logoalt Hacker News

gavinray • yesterday at 9:51 PM • 4 replies • view on HN

Funny story about drag-and-drop:

At my very first job, we had a weekly meeting to assign tickets and estimates.

Our non-technical PM wrote "drag-and-drop" on a whiteboard, and then my name.

"Gavin, how long do you think this will take?"

"All week. At least. Maybe longer?"

PM laughed, then realized I wasn't making a joke.

"What do you mean 'all week'? That's ridiculous, do I need to give this to someone else?"

"Well, you could, but I wouldn't count on you getting it any sooner."

Appalled, he exclaims: "It's just drag-and-drop!"

After 10-15 minutes of a room full of engineers trying to explain the difficulty, he gave up with an unhappy "Fine."

The phrase "it's just drag-and-drop" became an inside joke for the rest of my time there...


Replies

freecodeio • yesterday at 10:36 PM

I think non-tech people think that drag and drop is some sort of emergent property because you're pressing the mouse and holding it pressed.

adastra22 • yesterday at 10:43 PM

Dumb question: why? It’s been a long time since I touched GUI code, but I thought it gave you a message with the URI to the file. How is this significantly different than file-open?

➕ show 2 replies
giwook • yesterday at 11:51 PM

I love when non-technical people think they know better than the technical people about technical things...

timcobb • yesterday at 10:21 PM

good thing you had backup. rough hahaha.