> 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.
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.)
> "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...
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".
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.
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.