I hate to say it, but the question "It's impossible?" is my kryptonite--but in the opposite perspective.
I accidentally established myself as a capable and competent worker at my job and have unfortunately given management the confidence that I can do anything. I'm using a negative context here because I've lost the ability to say no to them. I suppose since my job as a programmer is to give them what they want I should never want to say no, but I'm a sucker for elegance and I really try to avoid solutions that are overly complex and convoluted. Unfortunately, there are occasions in which a feature requirement requires such a solution. Or rather, not the actual feature requirement, just one of the "tweaks" they like to nitpick on to make it perfect. I.e "This is great, but you know what would make it perfect?" syndrome. Usually, I'm fine with these but when the tweak requires a complete overhaul or reimplementation--potentially days worth of coding to implement I'll try to dissuade them from it. Inevitably, if it's something they are really stubborn on when I say "well, I can't really do that--the system doesn't support event callbacks which is what would be required to implement...." I'll get back "It's impossible?".
And thats it, cat's got my tongue. I want to say yes. So bad. But I know the answer is no. I know they are confident in my ability, so they think they know the answer is no. But, seriously I'm gonna have to write a third party application in a different language and write a service protocol to communicate between the main ERP suite and the third party app to accomplish this and it's just so they can get an extra description feedback to an auto-complete feature. I know there are more important, more critical, more exciting issues that I could and I think I should work on. Whats worse, is that if I were a little less proficient, if I knew one less programming language it would impossible for me. Then again, it still wouldn't because I know I could just learn that one language and it would be possible. Arrrggghh there's no way out of this question.
"Well, no it's not impossible. I can probably do it. But it's going to take an extra couple of days.."
Management ahold be making those decisions based on ROI. That implies they are responsible for understanding the value the change will bring and you are responsible for educating on the costs. I would respond to the "It's impossible?" question with "Is it worth seven man days of work, a potential for tricky-to-find bugs because we adding a square peg to a round whole which will increase maintenance costs, and the opportunities lost by me not working on something else for those seven man days?"
I've worked at few places that have done the real analysis to know the answer to that, but very few even consider it.
You have to start using the words "risk" and "maintenance cost" when talking to managers then.
The main drawback to the solution you describe is not the "two days to develop", but doubling or tripling the complexity of that part of the application. It will be a pain to support and enhance in the future.
Manager: "Is it possible?"
You: "Yes it can be done, but you're basically making this application twice a complicated for this one feature. This makes deployment and support more complex, and if anything ever goes wrong, it will take a lot longer to even find the problem. If we ever want to upgrade the underlying software, this could break."
Yup, I know what you mean. In fact, when people explicitly tell me something is impossible I just take it as a challenge. And I often succeed.
Of course it usually takes me more than a couple days to do the impossible, but maybe you're faster than I am. ;)
Seriously, though, if there is a trade-off in feature value, the "agile" approach would be to point that out, and let them know what features they might be losing by having you work on one with only a lesser value.
Or in the words of a good friend of mine, if they're asking you to do it anyway, you're not charging enough for it. :)
I accidentally established myself as a capable and competent worker at my job and have unfortunately given management the confidence that I can do anything. I'm using a negative context here because I've lost the ability to say no to them. I suppose since my job as a programmer is to give them what they want I should never want to say no, but I'm a sucker for elegance and I really try to avoid solutions that are overly complex and convoluted. Unfortunately, there are occasions in which a feature requirement requires such a solution. Or rather, not the actual feature requirement, just one of the "tweaks" they like to nitpick on to make it perfect. I.e "This is great, but you know what would make it perfect?" syndrome. Usually, I'm fine with these but when the tweak requires a complete overhaul or reimplementation--potentially days worth of coding to implement I'll try to dissuade them from it. Inevitably, if it's something they are really stubborn on when I say "well, I can't really do that--the system doesn't support event callbacks which is what would be required to implement...." I'll get back "It's impossible?".
And thats it, cat's got my tongue. I want to say yes. So bad. But I know the answer is no. I know they are confident in my ability, so they think they know the answer is no. But, seriously I'm gonna have to write a third party application in a different language and write a service protocol to communicate between the main ERP suite and the third party app to accomplish this and it's just so they can get an extra description feedback to an auto-complete feature. I know there are more important, more critical, more exciting issues that I could and I think I should work on. Whats worse, is that if I were a little less proficient, if I knew one less programming language it would impossible for me. Then again, it still wouldn't because I know I could just learn that one language and it would be possible. Arrrggghh there's no way out of this question.
"Well, no it's not impossible. I can probably do it. But it's going to take an extra couple of days.."
"Okay, let me know when its done."
[grit teeth].