I used to wind up a work project manger with that response.
He would always ask "whats the percentage chance of this working?" around problems that where difficult, and often needed trial and error investigation.
Since you often don't have a clue whats wrong or whats the best solution you can't really give any feedback till you've spent some time investigating.
He couldn't handle loosing control no the time frames, and hated to 'waste' time on investigation, so I slowly evolved the response "50/50, either it works or it doesn't" so that he would fly off the handle, vent and then be calmer to deal with a few minutes later.
He's fall for it every time, start firmly almost yelling "Its not funny, can you be serious... its not 50%! whats the likelihood of it working!, do we need to put more resources onto this, can you please be serious for once".
Then later in the day he'd get his estimate, but not till we had some time to mull it.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 22.9 ms ] threadI didn't want to ruin it for myself so I didn't read all the comments.
However your answer seems to make the most beautifully simple sense.
Thank you!
He would always ask "whats the percentage chance of this working?" around problems that where difficult, and often needed trial and error investigation.
Since you often don't have a clue whats wrong or whats the best solution you can't really give any feedback till you've spent some time investigating.
He couldn't handle loosing control no the time frames, and hated to 'waste' time on investigation, so I slowly evolved the response "50/50, either it works or it doesn't" so that he would fly off the handle, vent and then be calmer to deal with a few minutes later.
He's fall for it every time, start firmly almost yelling "Its not funny, can you be serious... its not 50%! whats the likelihood of it working!, do we need to put more resources onto this, can you please be serious for once".
Then later in the day he'd get his estimate, but not till we had some time to mull it.