this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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This is why "sure" or "yes" are not part of my IT vocabulary. "Should" is king. "We should be be able to do" or "that should work."
In the idiocy of stakeholders that want IT to be a magic wand to fix their ineptitude instead of a helpful contributor to their well thought out process, you have to coach everything in the polite "no" that is "maybe" or "should."
One of my managers told me that I need to use words like "will" instead of "should" when talking discovery with clients. I told him only Siths deal in absolutes, which he didn't like as much as I did.
I'm not a yes man, and I'm not going to lie about something I can't guarantee. If something goes wrong, I'm the one that looks like a lying failure and gets to fix it. My clients are internal business users, not actual external customers. Words have meanings, and it's important to use the correct ones when communicating important information.
Fine. You WILL give me a 20% raise.
How to piss off management with one simple word.
Am manager, hate should.
Should presumes an ideal set of conditions with perfect context.
Could is a much better term as it implicitly accepts real world conditions and a lack of total context by couching the affirmation as contingent upon only the discussion (and prior references) at hand.
In my experience, people want "it will work." They will not accept "it could work" at all.
"It should work" is the perfect amount of hedge, even when you know "it will work," because all of us have been burned by simple assumptions that were right 1000 times before and were somehow wrong this time.
Getting a bit in between the lines, "should" more often than not reads to me as "it's expected to work and we're working towards it".
While "could" sounds like a shrug: "it may work, but I/we have little to no control over it".