Another exchange from the same session, with a different guy. Less legendary but still instructive:
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Him: My sink is always full of dirty dishes.
Me: Okay, do you know what the blocker is?
Him: I just never feel like doing my dishes.
Me: Why?
Him: Well, I only want to wash my dishes with hot water, but the water in my sink doesn’t get hot enough, so every time I do the dishes I have to boil water for that purpose, but my stove isn’t very powerful and I only have one pot, but it’s not big enough to fill the sink so I have to boil three pots full of water before I can do the dishes, and that takes like half an hour.
I hope I am not missing a point, so just to be sure… the point is that buying a larger pot would dramatically improve this guy’s quality of life, but he is unable to notice this?
(Or buying an electric kettle. Or only washing greasy dishes with hot water, and everything else with water from sink. Or switching to Soylent… okay, this is too extreme, but still within 5 minutes of thinking about the problem.)
Oh, part of this is that I posted this anecdote as a supplement to the main one; it illustrates the same point but less starkly. I think the thing I was pointing at here was: people come to you stating that their problem is “I don’t feel like doing my dishes” or “I’m bad at grocery shopping”, and it turns out that there’s a more fundamental thing in the way that on some level they know is the actual blocker, but they don’t realize that that’s where they need to intervene on their problem. Knowing Guy 2, I think he would have been able to come up with all of the solutions that you did within 5 minutes of brainstorming, but he was focused on {sink full of dishes} rather than looking at the problem as a whole.
This same thing can open happen with debugging but internally. You think it’s about dishes but actually it’s about not having your mother’s love.
I’ve observed that different pair debuggers tend to focus on finding the root internal or external causes, and the best can hone in on which is more relevant.
Another exchange from the same session, with a different guy. Less legendary but still instructive:
---
Him: My sink is always full of dirty dishes.
Me: Okay, do you know what the blocker is?
Him: I just never feel like doing my dishes.
Me: Why?
Him: Well, I only want to wash my dishes with hot water, but the water in my sink doesn’t get hot enough, so every time I do the dishes I have to boil water for that purpose, but my stove isn’t very powerful and I only have one pot, but it’s not big enough to fill the sink so I have to boil three pots full of water before I can do the dishes, and that takes like half an hour.
Me: o.0
I hope I am not missing a point, so just to be sure… the point is that buying a larger pot would dramatically improve this guy’s quality of life, but he is unable to notice this?
(Or buying an electric kettle. Or only washing greasy dishes with hot water, and everything else with water from sink. Or switching to Soylent… okay, this is too extreme, but still within 5 minutes of thinking about the problem.)
Oh, part of this is that I posted this anecdote as a supplement to the main one; it illustrates the same point but less starkly. I think the thing I was pointing at here was: people come to you stating that their problem is “I don’t feel like doing my dishes” or “I’m bad at grocery shopping”, and it turns out that there’s a more fundamental thing in the way that on some level they know is the actual blocker, but they don’t realize that that’s where they need to intervene on their problem. Knowing Guy 2, I think he would have been able to come up with all of the solutions that you did within 5 minutes of brainstorming, but he was focused on {sink full of dishes} rather than looking at the problem as a whole.
This same thing can open happen with debugging but internally. You think it’s about dishes but actually it’s about not having your mother’s love.
I’ve observed that different pair debuggers tend to focus on finding the root internal or external causes, and the best can hone in on which is more relevant.