Engineers Ain't Made For Meetings

Ah yes, the classic interview fairy tale where bosses claim "we don't have technical debt" with a straight face. That's like saying "our codebase is flawless" or "all our documentation is up-to-date." The detective's doubt button might as well be a nuclear launch button at this point. Every company has technical debt lurking in the shadows. It's either hiding in that legacy system nobody wants to touch, or in that "temporary fix" from 2015 that somehow became permanent. The only question is whether they're honest enough to admit it or if you'll discover it on day three when they ask you to "just make a small change" to the monolithic spaghetti monster powering their entire operation.

OMG, the CRUSHING REALITY of tech jobs in four tiny panels! 😭 First day: you're dragging a BOULDER of responsibilities while sweating buckets. Then the team lead introduces the shiny new hire who's all "excited for opportunities" while you're LITERALLY DYING. They promise the newbie will "help with your load" and what happens? Now you're BOTH crushed under separate boulders! The tech industry doesn't distribute workload—it just finds more rocks to drop on innocent developers! The circle of suffering continues, and the only thing getting lighter is your will to live! Welcome to software engineering, where your reward for hard work is... MORE HARD WORK!

Physics meets software engineering in this brilliantly accurate parody of Newton's First Law. That dormant side project you started six months ago? It'll stay collecting digital dust until your boss suddenly declares it's "mission-critical" for next week's release. And that perfectly flowing development sprint? It'll continue smoothly right until the client says those five dreaded words: "I've been thinking, what if..." The universal constant in software isn't gravity—it's the inverse relationship between project stability and proximity to deadlines.

The new developer took "Make the clock hands show the current time" a bit too literally. Instead of rotating analog hands, they just slapped the actual timestamp values onto the clock face. Classic case of malicious compliance meets unclear requirements! This is what happens when you inherit code with zero context and the documentation is just a Post-it note. The PM probably envisioned elegant rotating hands, but the dev thought "well technically these digital values DO show the current time..." and shipped it. Requirements passed, elegance failed.

That one teammate who shows up at the last minute with a half-baked pull request while everyone else has been pushing the project forward for weeks. The classic "I helped" contribution that somehow makes it into the final demo despite breaking three unit tests. At least they remembered to add their name to the README.md!

Adding more project managers and consultants to a sinking project is like adding more people to the top deck of a sinking boat. "Why aren't we moving faster?" asks the clueless executive as the poor dev in the water desperately tries to paddle. Classic corporate solution: throw more management at the problem while the actual workforce drowns. The Brooks' Law special – adding more people to a late project just makes it later. But hey, at least there's plenty of people to document the failure in a retrospective PowerPoint!