[SamBam]

Sure it was. But it was a good example, because the person helpfully starts with "I'm trying to do X."

But they still say. "I'm trying to do X. To do this, I'm doing this complicated Y. How come Y doesn't work?"

This is still XY because they're asking about Y. But in the bad cases, they'd only mention the Y part, and omit that they're trying to do X.

[moralestapia]

The XY problem is "I'm trying to do Y" -> "Are you sure you don't want X?"

This is "I'm trying to do X" -> "Here's how you do X"

[SamBam]

No, not exactly. From [1], the XY problem is "you are trying to solve problem X, and you think solution Y would work, but instead of asking about X when you run into trouble, you ask about Y."

So person is trying to solve X, but asks

"How do you do Y?"

"Why are you trying to do Y?"

"Well, I want X and Y seems to be the solution"

"No, to solve X you want to do Z."

In this case the asker nicely gave their X as part of the question, but the bulk of the question was still about trying to move forward on their mistaken "solution" Y.

1. https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-x... (and note all the other answers saying the same thing.)