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Comment by jmpeax | Hacker News Reader

> If your sink is leaking, you might call a plumber to fix it.

> But you don't really pay the plumber for putting a new gasket in.

> In fact, you don't care about the gasket, you care about not having you sink leaking.

I care about the gasket. If I want the sink to not leak then one way is to not use the tap/faucet. There are countless ways to fix the problem of your sink leaking, but only very few that you really want. Knowing your problem is important so that you don't waste time and money on charlatans. I care about the damned gasket.

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I was looking for this response.

I would be pissed if a plumber charged me to do it some way other than the right way.

I'm paying for the sink to stop leaking, sure. But I'm also paying for the solution to be the correct, and best solution, especially in regards to fixing durable infrastructure.

I get the author's point, but this was a poor analogy because there is a lot of ways for plumbing to be done wrong.

A better analogy would probably be shipping a box from NY to LA. I don't particularly care if it is trucked, flown, or carried by a team of pigeons as long as it gets there when I was told it would get there.

No you don’t. You think you do, but you really don’t. You care about the problem going away.

Sure maybe YOU care about the gasket, but there’s some other technical domain in your life that can sub in and the metaphor stands. No one is technical enough in every arena of life to care about the gasket.

Also to really stretch this metaphor to its limit, it’s exactly as the author said—there ARE countless ways to fix this sink but you care about a select few. And the truly world-class plumber knows that and will gauge your interest in understanding the full solution.

So at the end of the day, it’s STILL not about the gasket it’s about the communication surrounding the gasket and your comment actually reinforces this.

Yeah, you may not KNOW you care about the gasket, you may not even know what a gasket is or where it is, but you care about it because you care about the outcome it gives you.

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