The XY Problem (2014)

The most amusing variant of the XY problem is when you want a seemingly ridiculous Y, and then, when people inevitably ask why, you tell them about your entirely-novel X, which they still don’t understand the use for, so you have to explain the entirely-novel W that motivates X, and so on... and by the time you’re done, you’ve explained your whole business model, written a ten-page journal paper, and completely killed the conversation—because they don’t feel they have the…

I often encounter the opposite. I would have a complex problem that I can legitimately solve by something reasonably simple yet I don’t posses the expertise on. Asking how to do Y, I need to spend an godawful amount of time wasting to convince people that no, it really is not an XY problem, and could we just focus on the literal problem description, which you could answer in like 3 minutes, instead of you trying to score points by…

The XY approach can be perfectly legitimate. You're a domain expert. You have a problem X. It's a standard problem in your domain but only you can really understand it. However, you can see that a general purpose approach, Y, could solve it. Y might even sound complicated but is at least fully explainable whereas X isn't easily explainable at all. Of course, the "XY problem" usually presumes a naive person ("user")who falsely imagines the more complicated-sounding solution Y would…

There's an inverse phenomenon in which the question asker has legitimately found the appropriate solution to their problem, but people are combative and unwilling to help because they insist on knowing the full context, erroneously believing the situation to be an instance of the XY problem. This sometimes leads to a huge digression because explaining the full context is not always as simple as "I want the file extension". I've seen this fairly often on Stack Overflow, where someone is…