Razorpay Frontend - More like a copy paste ninja job
Off late, the frontend engineering at Razorpay has become more of a data entry job. The design system (god knows how many years it will take to be completely ready) is restricting both the devs and the designers a LOT. Designers are literally fed up with being dictated to design things only in a particular way (limiting even animations, font-size, choice of italics v/s bold). There was even a long 2 month discussion to get font size for a component to support higher value, if you honestly want to know. The so called core team has been developing blade since God knows when. Agree that they've done a great work with tokens and other stuff, but it seems that by the time it's ready, it'll already be outdated design wise (suxs). So, any other devs, all they have to do is follows. 1. Open Figma 2. See if the component in Figma is supported by Blade. 3. If yes, then see if our designer has by mistake used any font-size, color, margin or spacing not supported by Blade. 4. If yes, start a thread between everyone and give them a month to come to a resolution (Blade team always retaliates like it's a personal attack) 5. Eventually end up using your own component to save time and move fast. 6. Explain to your manager's manager's manager why you can't use Blade. (they've funded it for 2 years and no dev likes it, so they push it from top) If your company has some interesting approach to this, please add in the comments.
Hello. Senior FE at Razorpay. Not from the Blade team though. Since not everyone in the comments has all the context, i'll try to explain why things are the way they are:
1. The scope of design system is large. They cannot add a font size just because one particular project wants to use it. Because it becomes available to all projects. That said, 2 months seems like a very long time.
2. (Blade team always retaliates like it's a personal attack). Somewhat agree with this but its their baby and multiple teams have raised questions regarding the investment in Blade and they have started to become defensive about it.
3. See if the component in Figma is supported by Blade. -> a dev had raised a question regarding this in the townhall and the team answered that since it is a transition period, there is a little friction that should smooth out over time.
If you are wondering why an org even needs a DS, take a look at Google. Their UI is very consistent across all products thanks to their Material UI DS and guidelines. With Blade, the aim is similar that across products like Razorpay, X, and others, the UI should look consistent
Criticism that i have with the team:
1. The speed at which components are released has been slow. To the point that a lot of components that i need are not yet available
2. Education has been severely lacking for designers and they mis-use components without understanding their usecase
waitwhat
Stealth
a year ago
Not sure why the developer is complaining of slowness. DS should never be a launch-blocker. If it’s not available in the library, just write it and ship it. DS team can then pick it up, standardise it and add it to the library.
Unless the design and product team is blocked from experimenting - DS will never be a blocker.
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CodeDestroyer
Stealth
a year ago
Hi @LuckyPalak10, Backend dev with 1 year & 9 months of experience here. If I am eligible, can you refer me as well. TIA.
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waitwhat
Stealth
a year ago
This is my estimation and I could be wrong. Also I’m in a hurry so it’s not we’ll articulated -
A couple years ago when I was rejected for a senior engineer role, I was sad for a bit. I’d cleared all rounds and did a more than satisfactory job in the final round. But I quickly learned that they were trying to find a culture-fit (more like cult-fit) than a suitable engineer.
I was awe-struck (at the time) by their lead UI engineers. They are talented, no doubt! During the final interview, we were discussing my past accomplishments and I felt that they weren’t impressed because I come from a different tech stack than theirs, although I came with a superior/cutting edge tech experience.
The lady in the interview was a dud and had no meaningful questions for me. But her tonality was judgemental rather than curious about my work. The guy was cool but seemed biased from the get-go.
I’m sure I must have done a few mistakes which got me rejected. But I was glad. Didn’t want to be a part of a team which encourages groupism/cult/fanfare.
I’m at a good place right now. Doing far better than I would have at RZP. God is gracious 😇
waitwhat
Stealth
a year ago
@GeneralZod I don’t remember now 🫠
Lolan
Stealth
a year ago
What is Blade? Asking for the uninformed.
Haha this has an uncanny similarity to my work xD
Same stuff happens at Reliance as well.
This seems to be in stark contrast to Juspays Presto, which powers hypersdk and namma yatri:
- Renders views written in purescript natively (like flutter)
- Allows whatever the native platform supports
- You can push OTA updates to your users without doing an app release
- Customizable via configs
Maybe suggest this to your org? Presto is open source.
lmao that sounds painful af. A good approach to this is make a Storybook and have all components listed there. Works great for cross org design sync as well as importing components and using it in your webapp.
A quick and dirty way to spin up a small design system for our web that i used in my last org was move all the reusables to a separate folder and spin up a Docusaurus page to document it all. Worked well as we were a smol team.
But its funny to see razorpay team also doing this :P always wanted to join the web team over there but never got an opportunity to even interview :")
Hi RZP.....why are new grads like us forced to suffer with such delayed onboarding (dec-jan)😢. Bcoz of the current job market, it is very difficult to find a different opportunity with a comparable offer. I'd really appreciate it if somebody could talk to the senior HR (I won't name him but his name starts with K😬, he's heading the onboarding of new grads) as they have stopped responding to us.
Lik
Stealth
a year ago
I second this.
Can I get a referral for razorpay please would love to work with razorpay looking for a better company @NotYourDhinchakPooja
Would love to get a referral for stripe so please if someone can. although I wanted razorpay since it's at location where I can easily commute 😅
TookTook
Stealth
a year ago
Mai pehchan gya, tu wo hi h
Exact same situation at BrowserStack. They call it BiFrost and is supposed to be owned by Central Frontend & Design team.
It's far away from giving meaningful system to developers. Team gives major pushbacks when new variant or new component is requested. Have no concept of respecting the deadline. Straight bully attitude if you try to raise voice against them. The vibe on the ground around it is extremely bad.
Problem is ownership. There is no real decision maker on what gets added and what doesn't. Design team despite being co-owner of this do not know what exists in DS and what doesn't -> leading to same frustrating cycle of fighting with everyone.
I'm concept, DS definitely has great utility and is essential for mature orgs. That being said, I feel it needs to be driven more seriously with better alignments and mature people.
Thanks for sharing. Despite this, would u recommend a friend to work at Browserstack?
Yes. The quality of work is still way better than other companies. Learning is great.
However recently everyone is overworking a lot and there seems to be burnout in few places. If that's something my friend can take, I would recommend it
James_bond
Stealth
a year ago
After a time, the applications in the organizations become stagnant and very rarely you’ll get to work on the exciting things
Agreed that the code becomes monotonous and the scope of innovation gets reduced given the complexity and dependency of the code increases manifold
But thats the cycle of software development
What i have understood from the post and the comments is that once the blade becomes fully ready and the designs are updated accordingly, its only then you guys should start the revamping process and thats where the things will become exciting again
pixelpusher
Stealth
a year ago
As a designer my two cents on blade are
1. Why is there a different team for DS
2. Looks like blade is not made to adapt and scale for such scenarios
3. Poor collaboration between designers and developers
I am not a part of razorpay but following their design work for some time
Design system is applicable for scenarios where in there is a single application that has multiple pages and the application is to be accessed by fixed type of personas. Moreover, you don’t see many changes happening in future when it comes to the user experience or the UI. So when you create new pages for the application, you just need to reuse the existing design language. It saves ui ux and fe dev efforts
Heya
Student
a year ago
What is your salary and experience?
At Optum we also made a rzp like app that is powering billion dollar subsideries.
This is exactly how it works in the current company I work in. I am feeling up of frontend altogether because of this.
OnADietCoke
Stealth
a year ago
I personally felt the design was generic AF. Don't see why you guys have such long discussions about design. The entire point of establishing a design system should be to avoid time around them unless maybe accessibility / edge case responsive situations.
