Ask HN: Developers – How did you learn to say NO? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Developers – How did you learn to say NO?

#51

Post by marcuscreo » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 1:14 PM UTC

eitland wrote: post #31

marcuscreo wrote: post #22

Learn not to answer in the moment, and commit to always give yourself time to think alone about the request and respond in 24 hours. When you do that, you remove the immediate pressure to please the person with a YES answer. You also give the (honest) impression that your answer has thought and weight behind it, and is the measured response of a professional.

While 24 hours sounds much to me I agree on the principle. Tom Limoncelli/Christine Hogan has you covered on this one I guess: The Practice of System and Network Administration mention that you should ask politely if the other party can fire a mail to the ticket system since "that way you can be sure I won't forget". Tada: off your mind in to a queue that can be sorted and prioritized.

Ya, even 1 hours is better than answering in the moment.

Re: Ask HN: Developers – How did you learn to say NO?

#52

Post by stuxnet79 » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 1:35 PM UTC

saasinator wrote: post #43

You can say "no" without saying "no". Try this, "We can do that, but I've got a lot on my plate this week. Shall we log the task for next week or shuffle some tasks around different sprints to make room for it?" There you go, 9 times out of 10 they will shelve the idea.

Not a fan of passive-aggressive tactics. I trust my colleagues to be forthright in their answers so giving a convoluted yes when it is actually a no builds distrust and resentment on my end. Sometimes a question is just a question and deserves an honest, no fluff answer.

Re: Ask HN: Developers – How did you learn to say NO?

#53

Post by userunknown00 » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 2:38 PM UTC

I read a book once called "The One Thing", written by Gary Keller (of Keller Williams Realty). Essentially what he says in the book is every day, identify your most important task, and do that. Everything and everyone else gets "no" until you finish that one task. Then you move on to the second most important thing, and so on.

I don't know how well all of his concepts translate to an IT environment, but it was, for me, a good read with a lot of insights.

Re: Ask HN: Developers – How did you learn to say NO?

#54

Post by orthecreedence » Sun, Aug 07, 2016, 8:42 PM UTC

supercoder wrote: post #49

orthecreedence wrote: post #16

A client who knew nothing about programming whatsoever, much less the intricacies of programming languages, wanted my brother and I to build the stupid app they wanted in Ruby on Rails. We explained to them we don't know Ruby on Rails and doing it in that language would take us 4x longer because we'd have to learn both a language and framework as we were building the app. "Nope, it has to be Ruby on Rails. Oh, and so…

Perfectly reasonable for a client to dictate the technology they want a product built in. But yeah silly to engage a developer who is inexperienced in it.

> Perfectly reasonable for a client to dictate the technology they want a product built in

Not if they know nothing about programming and they are just throwing out buzzwords they happened to pick up.