If the “why can’t we do X” is “because we’re a team of 4 and already overburdened” there may not be any practical solutions.
Most of the time the issue is the "9 women can't have a baby in a month" problem where adding more resources is not going to make things happen faster - in fact it may slow things down.
But the business doesn't understand that software is not like construction where adding more people really will get that ditch dug faster.
At its core software is not making a thing - it's inventing a machine that makes the thing.
If you're Little Debbie and you have a machine that makes cupcakes it's hard when the business comes in and says, "now it needs to make fudge rounds." And no amount of extra people working on the problem will get that machine retooled any faster.
People tend to understand that there's an upper limit to the amount of people that can be deployed to dig a ditch any faster too
They just refuse to believe that with software, sometimes that number is smaller than they think it should be simply because people aren't physically getting in each others way
But it's super common for a team to be asked to do something fundamentally outside their scope, and the asking client/boss not realizing that they are doin g it.
"Figure it out" as a useful strategy sort of assumes that both sides of the equation are clued in about this and roughly on the same page.
"I underwrote a great team, you should be able to figure this out (stop whining about it being hard)" is a fundamentally different statement than "Why can't you just do X, how hard can it be?"
It's also worth remembering that the plural of "resource" is not "team".
> "figure it out"
that's the kind of motivation that leads to someone making Armchair Toilet
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ce/11/34/ce1134ca396e43f55c84...
Sure, sometimes you can re-define the goal. ("We need to know more about what's in the Alpha Centauri system.") But sometimes domain expertise means telling non-experts about reality. (Pi is not 3, no matter how much someone thinks it should be.)
See: the full rewrite/retool
This resonates with me. I get a lot of "But Microsoft Office 365 Cloud does…"
I tell them that Microsoft spent a quarter of a billion dollars on that item last year, and I'm perfectly happy to re-create it if they give me a quarter of a billion dollars, too.
> Steve Jobs would just say "figure it out".
The difficulty in what my clients are asking for is often not the feasibility but rather the time, monetary, and opportunity cost for ignoring other features.
Apple didn't pay well for most of its life, until well after iPhone/iPad success
It was not like "FAANG salaries", which started around 2011, by my reckoning because Facebook didn't agree to the "Steve Jobs collusion" with Google/Intel/Pixar (ironically!)
This is very well documented
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Steve Jobs e-mails Eric Schmidt (2007) -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699873
Steve mostly realized the good engineers want to work with other good engineers, no matter what they are paid
He didn't actually give people "budget"
As a side note, engineers tend to be bad at couching conversations in these terms - nothing is impossible*, things just cost more or less, and that’s a decision for the money people to make.
* yes yes caveat caveat
Where I work, it doesn’t really matter what I’m paid, we don’t have a budget to go get what we need. If I think a certain tool would help get a job done faster, too bad, I have to cobble together what I can with the tools I’ve been provided. If I think something will take a year, too bad, it’s due in a month and we’ll have an hour long meeting every day to ask why it isn’t done yet.
In this context, employee pay is largely irrelevant.
He got the money together to buy one. Or thought he did. Forgot about insurance, being a young male and little driving history. Doubled his payments.
Also he was a terrible driver. The expensive thing about BMWs is not the car it’s repairs. Which is also why the insurance is so high. He wrecked that thing three times. He probably could have gotten his family into a better house for the amount of money he burned on that car. So foolish.
Customers live out this sort of drama all the time. They need a good used car but they want something that’ll bankrupt them because they have an image in their head. Either a dream or a status symbol.
Gordon Ramsay did a whole TV series about restaurateurs with the same mental block. They want to be successful but they don’t want to pay their dues and pretend instead.
I had a boss who I’m now sure had aphantasia and his two best UI people would tell him something wouldn’t fit in backlog grooming, then we’d get to spend a week showing him all the different ways it doesn’t fit before he would shut the fuck up about it.
We already “figured it out” in our heads because we are equipped to do the job. We were already doing some pretty sophisticated typesetting to make more things fit on the screen than really did.
He was sure he knew where the problems were in the org and that they weren’t him.
Just is a bitch mother that seeks to handwave away any potential problems.
If it’s just that, I’ll gladly step aside and let you do it. But if you then tell me you can’t do it, then you better sit down, shut the fuck up, and listen when I tell you something is more complicated than you think.
My best example of this is my father-in-law. He's an absolutely wonderful man, generous to a fault and all of that. Fancies himself a handyman. But I had to stop asking for his help with around-the-house projects out of sheer anger and frustration because every SINGLE time I made a decision about how to proceed with the job or pick which tool to use to cut something, he would stop and and ask, "Well, why don't you just do X instead?"
It didn't seem to matter if I explained my reasoning, or if doing X meant redoing a hour of work just to get back to where we currently were. I even attempted to humor him by trying things his way whether or not they were going to work out. (They often didn't). Eventually it ended in me saying "no" way more often than "yes" and he would infer that I was refusing his help and he'd throw his hands up and walk away.
I think it's not an uncommon opinion. And of course, Adam Savage is always great.
Sounds like he spends a lot of time on StackOverflow.
In some cases, it's diminishing or trivializing the work. "I just need to do X" trivializes the amount of work that X takes and in some cases implies that the person I am talking to is not competent / capable of doing it themselves (often implying that they should be).
Likewise, "they just did X" trivializes the work that the other person does.
Its a word I ̶j̶u̶s̶t̶ don't believe adds value to a sentence.
See also why estimates aren’t actual costs. Every plumber runs into this constantly. Sorry you have a crushed sewer line add a zero to the cost.
Especially since corona. And not a tiny minority, but a big group.
He told me that a few decades ago, there were the occasional homeopathic or other "nutcases". But that today this is common.
What I've read about this, it's a global trend, in a fly-wheel (feedback-loop) effect with mostly populism. Populism feeds distrust in authorities like lawyers, doctors, journalists. And distrust in authorities feeds populism.
I try not to fall into the first category but I've known many people who do. Though I've had many experiences with fast talking, eyes glazed, interrupt me to push the first thing that comes to mind type doctors. Once i had to fight with guy to just get him to let me finish a sentence! He changed his mind every 5 words trying to get out of there but it'd've been faster if he just let me talk! It's infuriating, I'll never go back to a doctor like that. Seems like he didn't even wait to leave the room before i was out of his mind, possibly i never even entered it
Assuming the patient is as intelligent as the average on HN, and motivated about their health, they may well be able to learn more about what's going on with their health in the month it takes to get an appointment than the doctor will in the ten minutes they spend with you.
(* Because most people who live in cities, and most people who go into primary care in cities do so because they weren't competitive enough for one of the more interesting and lucrative specialties. It's a similar dynamic as to why most people in the tech industry that people encounter—IT help desk reps—are not usually the cream of the crop.)
Unfortunately, the kind of sacrifice and selflessness you describe is not the norm in our society. As a result, the dynamic I articulated holds for "most"—just like I said.
Your post is deliberately dishonest in its characterization of what I said, and excessively hostile. That kind of behavior is not consistent with the community norms on HN. I urge you to reconsider how you interact with people here.
I’ve been on both sides of this fence as a customer and a developer, and have at times had to straddle the fence as a PM.
The hardness of a problem does not mean the problem can’t or doesn’t need to be solved.
A client pushing back is often their way of trying to ensure that the developer actually understands what they want.
“Pushing back” as a developer is often mostly about setting expectations, i.e. “no, this is very different, won’t benefit from previous work and won’t be easy”.
All of this is necessary to gain a shared understanding, and the end result may still be that the work must be done.
Unfortunately, the part after the "can't you just" is rarely helpful.
“Can you just…” sums it all.
You're there because you are reliant on their expertise and can't just do it yourself. Otherwise you'd be doing so.
I’m usually paying experts to advise me so I can make my own decisions and then enact those decisions. Occasionally, I will have an opinion on methods. I’m not reliant individually on any expert, even if I am ultimately reliant upon their profession. And I hire people for work I can do all the time.
Experts are often wrong. They misunderstand requirements. They don’t fully understand the system they are modifying. They can be lazy. They can consider a job or client as less important than other jobs or clients. They can lie. They can have incentives that don’t work for the client. They can be terrible at their work.
Even when experts are good and honest, they can make decisions that don’t work for their clients. My divorce lawyer was amazing when he was on the warpath, but I told him I didn’t want to take that approach generally because I knew my ex’s back would go up and we’d both pay a lot more in legal fees to achieve the same results. He was good at his job and he wasn’t wrong, but that particular method didn’t work for me.