3 ms·

A friend of mine was once told to make his product idiot-proof. He said "sure, as soon as you give me the spec for the standard idiot."

• anigbrowl 7y ago
  That's a really old joke and its purpose is to deflect rather than to illuminate. Your friend was trying to sound smart to distract from his unwillingness or inability to come to grips with the underlying design issues.
  • mark-r 7y ago
    Maybe it was an old joke, but it was new to me at the time - only time I had heard it, and I haven't heard it again in the many years since. And I think it says something useful about the impossibility of the task. The domains we work in are all about the expected inputs and expected outputs, and it takes a special kind of imagination to come up with parameters outside of those.
  • serf 7y ago
    >Your friend was trying to sound smart to distract from his unwillingness or inability to come to grips with the underlying design issues. Stout claim. So I presume that you've witnessed any design or engineering firm that was able to deal with every 'idiot' within their problem domain? I think OPs interpretation of the saying is more correct. The saying is bringing up the impossibility of designing something for everyone , not the deflecting of labor in some snarky way.