The Developer-Client Communication Gap, A.K.A. 'Eating the Baby'
Description
A four-panel meme captioned 'Requirements specification meetings be like', using a scene from Game of Thrones to illustrate a communication breakdown. The first panel shows Tyrion Lannister, labeled 'Dev asking a question', offering something 'For your baby.' to a poor woman. A second panel shows a close-up of Tyrion, with his internal thought being 'To eat.' The third panel shows the horrified woman, labeled 'Client', clutching her baby protectively. The final panel shows Lord Varys, labeled 'Manager helping me out', whispering to a confused Tyrion, 'She thinks you want to eat her baby.' This meme masterfully captures the frequent and painful miscommunications between technical teams and non-technical clients. A developer's probing question, meant to clarify an edge case or technical requirement, can sound bizarre or even threatening to a client who is deeply invested in their project (their 'baby'). The manager's attempt to translate often fails, further muddying the waters and confirming the client's worst fears
Comments
7Comment deleted
The dev was just asking about garbage collection for orphaned child objects, but the manager translated it as a proposal for a 'finalizer' solution
Pro tip: phrase your questions as "consume the API" - clients panic less than when you ask if it’s okay to "eat the payload."
After 20 years in tech, I've learned that every requirements meeting is just an elaborate game of telephone where 'we need better observability' somehow becomes 'the client wants real-time 3D visualizations of every database transaction with blockchain verification' by the time it reaches the sprint planning
This perfectly captures why we now write acceptance criteria in Gherkin syntax with Given-When-Then scenarios - because apparently 'What should happen when the user clicks submit?' can somehow be interpreted as 'The developer wants to consume our firstborn child' after passing through three layers of stakeholder telephone
Requirements via PM: the ultimate lossy codec, compressing 'edge case?' to 'eat my baby project'
Asking “Do we deprecate v1 after GA?” and watching the PM transcode it into “they want to eat your baby” is why we write ADRs and a ubiquitous glossary - human middleware has a surprisingly high bit‑error rate
When the PM becomes the translation layer, requirements go through lossy NAT - skip Ubiquitous Language and example mapping, and you’ll ship an endpoint nobody asked for with beautifully documented undefined semantics