8 ms·

Sometimes a blunt ”that won’t work” is needed, to save the team valuable time. There is no point in exploring implementation details of a solution, if the propo

by nikanj 5y ago

Sometimes a blunt ”that won’t work” is needed, to save the team valuable time. There is no point in exploring implementation details of a solution, if the proposed solution has a fatal flaw. Pointing out said flaw obviously is the responsibility of the person calling TWW. The last thing I want is an engineering team of yes-men, who don’t want to be ”bad team players”, and thus keep cheering ideas that Just. Won’t. Work.

CrazyStat 5y ago
I think rephrasing the comment (as the post suggests) in terms of "that might work if we can [resolve fatal flaw]" is a good suggestion, in that case. It's a much less negative way to point out the flaw.
- mixedCase 5y ago
  That leans the discussion towards "it's possible" more than "it's impossible unless...". Not ideal if the goal is to save time and sanity.
- Isamu 5y ago
  Or just “what about <showstopper>?” All you have to do is bring up the issue that you think kills the idea, you don’t have to issue a judgment. If people can’t see that it kills the idea, then either you are wrong and it can be mitigated, or again you are wrong and it is not the issue you think it is, or you are right but you are dealing with a group of people that can’t see reason, which is something you would want to know anyway.
  - geocrasher 5y ago
    If you just say "what about <showstopper>?" without offering a way to continue the discussion, then you might come off as TWWP. I would suggest that it could be phrased in a more constructive way, which was the point I tried to make in the article. Instead of "what about <showstopper>?" you could say "I think that might be a reasonable solution. What impact will <showstopper> have on it?" and now you've validated the good and brought up the potential showstopper without shutting down the conversation about it.
    - Isamu 5y ago
      > without offering a way to continue the discussion It is asking asking a legitimate question in a neutral manner. It’s not supposed to be a microaggression. Asking a legitimate question should provoke discussion, unless discussion is fundamentally broken in your current environment, which again would be good to know.
      - Beldin 5y ago
        If you're in a brainstorm session for solutions (which is what this sounds like), keeping a positive flow is way better than halting to consider a neutral or even a negative. In other words, don't ignore the atmosphere and end up killing it. Which is kind of the point of the article, I feel.
    - joenathanone 5y ago
      > you could say "I think that might be a reasonable solution. What impact will <showstopper> have on it?" This is super condescending.
      - geocrasher 5y ago
        I suppose if you say it with a superior tone and act like you know better, sure. It's all in the delivery. If you ask it as a genuine question, assuming that you don't have the answer, then I can't see how it would be taken that way by most people.
        andrewflnr 5y ago
        No, it's not the delivery, it's the content and the fact that you're lying to save the other person's feelings. Specifically, the lie is that you think the solution is "reasonable" in the same breath that you raise an objection you believe puts it in serious doubt, if it's not outright fatal. You can deliver that in perfect sincerity and if I see what's going on, the condescension will come through crystal clear, because I'm not a child.
  - lumost 5y ago
    There's an important callout here that often someone's "showstopper" isn't correctly viewed as a showstopper elsewhere. If the someone calling out the showstopper isn't the final approver or able to sway the group that it's a showstopper then suggesting a follow-up validation to demonstrate the showstopper can be a good strategy.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  that sort of faux-diplomacy annoys me more personally because it always is blatantly obvious what the person is trying to communicate, and it sounds like it comes out of some kind of corporate PR training session. Like, if someone thinks what I does suck I always invite people to tell me so. If you're trying to sugarcoat it not only is it obvious that you think the idea sucks, you also think I can't accept your opinion, that's worse lol. I think in general, not just in the workplace, people are very fine-tuned to noticing false compliments or underhanded criticism, and it's always worse than just playing it straight.
  - mechEpleb 5y ago
    >Like, if someone thinks what I does suck I always invite people to tell me so. That's you. Plenty of other people will defend whatever they come up with regardless and need to protect their fragile egos.
didibus 5y ago
The post actually convinced me against what you're saying. Something might not work, and if you know it won't and know a way that will, sure interfere (hopefully with tact), and steer the conversation towards a more likely solution. But, if you only know why it won't work, but not of anything else that could work, than it seems useful to discuss further, but can't it be made to work?
- lazide 5y ago
  The issue I’ve run across is the passive aggressive approach (aka what some people often mean re:tact) can delay having the direct conversation and then people spend the next 6 months noodling around hypotheticals until the original objector is worn down and says fine - and then the project fails because sure enough, it didn’t actually work. Seen it at least twice. Also seen the ‘actually it was fine, the objector was just in a bad mood and couldn’t see past their own prior experience and was being a pain in the ass’ more times than I can count. Which is why hopefully you have senior leadership that can see through the BS and get things moving in a workable direction.
- saurik 5y ago
  """No matter how many times it comes up, I can't build you a perpetual motion machine. I know it can't be done--and, more to the point, have explained why multiple times--and I would rather not the entire team continually have giant meetings attending to discuss how to build it anyway. It doesn't motivate me that you have found a customer for it, or that you have come up with a million ways it will make the world a better place: we have an actual engine that we are trying to ship here, and your insistence upon wasting my time and energy requiring me to explain over and over again why your perpetual motion machine is, at least, something that our team isn't going to come up with, is so far past distracting as to potentially be active sabotage when you convince our users that they should wait for it to be implemented, or get our marketing department hyped about the possible new markets it will open up for us. Yes: I "only" know why it doesn't work... something I would hope would have extreme value, as I am not simply telling you "you are dumb" and refusing to discuss it, even if you don't understand the math or physics involved and thereby can't tell the difference; and I don't have something else for you that does anything similar: if I had any hope this was possible, I assure you I would be dedicating quite a lot of our resources towards figuring out how to pull it off. I will even admit that maybe, just maybe, you are correct, and what you want somehow can be done because everyone who has ever studied this before is wrong... but it isn't going to anyone on our team--not me, and especially not you, who figures this out--so let's spend our time talking about things that aren't a waste of our time and money. Am I a "negative Nancy"? Sure... if that's what you want to call someone who uses their time effectively.""" -- someone who has often been in the situation of having to have this conversation about the same scant handful of "obvious" ideas over and over again, often times for years (essentially, until the project is scrapped)
II2II 5y ago
That was my original response, but the author's point was about proposing potential solutions rather than affirming bad solutions. It isn't about good team players by being yes-men. It is about creating an environment where people are comfortable with proposing solutions that may work. Notice that the author was talking about redirecting the conversation rather than being agreeable. Are there times when someone has to say TWW? Sure. But that should be reserved for situations where it isn't possible to redirect the conversation along more productive avenues or a potential solution is being ignored in favour of one that just won't work.
ping_pong 5y ago
90% of "that won't work" that I've seen in my career is really just "I don't like your idea, I like my idea better" in disguise. If something really won't work because of some fatal flaw or because it's truly a stupid idea, then sure you need to speak up. But if it's just a difference of opinion, then it's fine to propose another idea but it should remain a professional and technical discussion and agreement. But also be supportive of other ideas that aren't your own. I see too many people think other people's different ideas won't work because their ideas are better.
- Yoric 5y ago
  Years ago, I was leading the R&D in a start-up. The CEO was full of ideas. Some of them were very good, some really bad, most completely ill-matched to our priorities and limited resources. It quickly became clear to me that my job was being the "that won't work guy", in an attempt to make sure that we managed to finish our project before we ran out of funds. Almost all the problems we encountered with the project where things that happened as a consequence of me not shooting down random ideas before said CEO managed to get them started. Whenever I came back from PTO, or conference, etc. I regularly discovered that the CEO had split the already direly understaffed team to work on yet another brilliant idea that would make no sense before we even had our product. A few of the brilliant ideas I managed to shutdown: a reimplementation of git, a home-made bug tracker, a novel abstract interpreter for a programming language that didn't work yet, a transpiler between the old programming language used in-house and the new one, a Google Docs clone, a home-made IDE, a mechanism for storing source code as structured data to a database instead of a flat file... Things I didn't manage to shutdown: a custom NoSQL database, a home-made project tracker, a homemade front-end framework, a custom HTTP server, a custom standard library, a new type system, ... all of which were distinctly inferior from what was already available, and could possibly have become much better, with years of development which we couldn't afford. The company managed to release a first version of the product and folded a few months later, out of funding. Of course, shortly before that, I got fired for "blocking" the development of the company. My conclusion? Yeah, sometimes, "that won't work" is a matter of survival. But if someone needs to throw away their career by being the "that won't work" person, the company risks ending up full of yes people.
op00to 5y ago
Did you read the article? You’re free to TWW, but rather than shooting the idea down you bring up the constraint that breaks the idea. Not: “hey that won’t work because xyz”. Result: people discouraged. Instead try: Hey that would work if xyz were true. Result: people can think about why is xyz false, how do we flip xyz to true?
furyofantares 5y ago
In my experience, saying "that won't work" as a direct response to anything a peer proposes is too early (or someone even resembling a peer). It's not that you need to say yes to things, it's that you need to sit with it a minute, and challenge your objection internally / try to creatively get around the fatal flaw you perceive, before voicing your opinion. Sometimes you'll actually be wrong, other times you'll invent something that works in response. Sometimes you'll be right, and you can raise the objection after you've put in a little internal work. This isn't the case if, say, someone suggests something as outlandish as "we should just invent a new compression algorithm that works on all possible inputs." But then, that's not something a peer or someone resembling a peer is likely to say.
- O_H_E 5y ago
  > it's that you need to sit with it a minute, and challenge your objection internally Yaaas please, this so much.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    Whoops, you missed your chance to object and now you've just signed up to fix the hard parts of someone else's bad idea! Boiling down engineering decisions into dispassionate lists of tradeoffs is an important skill, but early in my career I erred too hard in this direction. Coworkers who spoke without thinking "won" every time and I got stuck digging us out of the holes they led us into even though I had seen the holes from miles away. This happened several times before I learned to trust myself and stand up for my own ideas even if I wasn't 100% confident in them. That's an important skill too.
    - ironmagma 5y ago
      Isn’t there a reasonable middle ground? One could just say what they mean: “I have some major concerns about this idea.” It doesn’t shut anything down while still communicating there is significant pushback.
      - 5y ago
jbay808 5y ago
I just have to be honest and mention, I once flatly told one of my reports "that won't work". He said, "give me a month". I said, "don't waste your time". He said, "give me a week?" I said, "okay, you can spend a week on it, but after it doesn't work, please do it my way". Much to my surprise it worked, and much better than my way would have.
- joshschreuder 5y ago
  Yeesh, after trying to block it multiple times and then telling them you still think it won’t work even if you’re letting them “waste” time on it, that’s some serious humble pie to eat! How did that go?
  - jbay808 5y ago
    Yeah, I'm still embarrassed about it. Fortunately, we were all so excited about how well his crazy idea worked that he never held it against me. I was careful not to accept any credit whatsoever for how it all turned out, though.
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      > I was careful not to accept any credit whatsoever for how it all turned out, though. While it’s easy to fall into that trap. 90% of people wouldn’t have given them the week in the first place. I think you deserve some credit for realizing that you ‘might’ be wrong.
  - bruce511 5y ago
    I'm not the OP but I have had similar experiences along the way. My approach to it happening has always been two-fold; Firstly when talking about it I would tell the story - I hated the idea, wouldn't work etc - but the other guy was better than me and made it work. I lean into the mistake, make sure others know it happened. That leads to part 2 - everyone and most of all myself need to know I am not omniscient. Someone needs to tell me I also have bad ideas. Sometimes other people have good ideas I don't like. Most of all I encourage people to have and share lots and lots of ideas. 90% are bad (mine included) but if we can isolate the good 10% we'll do OK.
keithplayer 5y ago
As mentioned often "that won't work" is a good way to cut off all creative thought processes and should be limited, but there are definitely times when a quorum of uninformed parties are about to commit to 'an investigation' where someone calling it straight is appreciated
- geocrasher 5y ago
  I'd agree with this. The article specifically mentions the need to analyze rather than jump to conclusions, and "That won't work!" is usually a case of the latter. If TWW is the result of an analysis, then it is definitely not what I was referring to in the article.
Vinnl 5y ago
The post argues (rightfully, I think) that even if the proposed solution has a fatal flaw, shutting it down does not save the team valuable time, because even if the solution isn't The Right One, its proposal can spark the creativity in others to come up with what is The Right One. I used to cut meetings up in a brainstorming phase, in which it was not allowed to say no to anything, and a filter phase, in which we narrowed down proposals to the viable ones.
roamingdave 5y ago
Blunt approaches like that are often ineffective. A discussion that explains why it's a bad idea with the person arguing against the idea actually listening to the creator's defense is much better. Quite often people recoil at being told abrasively "that won't work" and end up taking the view that the person calling them out doesn't get it. Whereas a discussion where both sides have a push-and-shove to get to the conclusion sticks in the creator's mind and might even get them to stop pursuing it.
Xcelerate 5y ago
> Sometimes a blunt ”that won’t work” is needed, to save the team valuable time. In my experience, “sometimes” means “very rarely”. The reason often has more to do with personality than any sort of technical obstacle.
YZF 5y ago
Can't the fatal flaw always be duct-taped over? ;) The problem I often have is not with stuff that clearly just does not work. The problem is the stuff that "sorta maybe works" and then keeps working until it doesn't. You can't really prove it won't work, because hey, it does work. There's always some convoluted way of getting it to keep working. It's really tough to make the argument that further down the road when the software grows, the scale grows, or the requirements change, the proposed solution won't be easy to adapt or won't be as robust/reliable. This is the really important stuff. I would say that investing in things that just never work at all and can't be made to work is more rare, probably still happens, but more rare.

by nikanj 5y ago

CrazyStat 5y ago

I think rephrasing the comment (as the post suggests) in terms of "that might work if we can [resolve fatal flaw]" is a good suggestion, in that case. It's a much less negative way to point out the flaw.

mixedCase 5y ago
That leans the discussion towards "it's possible" more than "it's impossible unless...". Not ideal if the goal is to save time and sanity.
Isamu 5y ago
Or just “what about <showstopper>?” All you have to do is bring up the issue that you think kills the idea, you don’t have to issue a judgment. If people can’t see that it kills the idea, then either you are wrong and it can be mitigated, or again you are wrong and it is not the issue you think it is, or you are right but you are dealing with a group of people that can’t see reason, which is something you would want to know anyway.
- geocrasher 5y ago
  If you just say "what about <showstopper>?" without offering a way to continue the discussion, then you might come off as TWWP. I would suggest that it could be phrased in a more constructive way, which was the point I tried to make in the article. Instead of "what about <showstopper>?" you could say "I think that might be a reasonable solution. What impact will <showstopper> have on it?" and now you've validated the good and brought up the potential showstopper without shutting down the conversation about it.
  - Isamu 5y ago
    > without offering a way to continue the discussion It is asking asking a legitimate question in a neutral manner. It’s not supposed to be a microaggression. Asking a legitimate question should provoke discussion, unless discussion is fundamentally broken in your current environment, which again would be good to know.
    - Beldin 5y ago
      If you're in a brainstorm session for solutions (which is what this sounds like), keeping a positive flow is way better than halting to consider a neutral or even a negative. In other words, don't ignore the atmosphere and end up killing it. Which is kind of the point of the article, I feel.
  - joenathanone 5y ago
    > you could say "I think that might be a reasonable solution. What impact will <showstopper> have on it?" This is super condescending.
    - geocrasher 5y ago
      I suppose if you say it with a superior tone and act like you know better, sure. It's all in the delivery. If you ask it as a genuine question, assuming that you don't have the answer, then I can't see how it would be taken that way by most people.
      - andrewflnr 5y ago
        No, it's not the delivery, it's the content and the fact that you're lying to save the other person's feelings. Specifically, the lie is that you think the solution is "reasonable" in the same breath that you raise an objection you believe puts it in serious doubt, if it's not outright fatal. You can deliver that in perfect sincerity and if I see what's going on, the condescension will come through crystal clear, because I'm not a child.
- lumost 5y ago
  There's an important callout here that often someone's "showstopper" isn't correctly viewed as a showstopper elsewhere. If the someone calling out the showstopper isn't the final approver or able to sway the group that it's a showstopper then suggesting a follow-up validation to demonstrate the showstopper can be a good strategy.
Barrin92 5y ago
that sort of faux-diplomacy annoys me more personally because it always is blatantly obvious what the person is trying to communicate, and it sounds like it comes out of some kind of corporate PR training session. Like, if someone thinks what I does suck I always invite people to tell me so. If you're trying to sugarcoat it not only is it obvious that you think the idea sucks, you also think I can't accept your opinion, that's worse lol. I think in general, not just in the workplace, people are very fine-tuned to noticing false compliments or underhanded criticism, and it's always worse than just playing it straight.
- mechEpleb 5y ago
  >Like, if someone thinks what I does suck I always invite people to tell me so. That's you. Plenty of other people will defend whatever they come up with regardless and need to protect their fragile egos.

didibus 5y ago

The post actually convinced me against what you're saying. Something might not work, and if you know it won't and know a way that will, sure interfere (hopefully with tact), and steer the conversation towards a more likely solution. But, if you only know why it won't work, but not of anything else that could work, than it seems useful to discuss further, but can't it be made to work?

lazide 5y ago
The issue I’ve run across is the passive aggressive approach (aka what some people often mean re:tact) can delay having the direct conversation and then people spend the next 6 months noodling around hypotheticals until the original objector is worn down and says fine - and then the project fails because sure enough, it didn’t actually work. Seen it at least twice. Also seen the ‘actually it was fine, the objector was just in a bad mood and couldn’t see past their own prior experience and was being a pain in the ass’ more times than I can count. Which is why hopefully you have senior leadership that can see through the BS and get things moving in a workable direction.
saurik 5y ago
"""No matter how many times it comes up, I can't build you a perpetual motion machine. I know it can't be done--and, more to the point, have explained why multiple times--and I would rather not the entire team continually have giant meetings attending to discuss how to build it anyway. It doesn't motivate me that you have found a customer for it, or that you have come up with a million ways it will make the world a better place: we have an actual engine that we are trying to ship here, and your insistence upon wasting my time and energy requiring me to explain over and over again why your perpetual motion machine is, at least, something that our team isn't going to come up with, is so far past distracting as to potentially be active sabotage when you convince our users that they should wait for it to be implemented, or get our marketing department hyped about the possible new markets it will open up for us. Yes: I "only" know why it doesn't work... something I would hope would have extreme value, as I am not simply telling you "you are dumb" and refusing to discuss it, even if you don't understand the math or physics involved and thereby can't tell the difference; and I don't have something else for you that does anything similar: if I had any hope this was possible, I assure you I would be dedicating quite a lot of our resources towards figuring out how to pull it off. I will even admit that maybe, just maybe, you are correct, and what you want somehow can be done because everyone who has ever studied this before is wrong... but it isn't going to anyone on our team--not me, and especially not you, who figures this out--so let's spend our time talking about things that aren't a waste of our time and money. Am I a "negative Nancy"? Sure... if that's what you want to call someone who uses their time effectively.""" -- someone who has often been in the situation of having to have this conversation about the same scant handful of "obvious" ideas over and over again, often times for years (essentially, until the project is scrapped)

II2II 5y ago

That was my original response, but the author's point was about proposing potential solutions rather than affirming bad solutions. It isn't about good team players by being yes-men. It is about creating an environment where people are comfortable with proposing solutions that may work. Notice that the author was talking about redirecting the conversation rather than being agreeable. Are there times when someone has to say TWW? Sure. But that should be reserved for situations where it isn't possible to redirect the conversation along more productive avenues or a potential solution is being ignored in favour of one that just won't work.

ping_pong 5y ago

90% of "that won't work" that I've seen in my career is really just "I don't like your idea, I like my idea better" in disguise. If something really won't work because of some fatal flaw or because it's truly a stupid idea, then sure you need to speak up. But if it's just a difference of opinion, then it's fine to propose another idea but it should remain a professional and technical discussion and agreement. But also be supportive of other ideas that aren't your own. I see too many people think other people's different ideas won't work because their ideas are better.

Yoric 5y ago
Years ago, I was leading the R&D in a start-up. The CEO was full of ideas. Some of them were very good, some really bad, most completely ill-matched to our priorities and limited resources. It quickly became clear to me that my job was being the "that won't work guy", in an attempt to make sure that we managed to finish our project before we ran out of funds. Almost all the problems we encountered with the project where things that happened as a consequence of me not shooting down random ideas before said CEO managed to get them started. Whenever I came back from PTO, or conference, etc. I regularly discovered that the CEO had split the already direly understaffed team to work on yet another brilliant idea that would make no sense before we even had our product. A few of the brilliant ideas I managed to shutdown: a reimplementation of git, a home-made bug tracker, a novel abstract interpreter for a programming language that didn't work yet, a transpiler between the old programming language used in-house and the new one, a Google Docs clone, a home-made IDE, a mechanism for storing source code as structured data to a database instead of a flat file... Things I didn't manage to shutdown: a custom NoSQL database, a home-made project tracker, a homemade front-end framework, a custom HTTP server, a custom standard library, a new type system, ... all of which were distinctly inferior from what was already available, and could possibly have become much better, with years of development which we couldn't afford. The company managed to release a first version of the product and folded a few months later, out of funding. Of course, shortly before that, I got fired for "blocking" the development of the company. My conclusion? Yeah, sometimes, "that won't work" is a matter of survival. But if someone needs to throw away their career by being the "that won't work" person, the company risks ending up full of yes people.

op00to 5y ago

Did you read the article? You’re free to TWW, but rather than shooting the idea down you bring up the constraint that breaks the idea. Not: “hey that won’t work because xyz”. Result: people discouraged. Instead try: Hey that would work if xyz were true. Result: people can think about why is xyz false, how do we flip xyz to true?

furyofantares 5y ago

In my experience, saying "that won't work" as a direct response to anything a peer proposes is too early (or someone even resembling a peer). It's not that you need to say yes to things, it's that you need to sit with it a minute, and challenge your objection internally / try to creatively get around the fatal flaw you perceive, before voicing your opinion. Sometimes you'll actually be wrong, other times you'll invent something that works in response. Sometimes you'll be right, and you can raise the objection after you've put in a little internal work. This isn't the case if, say, someone suggests something as outlandish as "we should just invent a new compression algorithm that works on all possible inputs." But then, that's not something a peer or someone resembling a peer is likely to say.

O_H_E 5y ago
> it's that you need to sit with it a minute, and challenge your objection internally Yaaas please, this so much.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Whoops, you missed your chance to object and now you've just signed up to fix the hard parts of someone else's bad idea! Boiling down engineering decisions into dispassionate lists of tradeoffs is an important skill, but early in my career I erred too hard in this direction. Coworkers who spoke without thinking "won" every time and I got stuck digging us out of the holes they led us into even though I had seen the holes from miles away. This happened several times before I learned to trust myself and stand up for my own ideas even if I wasn't 100% confident in them. That's an important skill too.
  - ironmagma 5y ago
    Isn’t there a reasonable middle ground? One could just say what they mean: “I have some major concerns about this idea.” It doesn’t shut anything down while still communicating there is significant pushback.
    - 5y ago

jbay808 5y ago

I just have to be honest and mention, I once flatly told one of my reports "that won't work". He said, "give me a month". I said, "don't waste your time". He said, "give me a week?" I said, "okay, you can spend a week on it, but after it doesn't work, please do it my way". Much to my surprise it worked, and much better than my way would have.

joshschreuder 5y ago
Yeesh, after trying to block it multiple times and then telling them you still think it won’t work even if you’re letting them “waste” time on it, that’s some serious humble pie to eat! How did that go?
- jbay808 5y ago
  Yeah, I'm still embarrassed about it. Fortunately, we were all so excited about how well his crazy idea worked that he never held it against me. I was careful not to accept any credit whatsoever for how it all turned out, though.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    > I was careful not to accept any credit whatsoever for how it all turned out, though. While it’s easy to fall into that trap. 90% of people wouldn’t have given them the week in the first place. I think you deserve some credit for realizing that you ‘might’ be wrong.
- bruce511 5y ago
  I'm not the OP but I have had similar experiences along the way. My approach to it happening has always been two-fold; Firstly when talking about it I would tell the story - I hated the idea, wouldn't work etc - but the other guy was better than me and made it work. I lean into the mistake, make sure others know it happened. That leads to part 2 - everyone and most of all myself need to know I am not omniscient. Someone needs to tell me I also have bad ideas. Sometimes other people have good ideas I don't like. Most of all I encourage people to have and share lots and lots of ideas. 90% are bad (mine included) but if we can isolate the good 10% we'll do OK.

keithplayer 5y ago

As mentioned often "that won't work" is a good way to cut off all creative thought processes and should be limited, but there are definitely times when a quorum of uninformed parties are about to commit to 'an investigation' where someone calling it straight is appreciated

geocrasher 5y ago
I'd agree with this. The article specifically mentions the need to analyze rather than jump to conclusions, and "That won't work!" is usually a case of the latter. If TWW is the result of an analysis, then it is definitely not what I was referring to in the article.

Vinnl 5y ago

The post argues (rightfully, I think) that even if the proposed solution has a fatal flaw, shutting it down does not save the team valuable time, because even if the solution isn't The Right One, its proposal can spark the creativity in others to come up with what is The Right One. I used to cut meetings up in a brainstorming phase, in which it was not allowed to say no to anything, and a filter phase, in which we narrowed down proposals to the viable ones.

roamingdave 5y ago

Blunt approaches like that are often ineffective. A discussion that explains why it's a bad idea with the person arguing against the idea actually listening to the creator's defense is much better. Quite often people recoil at being told abrasively "that won't work" and end up taking the view that the person calling them out doesn't get it. Whereas a discussion where both sides have a push-and-shove to get to the conclusion sticks in the creator's mind and might even get them to stop pursuing it.

Xcelerate 5y ago

> Sometimes a blunt ”that won’t work” is needed, to save the team valuable time. In my experience, “sometimes” means “very rarely”. The reason often has more to do with personality than any sort of technical obstacle.

YZF 5y ago

Can't the fatal flaw always be duct-taped over? ;) The problem I often have is not with stuff that clearly just does not work. The problem is the stuff that "sorta maybe works" and then keeps working until it doesn't. You can't really prove it won't work, because hey, it does work. There's always some convoluted way of getting it to keep working. It's really tough to make the argument that further down the road when the software grows, the scale grows, or the requirements change, the proposed solution won't be easy to adapt or won't be as robust/reliable. This is the really important stuff. I would say that investing in things that just never work at all and can't be made to work is more rare, probably still happens, but more rare.