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A: If what you want is to do Y, you should ask that question without pre-supposing the use of a method that may not be appropriate. Questions of this form often indicate a person who is not merely ignorant about X, but confused about what problem Y they are solving and too fixated on the details of
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The XY problem obscures the real issues and may even introduce secondary problems that lead to miscommunication, resource mismanagement, and sub-par solutions. The solution for the support personnel is to
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Often, end users end up in XY problems when posing a question that does not directly address the desired outcome that originally motivated the question. Examples from
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Asking about how to grab the last three characters in a filename (
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