Can’t you just…?

There seems to be a great misunderstanding between technical employees of a company and everyone else.

From inside the IT room, we often see outsiders as hopelessly optimistic about the possibilities of technology. (Or, on the flipside, completely ignorant about what we can do to make their lives easier, but that’s another topic.) Not a week goes by where a new project is proposed, or a brainstorming session is underway, and someone blurts out those terrible words: “can’t you just…?”

On the other hand, from what I can tell, outside the IT department, most people seem to see us as negative people. We are the ones that tell them that the answer to “can’t you just…?” is actually “no” or, perhaps more often, “not without a significant amount of work that will distract us from the goals and projects you gave us last month.”

The problem, of course, is that IT people (at least not the annoying ones) are usually realists. We are aware of what it takes to do what is asked of us, and when people have their grand ideas, our job is to make sure we don’t promise anything of impossible scale or schedule. Trust me, I may be a down-to-earth pragmatist, but it kills me to have to tell people that what they want isn’t going to happen when they want it, or at all.

But the one thing that definitely doesn’t help is continuing to use the words “can’t you just…?” because that not only tells us “we think we know how to do your job better than you” but also puts us in a position where we have to look like the pessimists that we are not.

If only all people would be so kind as to include us code monkeys early on in the brainstorming process and instead ask “what are some possible solutions to this problem or opportunity we have in front of us?” It’s all about building trust. And stroking our egos.