Discovering Unknown Features During a Client Call
Description
A meme based on a scene from the movie 'Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse'. The top panel shows an experienced-looking Spider-Man, labeled '*Senior Dev', contemplating something seriously. Next to him, a less experienced, wide-eyed Spider-Man, labeled '*Junior Dev', looks on with a blank, confused expression. The caption below reads, 'When the client asks questions about the features that we didn't even know exists.' The meme humorously portrays a common and awkward situation in software development where a client or user uncovers a piece of functionality that the current development team has completely forgotten about, likely due to it being part of a legacy system, poorly documented, or implemented by a long-gone developer. Both the senior and junior developers are shown to be equally baffled
Comments
16Comment deleted
That's not a bug, it's an undocumented legacy feature. We can submit a ticket to deprecate it, but the one guy who knew how it worked now runs a goat farm in Vermont
“It’s not missing, it’s just stuck in eventual-consistency between the sales deck and the backlog - should reach our repo right after leadership achieves consensus.”
The only thing more distributed than our microservices architecture is the knowledge of what features actually exist in production - half in JIRA tickets from 2018, half in the original developer's head who left for FAANG, and the rest discovered only when clients casually mention them during quarterly reviews
That moment when you realize the 'feature' the client is asking about is actually a side effect of a workaround you implemented three years ago to fix a bug in a deprecated library, and now it's somehow become mission-critical to their entire workflow. Time to reverse-engineer your own code and pretend it was intentional all along
Schrödinger’s feature: shipped in the SOW, gated by a PowerPoint feature flag, and replicated from Sales to Engineering with eventual consistency
Undocumented features: Schrödinger's cat of the codebase - exists in superposition until a client observes it
Enterprise superposition: every “feature” simultaneously exists in the sales deck, a Jira epic, and a feature flag called future=false; it collapses only when a client asks about it in prod
Also, junior dev: Comment deleted
Why change Pic to black? Comment deleted
Murder in Belarus Comment deleted
The police murdered innocent man, this is a sign of grief. Comment deleted
Now it's null Comment deleted
Violently murder actually Comment deleted
Glad I leaved this horrible place, jesus christ Comment deleted
N word pic Comment deleted
+ Comment deleted