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Re:The Myth of Developer Obsolescence by blooalien on Tuesday May 27, 2025 @08:50AM (#44106454)
> Saying no is not really denying, it's negotiating.

Sometimes. I have often had to say "no" because the customer request is genuinely impossible. Then comes the fun bit of explaining why the thing they want simply cannot exist, because often they'll try "But what if you just ... ?" – "No! It doesn't work that way, and here's why..."

Re:The Myth of Developer Obsolescence by whstl on Tuesday May 27, 2025 @09:05AM (#44106588)
Argh.

I had to explain recently that `a * x !== b * x when a !== b`*... it is infuriating hearing "but the result is the same in this other competitor" coupled with the "maybe the problem here is you're not knowledgeable enough to understand".

Re:The Myth of Developer Obsolescence by cogman10 on Tuesday May 27, 2025 @09:18AM (#44106697)
Ah, I see you've worked on financial software as well ;)

We've definitely had our fair share of "IDK what to tell you, those guys are mathing wrong".

TBF, though, most customers are pretty tolerant of explainable differences in computed values. There's a bunch of "meh, close enough" in finance. We usually only run into the problem when someone (IMO) is looking for a reason not to buy our software. "It's not a perfect match, no way we can use this" sort of thing.

Re:The Myth of Developer Obsolescence by whstl on Tuesday May 27, 2025 @09:59AM (#44107111)
The super-advanced math that finance folks would throw at us was daunting.

At this particular job I used the plus, the star (multiplication) and once I even got to use the minus.

There's a legend going around that a friend of mine has used division, but he has a PhD.

Re:The Myth of Developer Obsolescence by ericrosedev on Tuesday May 27, 2025 @10:18AM (#44107265)
“I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you”
Re:The Myth of Developer Obsolescence by const_cast on Tuesday May 27, 2025 @07:41PM (#44111591)
Almost nothing is impossible, but a lot of things are really close. If it requires changing fundamental design aspects of a system then it's not worth it. I'm not going to burn down the code base and cause 1.5 million side effects that we don't know what they do so you can drag and drop a piece of the UI around like a widget.