Nowadays, i donʼt meet such people too often. If i do meet non-technical people, they are intelligent enough that they donʼt make such comments.

However, i had my fair share of getting these and, surprisingly enough, most of these people were managers at high tech companies. Except for a few cases i was lucky and my immediate manager had my back.

When i wasnʼt that lucky, i told these people that i hope they are right and i will finish said work in that short time or that small effort. In case I donʼt, though, I give myself a buffer so i can meet the deadlines and as a best case scenario we can go back to the clients with a solution faster than we promise.

Yeah. Politics are ugly. If you mess it up, you play with your job. But if you allow non-technical managers to set deadlines without thinking it through, you play with your sanity.

I choose my sanity.

Maybe, but I think there's a benefit to having non-coders give advice.

People whose minds are not limited to the restrictions we developers "know" about technology will have ideas that go beyond those restrictions and innovations. Then we'll find out that those restrictions maybe aren't so solid, and we start to push the boundaries.

What I mean to say is, yes it can be annoying to have people talking about things they don't understand, but we need them in order to continue to innovate.

That being said, I'll share a story of the most annoying such encounter that I have come across:

There was this guy I was working with (not a software job), and we got onto the topic of our hobbies.

I said "I like coding".

He says, "Oh, I mostly like to do hacking"

I said, "Oh, cool! So how do you set up a lab so you're not doing anything illegal?"

And then things went south.

"Oh, I took apart my Kindle and turned the screen around so the Amazon logo shows up backwards. Now Amazon can't legally sue me."

🤦‍♂️ This is wrong on a number of levels

I don't remember what I said after that, but he ended up talking to me about "PI addresses", and how he knows "everything about hacking except the words".

Not a pleasant experience overall.

Depends. I hate when I hear something like "that doesn't take so much time" or "that is easy" from someone who cannot write "Hello, World!".

I was but I am not anymore ;D. Because these days I am lucky enough that I rarely gotta discuss code with non coders. And tbh a lot of coders often aren't better with their language religions.

But my favorite story was roughly 6 years ago, when a customer asked us to rewrite an application with bootstrap. But he didn't mean styling he actually meant the whole backend and everything in bootstrap :).

There is no dearth of those individuals.. As UI/UX enthusiast, I got to face it very often(did I say, almost every week?) where the comments are not only on languages, stack etc.. but hilarious perceptions on usability, user context and way of doing things.