The Eternal Chant of the Indecisive Client
Description
A six-panel comic meme using the 'What Do We Want?' format, which features a crudely drawn, energetic pink character from the webcomic 'Hyperbole and a Half'. The meme follows a call-and-response protest chant. Left panels show a single character leading, right panels show a crowd responding. The chant goes: 'Who are we?' / 'Clients!', 'What do we want?' / 'We don't know!', 'When do we want it?' / 'NOW!'. The humor comes from the direct and painfully accurate portrayal of a common client dynamic in software development and consulting. It satirizes stakeholders who are unable to articulate their needs or define project requirements clearly, yet demand immediate delivery. For experienced developers, this is a universal source of frustration, highlighting the challenge of working with vague specifications under tight deadlines
Comments
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This is why the first user story is always 'As a client, I want you to read my mind, so that I can be disappointed when you don't.' Acceptance criteria: TBD
Sure - I'll ship an endpoint that returns 200 OK and {}, then let the observability dashboards reverse-engineer whatever the spec was supposed to be
After 20 years in this industry, I've realized the client's "we don't know what we want" is actually a sophisticated distributed consensus algorithm where no node ever reaches agreement, but somehow still demands atomic commits by yesterday
This meme perfectly captures the iron triangle paradox of software projects: clients want it fast, they want it perfect, and they'll know what 'it' is when they see it. It's the enterprise equivalent of asking an architect to build a house immediately while you're still deciding whether you want a house, a boat, or maybe a treehouse - but definitely have it ready by Monday because the board meeting is Tuesday
Clients: “We don’t know what we want - now!” - aka Schrödinger’s PRD: requirements undefined yet already late the instant you open the doc
Heisenberg PRD: the moment the deadline collapses to t=now, the scope becomes unknowable, yet procurement still asks for a fixed-bid estimate
Clients: the ultimate race condition - undefined requirements sprinting to a hard deadline