[danso]

“Just ssh into the box”…

I get what the OP is saying, but sometimes, the word "just" is justified. It is simply a command, an invocation of a program that is non-trivial itself, but the use of which has been made easy for laypersons...and by laypersons, I mean people who don't study the SSH protocol.

And I think it's important to tell people that things like "just ssh into..." are easy...it's not the action that is hard. However, understanding why you'd ssh into anything, rather than, say, FTP, or whatever...is difficult...I don't mean necessarily studying the SSH protocol, but why ssh is used in modern deployment workflows.

But until students just SSH in, they will never get to the why. So I don't really know what to tell them, except just try it.

[Jtsummers]

Imagine this scenario, you're teaching CS 1 at your college. Your system for submitting assignments is to have students use a git repo and push it to a remote repository on your servers. You could tell them, "Just clone this remote repository when you start working on the assignment." But that's unhelpful, and the word "just" implies that they should already know how to do it. If that's your statement on day 1, you're hurting many of your students. Instead it should be something like, "We use Git for assignment submissions, it is a version control system. Here's where you can learn more about it. Assignment 1 is posted on the website and will walk you through using git to submit the assignment. The full procedure is also available here along with some cheat sheets. Here's our CS 1 material of the day." The assumption that students or new employees know the idiosyncratic processes and tools of your school, class or organization does what assumptions are prone to do, someone is going to come out looking like an ass. It may be the new person when they get frustrated, or the experienced person when it turns out "easy" is really 20 different steps on 3 or 4 different systems.