• @[email protected]
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    41 hour ago

    I’m surprised I’m the first comment saying this, but all I see is a user who needs help expressing their needs but who is not getting that help. Sure they don’t have our experience with decomposing problems and anticipating technical issues, but that’s normal and expected.

    • @[email protected]
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      25 minutes ago

      All I see is 5 minutes of the protagonist not listening (yadda yadda) to expressed needs, then getting upset at the word active being used again.

    • @Bosht
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      154 minutes ago

      People bitch about the existence of Project Managers (I have myself) but then you see shit like this. Breaks in communication and one side needing the ability to express to the other. Some devs can bridge it, some can’t.

    • @mkwt
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      218 hours ago

      I preferred the Facebook group “If 2,147,483,648 people join this group, then an integer overflow may occur” back in the day.

    • palordrolap
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      159 hours ago

      That one xkcd about tautologies sure is that one xkcd about tautologies.

  • @Droggelbecher
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    349 hours ago

    You don’t need to know what they consider active, just give them a toggle so they can decide.

    • @[email protected]
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      167 hours ago

      This so much. If you can’t articulate it I’m going to make sure it stays your problem, not mine.

      • @marcos
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        9 hours ago

        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.

  • @SlopppyEngineer
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    56 hours ago

    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.

    • @BradleyUffner
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      12 hours ago

      This is how you end up with an excel sheet running the entire company.

  • mosiacmango
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    9 hours ago

    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.”

    • @BassTurd
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      116 hours ago

      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.

      • Eager Eagle
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        135 minutes ago

        Fine. You WILL give me a 20% raise.

      • @[email protected]
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        67 hours ago

        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.

        • Eager Eagle
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          29 minutes ago

          Getting a bit in between the lines, “should” more often than not reads to me as “it’s expected to work and we’re working towards it”.

          While “could” sounds like a shrug: “it may work, but I/we have little to no control over it”.

        • mosiacmango
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          86 hours ago

          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.

  • shoulderoforion
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    -109 hours ago

    The Game. You’ve lost it. In the quantum world, all things are not only active, but change, once you consider them.