Is There A Cure For Management?

The corporate circle of life in its natural habitat! First, management gets excited about AI boosting productivity so they can slash the dev team. Then their faces drop when devs use the same logic against them. "Oh, we need fewer managers now that we have fewer devs? surprised Pikachu face " The beautiful irony of corporate efficiency cuts coming back to bite the very people who initiated them. Turns out the sword of optimization cuts both ways... who knew? 🙃

The perfect metaphor doesn't exi— Oh wait, there it is! A Jira ad on a literal barrier that stops people from moving forward. The slogan "Big ideas start with Jira" plastered on what's essentially a roadblock is just *chef's kiss* irony. Nothing captures the spirit of Jira better than something designed to prevent progress while claiming to enable it. Six sprints later and we're still waiting for that gate to open...

Ever seen a codebase that looks like it was designed by drunk toddlers playing Jenga? That's what happens when someone utters those fateful words: "Just keep coding. We can always fix it later." This brick wall is basically every legacy project I've inherited. Sure, it technically "works" in the same way this wall technically exists — but one strong breeze (or one edge case) and the whole thing collapses faster than my will to live during a 3 AM production hotfix. And that promised refactoring? It's like saying "I'll start my diet tomorrow" — we all know it's never happening. By the time you circle back, you'll need a team of archaeologists to understand what that spaghetti mess was supposed to do in the first place.

OH. MY. GOD. The AUDACITY of recruiters! 😱 They show you this PRISTINE yellow building during the interview like "Oh yes, our codebase is TOTALLY organized and well-maintained!" Then you show up on day one and BAM! 💥 Half the walls are LITERALLY CRUMBLING, windows hanging by a thread, and some poor soul is outside with heavy machinery trying to keep the whole disaster from collapsing! "Needs a little refactoring" is corporate-speak for "this horrifying spaghetti code hasn't been touched since 2003 and the original developer left to become a goat farmer in the Alps." Honey, that's not a project—that's an archaeological excavation waiting for carbon dating! 💀

When faced with actual work, the programmer's brain immediately activates its highest priority function: procrastination.exe . Nothing says "I'm being productive" quite like spending four hours restructuring code that already works while your actual tasks multiply in the background. The refactoring rabbit hole—where deadlines go to die and meetings get mysteriously "forgotten." The beautiful irony is that we genuinely convince ourselves it's necessary work. "I can't possibly fix those bugs until I've rewritten this entire class using the latest design pattern I read about 20 minutes ago!"

OH. MY. GOD. The AUDACITY of that one ugly class to EXIST in my codebase! 💅 Here I am, innocently reaching for the finish line of my side project when suddenly—GASP—I spot that monstrosity of a class with its disgusting variable names and spaghetti logic! And what do I do? OBVIOUSLY the only reasonable response is to BURN THE ENTIRE PROJECT TO THE GROUND and rebuild it from scratch! Who cares about actually finishing things when your code can be BEAUTIFUL? Sleep is for the weak, and deadlines are merely suggestions when there's refactoring to be done! That dopamine hit from perfect code is worth sacrificing WEEKS of progress, darling!