Twilight of the programmers?
The idea is right, but his vin example is poor. If the system doesn&#x27;t actually reflect reality than the system is poor.<p>A better example might be someone say asking for a report that shows all the part time employees that are getting overtime time and a half pay. Which makes sense at first, until you consider that an employee working more than 30 hours (or whatever the number is) is classified as full time, and its not possible to get overtime unless your working more than 40 hours. So the programmer then has to go back and clarify, &quot;do you want to find employees that were hired as part time but are now classified as full time, or are you interested in part time employees collecting holiday&#x2F;danger&#x2F;etc pay multipliers?&quot;<p>Saying &quot;it can&#x27;t be done&quot; is the kind of thing you would get from a junior employee that doesn&#x27;t understand the business nor the code. The more senior guy understands the mismatch and asks questions that clarify what the intentions actually are.<p>So, the VIN example would make more sense if they clarified the system only has license plate data, and partial or missing VIN information because the data wasn&#x27;t collected. In that case the work item includes getting someone to do that data entry&#x2F;etc work of assuring the VINs exist for all the vehicles as well as creating the vin-&gt;mileage report.