When client demands a cruise ship that can also fly like a plane
Description
The meme is laid out in two parts. At the top, orange text reads "Client requirement…" followed by black text saying "Client: Why don't you clearly understand my requirements?" and then "His Requirement:". Below the text is a single image showing an absurd composite vehicle: the full upper half of a white-and-blue ocean cruise liner mounted directly on the fuselage, wings, jet engines, and landing gear of a large commercial airplane, captured as if taxiing on a runway against a blue-sky backdrop. The visual joke highlights how client or stakeholder specifications can combine incompatible ideas, resulting in impossible, contradictory deliverables. For software engineers, it satirizes poorly gathered requirements, scope creep, and communication gaps that lead to unbuildable products
Comments
6Comment deleted
“Every time a VP asks for global consistency, sub-10 ms latency, and five-nines on the legacy mainframe, I picture this CAP-defying cruise liner taxiing for takeoff.”
"We need the scalability of microservices with the simplicity of a monolith, real-time performance with eventual consistency, and it should be both stateless for the cloud and stateful for the audit trail. Also, can you make it work offline but keep it perfectly synchronized?"
This perfectly encapsulates the classic requirements gathering phase where the client wants a system that's simultaneously 'lightweight and scalable' (the airplane) while also being 'feature-complete with everything' (the cruise ship). They want microservices architecture with monolithic deployment, real-time performance with batch processing, and infinite scalability on a fixed budget. Then they wonder why the technical feasibility assessment takes more than five minutes and why you keep asking 'clarifying questions' instead of just building their perfectly clear vision of a flying ocean liner
Client requirements: on‑prem yet multi‑cloud, serverless but stateful, ACID over Kafka, real‑time batch and cheap - basically a cruise ship with landing gear
Client reqs so 'clear' they're stratospheric - now Kubernetes that cruise liner with some duct-taped pods
The PRD translates to “stateless monolith with ACID eventual consistency, on-prem multi-cloud, by Friday” - basically a cruise ship with wings