Frequently people early-terminate their ideas. Often to the person doing this it sounds like trying to conquer gravity. A coworker of mine would assume some con

Frequently people early-terminate their ideas. Often to the person doing this it sounds like trying to conquer gravity. A coworker of mine would assume some constraints were immutable. So I'd be on the other side of the table. Examples: * We need Bob, but Bob is busy working on the other thing -> but what if Bob wants to work on this and this thing is more important. I'll ask him. * We would need at least 32 TB RAM to process this in-memory -> okay, looks like we're going to GCP with some big requests then * We can't scale like that in the datacenter (the capital costs are too high) and we don't have the time to move to the cloud -> I can find you the time. * We can't fix that bug, it would cause downtime -> okay, tell me when you want that downtime. How much do you want? * They won't sell us their data -> we can buy the company itself. Almost everything except natural laws are mutable. EDIT: Sadly, chris, I am rate-limited but we actually did take all the actions on the right. That isn't to say someone can idiotically offer these things when they aren't an option, but asking the question does often have value.