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What the fuck, is that a rage comic in the grimdark future of 2025?
Dump to an Excel sheet and ask them to make a formula for “active”. A client that can’t use Excel deserves to be teased and be charged extra.
You don’t need to know what they consider active, just give them a toggle so they can decide.
This so much. If you can’t articulate it I’m going to make sure it stays your problem, not mine.
And what does it toggle?
The “active” status.
Any project with it set is active, any project with it not set isn’t. And you set them all to active when you create the toggle.
If the users complain, you make them tell you an specific rule that can you can use to auto-change a subset of the projects in a cron job. Expecting anything like this to have a complete objective definition is delusional.
I preferred the Facebook group “If 2,147,483,648 people join this group, then an integer overflow may occur” back in the day.
That one xkcd about tautologies sure is that one xkcd about tautologies.
This is why “sure” or “yes” are not part of my IT vocabulary. “Should” is king. “We should be be able to do” or “that should work.”
In the idiocy of stakeholders that want IT to be a magic wand to fix their ineptitude instead of a helpful contributor to their well thought out process, you have to coach everything in the polite “no” that is “maybe” or “should.”
One of my managers told me that I need to use words like “will” instead of “should” when talking discovery with clients. I told him only Siths deal in absolutes, which he didn’t like as much as I did.
I’m not a yes man, and I’m not going to lie about something I can’t guarantee. If something goes wrong, I’m the one that looks like a lying failure and gets to fix it. My clients are internal business users, not actual external customers. Words have meanings, and it’s important to use the correct ones when communicating important information.
How to piss off management with one simple word.
Am manager, hate should.
Should presumes an ideal set of conditions with perfect context.
Could is a much better term as it implicitly accepts real world conditions and a lack of total context by couching the affirmation as contingent upon only the discussion (and prior references) at hand.
In my experience, people want “it will work.” They will not accept “it could work” at all.
“It should work” is the perfect amount of hedge, even when you know “it will work,” because all of us have been burned by simple assumptions that were right 1000 times before and were somehow wrong this time.
You’re way smarter than me. I’m sure you can come up with something.
Then you implement it.
Not like that. Obviously!
You should really put a PTSD trigger warning on that quote.
The Game. You’ve lost it. In the quantum world, all things are not only active, but change, once you consider them.
