this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, I'm already quite content, if I know upfront that our customer's goal does not violate the laws of physics.

Obviously, there's also devs who code more run-of-the-mill stuff, like yet another business webpage, but those are still coded anew (and not just copy-pasted), because customers have different and complex requirements. So, even those are still quite a bit more complex than designing just any Gomoku game.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I’m already quite content, if I know upfront that our customer’s goal does not violate the laws of physics.

Haha, this is so true and I don't even work in IT. For me there's bonus points if the customer's initial idea is solvable within Euclidean geometry.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Now I am curious what the most outlandish request or goal has been so far?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Well, as per above, these are extremely complex requirements, so most don't make for a good story.

One of the simpler examples is that a customer wanted a solution for connecting special hardware devices across the globe, which are normally only connected directly.

Then, when we talked to experts for those devices, we learnt that for security reasons, these devices expect requests to complete within a certain timeframe. No one could tell us what these timeframes usually are, but it certainly sounded like the universe's speed limit, a.k.a. the speed of light, could get in our way (takes roughly 66 ms to go halfway around the globe).

Eventually, we learned that the customer was actually aware of this problem and was fine with a solution, even if it only worked across short distances. But yeah, we didn't know that upfront...