Claiming web development while barely touching the UI/UX slice of responsibility

Description

A four-panel cartoon of a chocolate layer cake on a plate is shown. Panel 1: a hand with a knife, captioned “Me,” prepares to cut the cake. Panel 2: a larger hand lifts out the very large slice that was cut, and that slice is labeled “Web Development.” Panel 3: the camera zooms in on the thin sliver of cake left on the plate, captioned “UI/UX.” Panel 4: the hand walks away holding the oversized piece, leaving an almost empty plate behind. The meme plays on the common frontend tension where engineers enthusiastically take ownership of generic “web development” tasks but devote only a token amount of effort to user-interface and user-experience design considerations

Common Tags

WebDevelopment Frontend UXDesign DeveloperHumor UIDesign FrontendPainPoints

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick Full-stack in 2024: I’ll own the SSR, edge cache, and twelve micro-frontends; the pixel-perfect sliver left goes to whoever’s still debating 4 px vs 6 px border-radius in Figma

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

Full-stack in 2024: I’ll own the SSR, edge cache, and twelve micro-frontends; the pixel-perfect sliver left goes to whoever’s still debating 4 px vs 6 px border-radius in Figma
Anonymous

After 15 years in the industry, I've learned that 'just make it look like the mockup' is the software equivalent of 'just land on Mars' - technically possible, but requiring an entire space program worth of CSS grid, flexbox gymnastics, and browser-specific hacks that would make a kernel developer weep
Anonymous

This perfectly captures the iceberg principle of web development: everyone sees the frosting (the polished UI), but the real engineering is the 90% beneath - responsive layouts, accessibility trees, state management, performance optimization, and the endless browser quirks. It's like explaining to stakeholders why 'just moving that button' is a three-day sprint involving design systems, A/B testing infrastructure, and analytics instrumentation
Anonymous

I’ll take the UI/UX slice; you keep SSR hydration mismatches, CSP headers, and cache‑invalidation calories
Anonymous

“Just a UI/UX slice,” they said - then it turned out to be the whole cake: design tokens, WCAG, focus management, Safari flex-gap quirks, i18n overflow… and apparently my CSS caused the API’s 500s
Anonymous

Backend devs staring at the crumbs: 'That's our entire service mesh you just plated as garnish.'
@deerspangle 5y

Mood
1. @mvolfik 5y
  
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