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Discussion on: You're Doing It All Wrong™

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mortoray profile image
edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

It's helpful to treat people's suggestions as requests for information. If somebody asks, "Why didn't you use X?" or says "I'd use X in such a situation", I interpret that to mean: "Interesting, I'm familiar with X, which appears to solve a similar goal, and am curious as to why you chose Y. It'd help me better understand both X and Y if you could explain a bit"

Give people the benefit of the doubt; some people just don't express there requests well, due to culture, language, typing speed, or whatever. Others may just be scared of new tech, or having outdated knowledge, and thus are automatically defensive of what they do. By ignoring the tone, and assuming a genuine request it let's you respond in a positive manner, share information, and ensures you actually think about the question.

That said, had you just used Gentoo you could have easily installed all 17 VMs from within Emacs! :P

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_bigblind profile image
Frederik 👨‍💻➡️🌐 Creemers • Edited

This is exactly what I was thinking while reading this. Communication can be hard, so the responsibility for making it clearer lies on both sides. If you mean to ask a question, ask a question! Don't phrase it as a statement. It can be as easy as adding ", right?" to the end of your sentence. For example:

You could just run these distros in VMs, right?

That word at the end indicates you've considered the possibility that your statement might not be right, and would like to discuss it further.

But as the recipient of such a message, it's indeed a good idea to give people the benefit of the doubt as well.

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald • Edited

Good points, both of you! I absolutely agree. In this article, I addressed the suggester's side of the exchange; if I had addressed both sides, this would been too long.

In my talk, A Field Guide to Common Nerds, I cover your points precisely. I'll work those into another article as well.

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_bigblind profile image
Frederik 👨‍💻➡️🌐 Creemers

I've bookmarked the talk, because it looks really interesstin!