Once upon a time I was in high school. Ah, the halcyon days of my youth. One day I was sitting in class, minding my own business when the teacher said: “Does anyone have a thin metal ruler?”

No answer. Apparently no one had a thin metal ruler.

“No? How about a nail file?”

No answer. Now, I cannot imagine that of all the girls in the class, not one of them had a nail file. But I can well imagine that none of them wanted to share it with a teacher.

“No? Hmm.”

So I piped up: “What do you need a nail file for?”

“I have this big staple in this document that I need to remove.”

Upon which point one of my classmates mentioned that he had a staple remover. Problem solved.

Over and over again I find that script customers (both internal consumers here at Microsoft and third-party developers) frequently ask questions like my teacher. That is, they have a preconceived notion of how the problem is going to be solved, and then ask the necessary questions to implement their preconceived solution. And in many cases this is a pretty good technique! Had someone actually brought a thin metal ruler to class, the problem would have been solved. But by choosing a question that emphasizes the solution over the problem, the questioner loses all ability to leverage the full knowledge of the questionees.

When someone asks me a question about the script technologies I almost always turn right around and ask them why they want to know. I might be able to point them at some tool that better solves their problem. And I might also learn something about what problems people are trying to solve with my tools.

Joel Spolsky once said that people don’t want drills, they want holes. As a drill provider, I’m fascinated to learn what kinds of holes people want to put in what kinds of materials, so to speak. Sometimes people think they want a drill when in fact they want a rotary cutter.

Commentary from 2019:

First off, I misattributed that quotation. “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.” is a quote from the economist Theodore Levitt. At the time I wrote this, I was sure that I had read about this idea in a Joel On Software article, but if I did, I cannot find it now. Apologies for the error.

Second, I did not know at the time that we have a name for this pattern of “have a problem, get a crazy idea about a solution, ask baffling questions about the crazy idea, rather than stating the problem directly” that we see so often on StackOverflow. It is an “XY problem“, which strikes me as a terrible name.

Third, I am reminded of a story about the time I was helping Morton Twillingate put a roof on his shed. “Hand me the screw driver there b’y,” he said so I handed him a Philips head screwdriver. “Sweet t’underin’ Jaysus b’y, give me the screw driver!” he said, pointing at the hammer in my other hand, “If I’d wanted the screw remover I’d have said so!”