To be fair to the client, I, as a programmer, often struggle to estimate tasks with accuracy, and am very often at a loss at even explaining to co-workers why some things are easy and others impossible.

[–] Klear@quokk.au 107 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

[–] neukenindekeuken@sh.itjust.works 15 points 12 hours ago

I've never felt more called out.

[–] WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 63 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

I once just asked how long if would take them to swap the chair and the table, and how long it would take to swap the window and that pillar. After all, it's just moving stuff around. They understood after that.

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 39 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Careful, that table is critical for getting airflow over that server in the corner. If you move the table it will overheat and cause a cascade of failures and bankrupt the entire company.

[–] Chronographs@lemmy.zip 33 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

And that’s a load bearing chair.

[–] AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 9 points 4 hours ago

You've just reminded me of a funny time when playing the game Eco with friends. It's sort of like Minecraft but themed around ecological sustainable technological development, and the specialised labour necessary to make that happen. There were about 8 of us in total, and we would drop in and drop out over the course of a month

The way the electric power system worked in Eco is that in addition to dedicated objects you could place to expand the electrical grid, objects that use electricity could also act as repeaters, albeit with a much smaller radius. They didn't even need to be physically connected up to power for this to work. They weren't intended to be used as repeaters; the radius thing was just an artifact of how the electricity mechanic was implemented, to ensure that it wasn't too complex to build an electric grid.

When we were short of materials and expanding our settlements, I ended up implementing a kludge solution of just placing a few unconnected water pumps between our power station and the place we needed to connect to the grid. It was only intended to be a temporary solution — but there's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.

nipped off the server for a little while, and when I came back, everything had gone to hell due to massive outages across the entire grid. After a while of fruitless troubleshooting, I happened to walk past one of the places where there had previously been a water pump, but there was no longer. I discovered that someone had removed it as part of routine tidying up the world.

Surprised and exasperated, I asked my friend why they removed it, and they (justifiably) responded indignantly with "Well I'm sorry! I didn't know that it was a load bearing water pump!". "Load bearing water pump" ended up becoming a recurring joke in my friend group, persisting long after we finished playing Eco. The situation really captures the absurd inevitability of this kind of change

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 15 points 11 hours ago

I like that metaphor. I'm gonna use it next time I have to talk to a non-technical.

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 19 points 13 hours ago

He was okay when I explained that the custom Magento plugin was written in Bulgarian and I had to translate it before attempting to understand the convoluted mess I’d been given.