Why do developers say: no?

I'm not going to give an overview of all the reasons that lead developers to say no to a client (or a manager), the most common reason being that the time window is incompatible with the latter's ambition.

I actually devoted an article to estimating a project and the constraints related to it available here (tldr; it's a complex task).

In this article, we're going to focus instead on the higher-order question: Why are developers often asked to carry out a task that is more complex than the time allows?

The answer I find the most concise and at the same time the most accurate is a quote from Steven Pinker (cognitive scientist and former co-director of the department at MIT) on computers and artificial intelligence:

"The main problem [...] is that hard problems are easy, and easy problems are hard"

Summarized in French: "Les problèmes compliqués sont simples, et les problèmes simples sont compliqués", which is a very accurate description of our relationship with computing and the main reason for the confusion of clients who think they have a simple request and get told "no".

I'm not telling you anything new by saying that our brains are very different from our computers.

Even multiplying the power of our machines many times over will not allow us to simulate the way a brain works, it's not a problem of power, but of data representation at the very core of the way we reason.

Our brain works in an analog way, meaning it processes data signals that are infinite and constantly changing (light, sound, taste, etc...), whereas our computers work with logical information, made up of 0s and 1s.

If the concept of binary representation isn't familiar to you, I invite you to read my introduction on the subject.

This fundamental difference means that a task that is simple for the brain of a 5-year-old child to perform will sometimes be very complex to carry out with the digital tools available to us.

We can take the example of the semantics of a text, the recognition of a cat, the analysis of a person's sentiment in relation to their face, etc...

Whereas, conversely, counting the exact number of occurrences of a word in a book will be very easily achievable by a computer system, but is much more complex for our brain and our memory.

It's only when we think about a project without knowing how a digital system works that it's our human brain that takes the wheel and assesses which task is complicated and which isn't, often leading to a misjudgment.

And therefore to a number of refusals so that the project remains technically feasible with the tools available to us.

While waiting for the arrival of consumer-grade bio-computers, keep in mind: "In computing, the simplest problems are the most complicated."