At a previous employer we had a rule. The only person allowed to say, "just", was the developer responsible for actually making it work. Another developer who said it, just volunteered themselves.
It was a rule that worked well for us.
It was a rule that worked well for us.
> “Precisely. It’s what I call a ‘Lullaby Word.’ Like ‘should,’ it lulls your mind into a false sense of security. A better translation of ‘just’ in Jeff’s sentence would have been, ‘have a lot of trouble to.'”
Yes I like this rule, how many things I could have solved at the worst run place I ever worked at if it had been implemented there. Although I guess the management might not have liked that essentially I could choose what got done and what I got to work on just by running my big mouth.
facetiousness aside, I'm trying to point out that most often when people say "let's just" it is because they are advocating a course of action and that rule won't work unless the course they are advocating gets chosen. If they say "let's just make an api" and you say no we're doing a UI and you will work on it because you used the word "Just" I guess that's a way to lose your tech talent relatively quickly.
These sorts of rules are really about people feeling devalued or disliking being volunteered or told what to do (often by people they consider less knowledgable). They aren’t really about effectively distributing work.
“Just” gets a bad wrap. There’s a sort of hidden assumption here that “you can just” is equivalent to “you can easily”. It sometimes means that but more generally it means something more like “…will be easiest” which can be true even when the action itself is hard or a lot of work.
This happened in Sprint Planning. Obviously by the end of the meeting, everyone would have a full sprint. So volunteering for one thing required giving something else up. This was definitely part of the equation.
"Giving someone a chance" is a positive thing and wont make people careful.
People wind up with as much work as they think they can reasonably do. They would have done that whether or not they "just volunteered" themselves. You only wind up with too much if you didn't estimate your own work well.
As for being passive aggressive, the word "just" usually is used in a passive aggressive way. Making people careful about saying it was an improvement. And we all agreed that it was.
And no, they did not volunteered themselves. That is just manipulative language.
And both of these are passive aggression.
So no, not easy. Not unless you're right, and someone else was wrong.
Equivalent weasel words are easy to come by. "I don't see why it wouldn't work to ..." But now you're asking for an explanation, without dismissing the person who will be explaining it.