Has that never happened to you? You are stuck on a problem for what feels like forever. It's complex and difficult to keep completely in your mind at once. You've hit it from every facet that you can think off. Then you explain it to someone that knows very little of the problem and they throw out a little perspective, maybe preceded with a "Can you just..." and it may not be the solution, but your mind sort of jump starts down a different path than it had before.

I see this "Can you just..." business similar to the advice that you just stop working on the problem that you can't solve and think about something else for a while. Take a nap, go for a walk, have a drink. Wait until tomorrow. Often times the problem isn't that the problem is difficult to solve or that it's complex (it is), but rather that you are too mired in it to come up with the solution. "Can you just... " suggestions often pull me out of the trees so I can see the forest.

I've used a small handful of carefully thought-out "justs" myself.

I'm basically a marketer and I work with a lot of programmers who just finished school. We're building websites. I have really basic programming experience.

Sometimes a feature request comes in but without enough budget to really do it the right way.

So I have come up with logical workarounds after the programmers said it couldn't be done. And these instances have not caused any conflict.

Like for example, instead of making a huge slow product database, I built a huge list of URLs and then they parsed the product number in it, and output the tech specs to the page. The mfr's product numbers were encoding the tech specs.

That said, I also see people up the ladder flinging "justs" left and right and causing immense failure and suffering.

Nothing easy to explain, since they're in a specialized domain, but I can say that sometimes other people's insights can be annoying, but they can also be quite helpful. Anyone who doesn't know that first hand might have problems working well with others.