[4lx87]

Nobody wants to hear "no". The way you say "no" without saying it is by turning "no" into an option, and attaching costs to options.

"no, I won't be able to make it in time" would be "I can confidently deliver in time if I have X, and we save Y and Z for later."

[beej71]

One hedge I always used to make was, "I think we have all the information we need for now. We'll get you an estimate within 3 business days."

And then I'd sit down and bust my ass trying to find out if it was feasible or not. :)

If it wasn't, we could always come back with a lesser approach and people seemed to be happy with that. ("It turns out Android doesn't widely support [feature x] so we recommend [feature y] instead.")

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Exactly this. I'm in a situation where I have to tell a customer that we won't be able to do the thing that I've spent a long time investigating.

My answer won't be "no, we can't do it." It'll be a form of "we have to use this alternate method to get to the goal, how does that affect your budget?"

[sublinear]

Well said, and on the flip side the strongest signal that your management sucks is their absurd sense of entitlement and inability to handle "no" correctly. Their lack of curiosity and ambition will cause the business to miss out on so many opportunities.

A naive junior shouldn't stump them, but it really does happen all the time. If all they have to do is ask what it takes to flip it to a "yes", the same information is communicated. The only thing ever truly at stake was someone's ego.

[sph]

> Nobody wants to hear "no"

Nonsense. The client that made me a job offer as CTO listed the fact that I wasn’t afraid of saying ‘no’ to unreasonable requests or unrealistic deadlines one of the things he valued the most in my work. He had plenty of experience with contractors that would always say yes, promise anything and then find themselves unable to deliver because they underestimated the complexity of the task.

Saying no is what makes a professional so valuable. Of course you always want to offer alternative approaches.

[danaris]

> Nobody ever, ever, wants to hear "no".

Frankly, that's toddler level thinking.

While there are certainly people who are rich enough and spoiled enough that they have probably never been meaningfully refused anything in their lives, that produces terrible people, and absolutely everyone needs to learn how to accept being told "no" when "no" is the correct answer (or a reasonable one).