How to Scare a Developer: The Dreaded 'App Idea'
Description
A two-panel, black-and-white comic strip depicting a scene in a forest. In the first panel, two bears are standing near a log. One bear says in a speech bubble, 'OH NO. HERE COMES SOME HUMANS. DON'T WORRY. I WILL SCARE THEM AWAY.' In the background, two figures representing humans are partially visible. In the second panel, one bear stands on its hind legs with its arms outstretched and proclaims in a spiky speech bubble, 'I HAVE THIS GREAT IDEA FOR A NEW APP!'. The humans in the background are shown fleeing in terror, with one screaming 'AAAHHHH!!'. This meme humorously illustrates a common experience for software developers: being approached by non-technical individuals ('idea guys') with unsolicited and often vague app ideas. For senior engineers, this scenario represents the potential for scope creep, unrealistic expectations, and a significant amount of work turning a half-baked concept into a functional product, making the 'great idea' a genuine source of dread
Comments
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The most effective way to make a developer run isn't a production bug, it's a business stakeholder saying 'This should be a quick change, I even drew it out on a napkin for you.'
Just shout, “It’s Uber on blockchain - need an MVP by Monday, equity instead of cash!” and watch even the staff engineers flee like someone just proposed a full-rewrite
Nothing scares a senior engineer more than hearing "it's like Uber but for..." followed by "I just need someone to build it, I'll give you 5% equity for doing all the work."
Nature's most effective deterrent: the idea is always 'basically Uber for X', the compensation is always 10% equity, and the hard part is always 'just the coding'
Every senior engineer has perfected the art of suddenly remembering an urgent production issue the moment someone starts with 'So I have this idea for an app...' It's not that we're antisocial - we've just learned that 'simple' ideas inevitably involve real-time blockchain AI with sub-millisecond latency, and somehow we're expected to build it over the weekend
Leanest MVP ever: zero cloud spend, instant 100% churn via pitch alone
That phrase flips every staff engineer's personal circuit breaker - 429 until there's a PRD, budget, and PMF; otherwise it's an equity-only DDoS
Shouting ‘I have a great idea for a new app’ is a multicast DDoS on senior engineers’ calendars - undefined requirements, zero budget, infinite backlog - so the only mitigation is immediate egress