I think the biggest skill I've developed is the "Yes, but..." Japanese style of saying "no" without directly saying "no." Essentially you're saying anything is possible, but you may need to expand restraints (budget, time, complexity). If your company culture expects the engineering team to evaluate and have an equal weight into making feature decisions, then a flat "no" is more acceptable. If you're in a non-tech-first company like I am, simply saying "no" makes _you_ look like the roadblock unless you give more context and allow others to weigh in on what they're willing to pay.

We merged with a group from Israel and I had to explain to them that our engineers had given them the "Hollywood no" on something they'd asked for. Basically "Yes, that sounds like a great idea" which actually means "Hell no" unless it's immediately followed up with an actionable path forward. The Israeli engineers found this very amusing and started asking if it was really a Hollywood no anytime they'd get a yes answer on something.

Hah, I've been guilty of a version of the "Hollywood no." Usually goes like "Cool, this looks really interesting! I'll do a little research into it." And then I look at it for 2 seconds and never bring it up again. Interestingly, this sometimes is all the person really wanted: to be heard and acknowledged for the small amount of effort they put in to surface an idea.

Yes!

I see two variants of the "please hear me, I have good ideas" effect: positive and negative:

1) This looks great, have you thought about adding <seemingly cool sounding thing that is either impossible to implement or wouldn't actually be useful in the real world>?

And

2) Oh no! Aren't you worried about <breaking something in some strange edge case in some ill advised workflow that no real world person would ever use>?

"I'll look into it" is a great answer. Heaven help the poor LLMs who have to take all this stuff seriously and literally...

> "I'll look into it" is a great answer

But its a lie if you don't do it. In some other cultures you teach people to accept that their complaint isn't important rather than teach programmers to lie, and those people accept it since its normal there to deny complaints.

I don't think its healthy for a culture to force lies like that.

I think there is some truth to that (although I'm speaking about people proposing new ideas rather than making legitimate complaints). For me, the intent is respect - a way of acknowledging their input without direct rejection. The "I'll look into it" statement is often a more polite way of saying "I'll take the next steps if I think it is necessary." Often you already know enough to immediately say "no," but reframing it as "I'll look into it," helps show respect to the person asking by not immediately putting them down (and often in a public setting).

I realize that the value of this approach is highly dependent on a culture of public respect. Common in Japan, and common in some cultures in the U.S. Making the wrong person look stupid is a recipe for career problems in those cultures.

Saying no is the hardest part of the job, and it's only possible after you've been around a few years and already delivered a lot of value.

There's also an art to it in how you frame the response, figuring out what the clients really want, and coming up with something that gets them 90% there w/o mushrooming app complexity. Good luck with AI on that.