A pet peeve of mind is the word negotiation in the context of user requirements.
In the business user’s mind, negotiation means the developer can do X but the developer is lazy. Usually, it is requirement X doesn’t make any sense because a meeting was held where the business decided to pivot to a new direction and decided the new technical solution. The product owner simply gives out the new requirement without the context. If an architect or senior developer was involved in the meeting, they would have told the business you just trashed six months of development and we will now start over.
I call it "nogotiating" - the problem is that inexperienced devs emphasize the "no" part and that's all the client hears.
What you have to do is dig into the REASONS they want X or Y or Z (all of which are either expensive, impossible, or both) - then show them a way to get to their destination or close to it.
> Saying no is not really denying, it's negotiating.
Sometimes. I have often had to say "no" because the customer request is genuinely impossible. Then comes the fun bit of explaining why the thing they want simply cannot exist, because often they'll try "But what if you just ... ?" – "No! It doesn't work that way, and here's why..."
Almost nothing is impossible, but a lot of things are really close. If it requires changing fundamental design aspects of a system then it's not worth it. I'm not going to burn down the code base and cause 1.5 million side effects that we don't know what they do so you can drag and drop a piece of the UI around like a widget.
I had to explain recently that `a * x !== b * x when a !== b`*... it is infuriating hearing "but the result is the same in this other competitor" coupled with the "maybe the problem here is you're not knowledgeable enough to understand".
Ah, I see you've worked on financial software as well ;)
We've definitely had our fair share of "IDK what to tell you, those guys are mathing wrong".
TBF, though, most customers are pretty tolerant of explainable differences in computed values. There's a bunch of "meh, close enough" in finance. We usually only run into the problem when someone (IMO) is looking for a reason not to buy our software. "It's not a perfect match, no way we can use this" sort of thing.
