This particular part to me is core:
> In the town near our house there's a shop with a sign warning that the door is hard to close. The sign has been there for several years. To the people in the shop it must seem like this mysterious natural phenomenon that the door sticks, and all they can do is put up a sign warning customers about it. But any carpenter looking at this situation would think "why don't you just plane off the part that sticks?"
I usually refer to it as a "problem-solving mindset" – a way of thinking where you approach a situation as something that could have a universe of solutions, but then learn to break down what exactly you want to solve, whittle down solutions to try, or whether you even need to reframe the problem, etc.
Another related thought (sorry but I don't remember where I saw it) is the idea of solving a problem vs making a problem go away, which are slightly different things. Solving a problem is like removing toxins from a car's emissions. Making the problem go away is to stop the car from having any emissions in the first place.
But the carpenter analogy is apt also because software people tend to think that the solution for many things is software (since that's what we're skilled in), whereas in some cases it's a human collaboration solution or something else.
> In the town near our house there's a shop with a sign warning that the door is hard to close. The sign has been there for several years. To the people in the shop it must seem like this mysterious natural phenomenon that the door sticks, and all they can do is put up a sign warning customers about it. But any carpenter looking at this situation would think "why don't you just plane off the part that sticks?"
I usually refer to it as a "problem-solving mindset" – a way of thinking where you approach a situation as something that could have a universe of solutions, but then learn to break down what exactly you want to solve, whittle down solutions to try, or whether you even need to reframe the problem, etc.
Another related thought (sorry but I don't remember where I saw it) is the idea of solving a problem vs making a problem go away, which are slightly different things. Solving a problem is like removing toxins from a car's emissions. Making the problem go away is to stop the car from having any emissions in the first place.
But the carpenter analogy is apt also because software people tend to think that the solution for many things is software (since that's what we're skilled in), whereas in some cases it's a human collaboration solution or something else.