, there was a time where a company I worked at implemented MapReduce before it was available as Hadoop, where we had a k-v store more performant than others before a nice one was available with the props we wanted, where we had an internal partitioning tool to enable efficient joins before one was available; and each time outside technology outpaced us and someone asking "Why don't we just" was right.

Personally, I always get that feeling of fright plus eagerness. "Oh god, have we wasted our time" plus "Oh man, can we save so much more?". And you only have to explain to coworkers once anyway. They'll either demonstrate their idea is better or turn into additional broadcasters for the viewpoint.

Or worse: “Why don’t you just x?”

I respond with "Why dont you just send me a pull request?"

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