When asked 'How can I foo the bar?' is 'Don't foo the bar' an appropriate answer?

Question

On Cleaning Up Bad Answers on Popular Questions a comment by Yamikurone says:

There seems to be a flood of "Not an answer" flags on answers on this post. Many of the answers so flagged were, in fact, trying to answer the question. If they're low quality, downvote instead please.

The fundamental issue on the post in question is that the asker is clearly asking, "How do I make my team more punctual?" while many of the answers say, "This is why you shouldn't make the team more punctual."

Are these sorts of answers appropriate?

Here is one (slightly abridged) example with +18 score:

It's possible to convince them to take it, but you'll need good arguments and there almost certainly will be lingering resentment about it. You may or may not lose good people over this.

From your description the main reason appears to be jealousy from other departments. Have you considered giving the other departments the same perk?

In short: Don't do it unless you think it's worth losing some of them over it.

The answer says it is possible, but doesn't explain how. It suggests making other teams less punctual rather than fixing the problem that the asker wants solved. It says not to do it because you may lose people when the asker clearly stated "I have the full support and backing of the senior management team and am empowered to employ whatever devices I feel appropriate to get this taken care of."

Is this an appropriate answer to the question?

References:

'Just Quit' is generally not an appropriate answer
When 'Don't do X' is an appropriate answer

Answer 1

First off: I don't think that particular answer is a good one for the "Don't foo the bar" category and should be down-voted, though not necessarily closed.

Don't foo the bar!

An answer that just says that, is generally not an answer to me, since it does in fact not answer the question.

When is not-an-answer an answer?

When it explains why some premise of the question is wrong.

In the example above there are several answer that don't answer the question any more than the cited one, but they explain in more detail why the premise (that not being on time is the actual problem) is wrong or should at least be revisted and then proceed to give alternate problem interpretations with proposed solutions.

In my book, this is also in line with what the help center explains here:

Answer the question

[…] The answer can be “don’t do that”, but it should also include “try this instead”. Any answer that gets the asker going in the right direction is helpful, […]

Answer 2

Explaining the asker why fooing bars in general is a bad idea instead of explaining how to foo bar's might provide value. It might even provide more value than a straight answer, because it prevents someone from making a mistake. But it doesn't answer the question:

1. The asker might be forced by a higher power to do this, even though they know it's a bad idea. So they must find a way to do it with a minimum amount of damage.
2. There are special circumstances which apply which make fooing a bar a viable solution in this special case.
3. Even when you know these circumstances don't apply to the special situation of the asker, a future visitor might be in a different situation where bar-fooing is more applicable.
4. You might be wrong (yes, i know, that's really unlikely. I just added this point for completeness)

That's why I would recommend to structure an answer to such a question like this:

1. Explain why you think that fooing the bar is a bad idea under these circumstances
2. Continue with "When you are still determined to foo the bar after all the reasons I gave you to not do it, then this is what you could do:".
3. Explain how to foo a bar causing minimal damage.

Answer 3

In my mind, the best answer by far was from bethlakshmi (heavily paraphrased):

As companies grow out of the start-up phase there can be growing pains and not everyone will fit. Make sure you've explained the situation properly, make sure you know what type of people fit the role, and establish a process to hire and fire to get people who can succeed in the new culture

If I were searching on google for how to handle this sort of issue, that is exactly the sort of answer I would want to find. Even progressive companies like Netflix realize that as companies grow, changes need to happen, and sometimes that means a previously great fit won't be a good fit for the new culture.

As a non-software guy, I often struggle with questions tagged with software-industry. I don't like the sense of entitlement that comes out in many of the questions as I don't think it has a good impact on us as a quality reference. Software questions get popular due to the hot question list and we end up getting Q&A that feel more like forums than they do a resource for future visitors. Do we really want answers that say things like:

"The Catholic Church had the same power during the Inquisition, look at how that turned out!"

That adds no value at all to the answer and does not reflect well on our community. That is an extreme example, but there are plenty of developers who seem to take these sorts of questions personally rather than answering them:

"As for the other workers in the company, if they didn't have the foresight to spend nights and weekends beating their heads against a Computer Science book trying to understand formal logic so they could enjoy the perks of being a developer, then frankly, that's their problem."

Sorry jmort, this just reads to me as How do I deal with the fact that I'm awesome and everyone around me sucks?

"And for devs like myself, who much prefer dodging rush hour and who get a horrendously nasty case of SAD in the winter, but can't think of any dev-friendly places closer to the equator I'd rather live, it's as big of a deal as pulling health benefits."

These comments do not contribute to our value as a resource. The policy decisions in a different company that you don't work at were made for a reason. Why not give the question the benefit of the doubt, and answer objectively based on the problem explained?

This question is old, and I think it's a great chance for us to clean up some of these to make them better reflect what we want to be. Remember what happened to "Not Programming Related". If we want to be a good resource, we need to be serious about voting up quality, not opinions we agree with.

Answer 4

If the question is really - How can I accomplish this goal?. That is not a good goal to have is not an appropriate answer.

If the question were How can I accomplish this goal by doing Y? Then do not do Y may be an appropriate answer.

In the example question the OP wants to accomplish a goal, that goal is to get people to arrive in time for team meetings on a regular basis. Telling them that it is a bad goal is not helpful. So no it should not be acceptable and should be flagged as not an answer and down-voted and the answers removed.

If the goal is blatantly abusive or illegal we can say that and close the question saying that we can not help break the law. But we should not be providing answers that say you should not do that.

Answer 5

How would you answer the question "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?"

"Yes" and "no" are the only literal answers. If either of those were selected, it would be acknowledging the hidden assumption that you beat your wife. In this case, the best answer is not to answer the question directly, but to challenge its assumptions. "I don't beat my wife, and I would never do such a thing" might be a good answer, or "I'm not married", even though neither directly answers the question. If directly answering would be a trap, best not to fall into it.

In general, every question is really two questions: the literal question asked, and an implied question of "this is my wording of a question, the circumstances surrounding it, and my assumptions; what should I do?". Sometimes the literal question is a great question; sometimes not so much. If the literal question is fine, it should be answered, and maybe the implied one too, if it's different enough from the literal one. If the literal question betrays a bad assumption on the part of the question asker, the implied question is the one that needs an answer, although the literal question might still be worth answering too.

In the question you link, there is an assumption that having a culture of punctuality on a software development team is indispensable -- even more important than having your developers get their work done well. Many developers reacted with horror to this assumption. This is not bad, and does contribute to this site as a resource. A manager with a similar set of presumptions could easily run across this question and find out that developers are likely to be rather sensitive about this issue (and why they respond like that). That is a more useful outcome than if the same manager ran across a prescription for how to lay down the law, implemented it, and ended up chasing away his best developer and reducing the rest of the team's morale.

Towards the end of your question, you ask (as I read it) if questions like "My senior managers are supportive of my implementing [bad idea]. How do I do it?" should be required to answer the literal question (How do I do it?). In my opinion, no, they should not be required to. The important thing to say is that [bad idea] is a bad idea.

Answer 6

To be a little more general than the question (which I guess may immediately get me attacked as being non-responsive to the exact question): When should we question the premise of a question?

If the premise has some minor technical flaw, one could of course just correct the flaw and move on to an answer. Like if someone asked, "Since unemployment rose to 8% in April, how should my company ..." If unemployment really hit 8% in March, you might say, "Actually it reached that level in March but ..." and then go on to answer the question. A response like, "Your question is unanswerable because unemployment did not 'rise to 8%' in April" is unhelpful and unnecessary. (Assuming there is not some reason why the date is critical.)

One can easily imagine a question based on a flawed premise that makes a direct answer worthless. Like, "Now that Congress has abolished H1B visas, am I still required to provide English lessons for foreign-born workers?" As Congress has not abolished H1B visas and employers never were required to provide English lessons, it's difficult to see how one could give a direct answer to the question that would have any meaning at all. The only meaningful or useful answer would be to point out the flawed premise.

And then you get questions like this one. "How do I do foo the bar?", when fooing is (in the opinion of the person answering) a bad idea. I think opinions on this are likely to be tainted by one's own opinion of whether it is a good idea.

Suppose someone asked, "My co-worker is rude to me and I hate him. How can I get him fired?" Would you really insist that the only valid, acceptable answers are those that discuss how to spread vicious rumors, make false accusations, sabotage his work, etc? Or would a good answer be one that explains why this is a bad idea, perhaps offers suggestions for getting along with co-workers?