The Irony of Poorly Planned Design Docs
Description
The meme displays a photograph of a modern, multi-story office building. The sign on the building reads 'DEPARTMENT OF PLANN...ING', with the last three letters 'ING' awkwardly misaligned and crammed vertically to the side, indicating a significant failure in planning and execution. Overlaid at the bottom of the image is the text 'MY DESIGN DOCS'. The humor stems from the irony of a 'Department of Planning' having such a poorly planned sign, which is then directly compared to the quality of one's own design documents. For experienced developers, this is a highly relatable self-deprecating joke about the frequent reality of creating design docs: they are often rushed, poorly thought out, or quickly become obsolete, much like this comically flawed sign
Comments
11Comment deleted
My design doc is a perfect example of eventual consistency; the implementation will eventually be consistent with something, just not what's in the doc
My design docs aren’t incomplete - they’re just horizontally partitioned across Confluence and six stale Google Docs, pending eventual consistency
Just like our design docs, it looks complete from a distance until someone actually needs to use it and discovers critical pieces were never implemented
The Department of Planning building ran out of space for its own sign - a perfect metaphor for every design document that starts with comprehensive architecture diagrams and ends three sprints later with a hastily updated README that just says 'see Slack thread from Q2 2019.' At least the building's technical debt is literally carved in stone, unlike our Confluence pages that link to deprecated wikis that reference deleted Jira tickets
When 'planning' doesn’t fit on one line in the doc, neither will your NFRs in production
Like my design docs: PLAN on page 1, NING in another Confluence space, and the I is in a deleted Slack thread
Design docs so grand, they qualify for historic preservation - untouchable and eternally maintained
Lol Comment deleted
They planned the building to be wider Comment deleted
Or letters to be smaller Comment deleted
Planner must be a css programmer Comment deleted