A Humble Admission of Abstraction Overload
Description
This image is the second panel of a two-part meme, responding to the first panel where a Java-themed 'Meme Man' asks about abstraction layers. This panel features a crudely drawn, white MS Paint-style character against a light blue, subtly patterned background. The character has a smug, knowing expression and is gesturing with its hands. A speech bubble contains the text, 'like,, maybe 5, or 6 right now my dude'. At the bottom right, a small, almost hidden caption reads, 'this was supposed to be legs', humorously pointing out the poor quality of the drawing. This image completes the joke started in the first panel. The response, '5 or 6 layers', is a self-aware jab at the exact kind of over-engineering criticized in the first image. It's funny to senior developers because it represents a moment of realizing one's own code has become the kind of complex, multi-layered system they would typically criticize. The casual, understated answer contrasts with the esoteric absurdity of the situation, making the critique of deep abstraction more potent and relatable
Comments
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Only 6 layers of abstraction? That's cute. My last project's stack trace looked like a Christopher Nolan movie plot
When I say “5-ish story points” I’m really encoding: 1 for the actual feature, 4 for discovering why the legacy microservice still speaks SOAP, and the remainder for the post-mortem blame-balancing algorithm
When the PM asks how many story points that 'simple' refactor will take after you've discovered it touches seventeen microservices, three legacy monoliths, and a Perl script someone wrote in 2003 that nobody understands but everything depends on
When the architect sold everyone on a microservices platform 'designed to handle thousands of services at web scale,' but three years later you're running exactly six services - and two of them are just health check endpoints. The distributed tracing setup cost more than the actual business logic, and you're paying for a service mesh that routes traffic between containers running on the same node. At least the Kubernetes cluster has room to grow... into the five other services that will never materialize because the monolith actually worked fine
Asked about uptime, the SRE says “like, maybe 5 or 6 right now, my dude” - which would be impressive if those were nines; it’s the number of concurrent Sev‑1s
Stakeholder velocity: infinite. Developer velocity: '5 or 6 points, plus yesterday's carryover.'
Our “simple” GET /users now goes CDN -> WAF -> API gateway -> BFF -> GraphQL -> gRPC -> service -> repository -> ORM - like, maybe 5 or 6 layers, my dude; the only thing flat is the SLO