Grandma Reminisces About When Software Development Involved Actual Engineering
Description
The 'Sure grandma, let's get you to bed' meme template showing an elderly woman with a walker being guided by a younger woman in a garden. The grandma's text reads: 'back in my day we actually used to do engineering in software development'. The younger woman responds: 'sure grandma let's get you to bed'. The imgflip.com watermark is visible at bottom-left. The meme satirizes the tension between old-school software engineering principles (formal methods, rigorous design, waterfall, documentation) and modern development practices (move fast, break things, Stack Overflow-driven development, AI-generated code). It implies that 'real engineering' in software is now seen as a quaint, outdated notion - like something only an elderly person would remember
Comments
6Comment deleted
Back in my day, we wrote design documents before code. Now we just ask ChatGPT and pray the tests pass - assuming we wrote tests, which we didn't because the sprint ended yesterday
The 'engineering' grandma misses is the six months spent writing a design doc for a CRUD app that a junior dev now scaffolds with a CLI command during the sprint planning meeting
Remember when we optimized assembly by hand? Now we're optimizing webpack configs that optimize TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that gets bundled into... wait, what were we building again?
The irony is that 'back in my day' we spent six months on requirements gathering and UML diagrams, shipped once a year, and called it 'engineering' - while today we deploy 50 times a day with feature flags and call it 'moving fast.' Both generations think they're doing it right
Back when we built monoliths that scaled to eternity, not microservices that decompose into outage symphonies
It is all vibecoding nowadays Comment deleted