I've had similar problems with people who think everything and anything is possible in just 4 weeks. People with positive attitudes who over-commit a whole team is bad enough, but when I try to say 'what you're talking about isn't possible, let's scale back the requirements' I'm told I'm a pessimistic person. The most frustrating part of the experience in when you prove time and time again, that the goals they are so optimistic about are more complex than they think, they do not alter their outlook on future goals! It's as if their only comfort is in predicting success and then passively ensuring failure and burnout.
Of course when hard time constraints are involved, things actually become impossible. Even the universe has a fixed limit how far you can go in an amount of time.
Nobody (besides you) is saying that "scaling back requirements" is pessimistic. Where is that coming from?
> It's as if their only comfort is in predicting success and then passively ensuring failure and burnout.
How is predicting a success and then failing a comfort? Mine was: predicting a failure and then failing, which would make the prediction a comfort because it was correct. Yours, as a whole, is not comforting, because it was incorrect.
> The most frustrating part of the experience in when you prove time and time again, that the goals they are so optimistic about are more complex than they think, they do not alter their outlook on future goals!
That's not exactly a bad thing, considering the alternative. I would so much rather someone never lose optimism than pessimism, even if they are wrong every time. With optimism, you're dumb enough to try again. With pessimism, you're dumb enough to never try.
