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by bko 1024 days ago
100% agree. Don't ask customers for solutions, ask them for problems. If they knew the solution to their problems, they wouldn't have problems. They would often suggest solutions that are round-about or overly complicated.

I remember at work someone said they wanted a way to arbitrarily update a SQL table and clobber old values. After some digging I realized they just needed a task to scrape a particular page and throw it in a structured format. Of course when they did it manually they made mistakes and mismapped a bunch of fields