Is There A Cure For Management?

Squidward peering through the blinds at SpongeBob and Patrick having fun is the perfect metaphor for tech lead existence. While the devs are happily writing code and building things, you're trapped in Jira hell, creating tickets, updating sprints, and wondering if you'll ever touch a keyboard again for anything other than status updates. The crushing weight of project management has turned you into Squidward - technically superior but dead inside.

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!"

The project manager is salivating over their delivery bonus while the senior architect just casually dropped a nuclear bomb about migrating to some shiny new framework. Classic tech industry priorities in action! The PM sees dollar signs while the architect gets to play with their new toys, and guess who's going to be working nights and weekends to make it happen? Not these two—they'll be at the beach while the dev team frantically googles "how to migrate legacy codebase to FancyFramework 4.0 without breaking everything." Ten bucks says the framework will be deprecated before the migration is even complete.

The eternal mystery of agile development! Scrum masters spend 15 minutes facilitating daily standups, then vanish into the ether for the remaining 7 hours and 45 minutes of their workday. They emerge occasionally to update Jira tickets, send cryptic Slack messages about "team velocity," and somehow justify their six-figure salaries while developers do the actual heavy lifting. The perfect job doesn't exi— wait, is that why everyone wants to be a scrum master?

Project managers choosing to draw 25 UNO cards rather than upgrade to Python 3 is the tech equivalent of saying "I'd rather eat glass." Python 2 reached end-of-life in 2020, but some companies are still clinging to it like it's the last bottle of water in a desert. The technical debt keeps piling up while managers keep muttering "but it works fine" through gritted teeth. Meanwhile, developers silently contemplate career changes.

Ah, the classic junior dev documentation approach: when in doubt, take a screenshot, add some ALL CAPS text pointing to the obvious, draw an arrow, and don't forget that official signature of approval! This is peak "documentation complete" energy. The button literally says "PUSH TO LOCK" on it already, but our enthusiastic junior has created a whole supplementary user manual for this complex system. Next sprint feature: a 50-page PDF explaining how to use the office microwave.