I Have Jira Tickets

The classic developer escape plan. You build half a monstrosity, realize it's become a Lovecraftian nightmare of technical debt, then suddenly remember your cousin's startup needs a senior developer. Meanwhile, the grim reaper (aka those impossible projects) patiently waits at the company door for the next unsuspecting junior who'll inherit your undocumented spaghetti code. It's not abandonment—it's a strategic career advancement opportunity.

That moment when your coworker suggests a "quick call" to discuss something you've already meticulously documented in an email with bullet points, code snippets, and three supporting diagrams. Nothing says "I didn't read a single word you wrote" like forcing you into a 45-minute meeting that could have been a 30-second scroll. The modern workplace equivalent of watching someone deliberately stick their hand in a crab trap.

The corporate-mandated team spirit has reached new heights of absurdity. Nothing says "we're definitely not a cult" like starting your daily standup with a synchronized hand salute while someone yells "SCRUM HEIL!" Ten years in the industry and I've watched Agile transform from "let's be flexible" to whatever dystopian ritual this is. Next sprint we'll probably have matching armbands with the Jira logo. And of course there's always that one teammate responding with "LGTM" (Looks Good To Me) because they've completely given up questioning anything.

The eternal developer's dilemma: finish too fast and you've just proven management's timeline was complete fiction, or sit on it and enjoy six months of "working hard" while secretly playing Elden Ring at your desk. Veterans know the correct answer: release it at 95% completion in exactly half the estimated time, then spend the remaining months "fixing critical bugs" that mysteriously appear right before each status meeting. The real skill isn't coding—it's managing expectations so you don't get rewarded with twice the work for being efficient.

The painful truth nobody warns you about in bootcamp! You dream of crafting elegant algorithms and building the next revolutionary app, but reality hits you with 8 hours of meetings, documentation, and explaining to project managers why adding that "small feature" would require rewriting the entire codebase. Meanwhile, your actual coding time has been reduced to those precious 15 minutes between the "quick sync" and the "end-of-day check-in." The modern developer: part therapist for legacy code, part translator between business and technology, and occasionally—if the stars align—allowed to write a few lines of code.

SWEET MOTHER OF PROCRASTINATION! 😱 The absolute AUDACITY of John's brain to completely IGNORE the flaming dumpster fire of work responsibilities and instead choose the forbidden fruit of a side project! This is the programmer's equivalent of seeing your house burning down and deciding it's the PERFECT time to redecorate your neighbor's garden gnome collection. The sheer chaotic energy of having a to-do list longer than the terms and conditions you never read, yet somehow finding the motivation to build that random Discord bot you've been dreaming about for 0.2 seconds. Why fix what's broken when you can create NEW broken things?! It's not procrastination if you're still writing code, right? RIGHT?!