In that analogy, a far more common situation is the developer saying “I don’t know”, “depends on what kind of baby you want”, and “5 years and you’ll have a 1st grader”.

> Why do you need a baby?

> Do you need to grow your own, or could you adopt?

> Is it about birth itself? Does it have to be a human baby?

> Does the baby need to be related to you?

> What if we hire a baby actor?

…

Honestly, asking these kinds of business level questions as a dev is a great way to be seen as stubborn and uncooperative in businesses where the mindset of the OP comment has taken root.

The managers who complain about their devs not thinking at the business level are usually the ones shooting them down when they do. Why are the coders questioning why we need the baby?

It might be, if it’s directionless pushback instead of genuine curiosity to understand the need of the internal customer.

From my personal experience, people are often positively delighted when you make an effort to try to understand them and their needs.

Not shooting down your experience, but from my perspective it could be seen as a straw man argument in favour of never trying in the first place.

I'm not saying "don't try." And I'm also not disagreeing that people, on the whole, respond well to attempts to understand them and communicate with them.

My observation is that it is ultimately organizational culture that frames the way people communicate and how they understand each other. Individuals can move the needle a bit depending on the size of the company and their position in it. But largely they are powerless against the prevailing culture.

In a healthy organization, your efforts to understand the rest of the business and its needs will be accepted as you intend and will benefit yourself, your team and the business. In the average toxic organization, your good intentions won't matter and your questions won't be received the way you intend. Staying upbeat and helpful in these environments might even result in you being punished.

Thanks for the clarification!

That's the best reply to the baby analogy i saw.

Thanks.

<3

That's a bad analogy. Managing expectations is very rarely absolute or binary thing.

If you can start asking questions like “do we actually need a baby”, “what are the specifications for hair color and nose length”, “does it need to be a human baby”, “how about we start at an embryo instead” etc. the whole equation changes. But most people asking for the estimate aren’t actually interested in providing any of that information.

They want to give you a vaguely defined blob of half finished specifications, and expect a perfectly accurate assessment of the time it will take, and also to be able to change the vaguely defined blob as they go along without effect on the given estimate.

What if you push really hard though