A recent thread asking how to schedule a daily reboot of their hub (without specifying why they want to reboot the hub) made me think of X Y Problems.
X Y Problems are when someone asks for help to accomplish task X, rather than their real goal of task Y. Usually they've figured out some convoluted solution that has X has a interim state, but they don't realize there are all sorts of negatives about X. If they'd just asked for help about Y, they might get a better solution. Better description: XY problem - Wikipedia.
Back in the day when I did useful things all day (e.g., before I retired), I worked for several large software/networking/systems companies. I often was in the position of knowing lots of details and people often came to me asked for help with what ended up being X Y Problems.
After explaining the concept many times, I eventually came up with this analogy.
A smart engineer comes in and asks me where on the dam they should place the dynomite. E.g., would putting it lower or higher demolish more of the structure. After spitting out a mouthfull of coffee, I would ask why the heck they want to blow up the dam. They tell me they want to get more water into the field for the crops, and need more of the dam cleared to let more flow. That's when I would suggest we simply open the spillway valve to let more water flow out into the field, without blowing up the dam.
I worked with software. We had almost 10,000 computers in our in-house cloud doing build and test, and the questions I got were often like "Can I create an account on all of them with no password" or "Can I install Wireless USB across the cloud to get access to the single USB device in my office from all of them".
What's an X Y Problem you've ever been asked about?
