More Like Marathon

The evolution of software development methodologies visualized with perfect accuracy: Waterfall: You meticulously build each component one by one, in strict sequence, until you finally have a car. No going back to fix the wheels once you've moved on to the chassis! Agile: Start with a skateboard, then a scooter, then a bike, then a quad bike, and finally a car. Each iteration is a functional product that gets you from A to B with increasing sophistication. AI: Just throw in a weird green alien car from The Jetsons at the beginning, and somehow it magically transforms into the same car as the other methodologies. Nobody knows how it works internally, but hey, it got there faster!

Ah, the classic corporate brainstorming session where everyone's looking for shortcuts except the one person suggesting the obvious solution. Low-code, AI, buzzwords galore—but nobody wants to hear "just hire someone who knows what they're doing." That dev getting thrown out the window represents every competent engineer watching their company chase shiny tech instead of proper staffing. The real punchline? Six months later they'll hire three devs anyway, but only after burning through the budget on half-baked AI solutions that generated more bugs than features.

Ah yes, the classic "I'll just give a positive review and nothing else" approach. When your boss asks for feedback, but your keyboard mysteriously only types thumbs up emojis and the occasional letters that spell "tgIm." After seven years as a senior dev, I've mastered the art of saying absolutely nothing while appearing enthusiastic. Career preservation at its finest. Why risk an honest opinion when you can just 👍👍👍 your way to your next performance review?

The eternal paradox of debugging: You need uninterrupted focus to solve the problem, but management's definition of "support" is checking in every 15 minutes to ask why it isn't fixed yet. Nothing kills productivity quite like the constant "is it fixed yet?" phone calls that somehow count as "helping." The irony of spending 94% of your time explaining why you haven't fixed something instead of actually fixing it is painfully real. Some things never change, even since the 1970s!

Behold, corporate problem-solving at its finest. One developer in a hole actually doing the work while eight people stand around "supervising." The two project managers are probably discussing which Jira board to create while the "analysts" (air quotes required) prepare PowerPoints about the hole. Meanwhile, the designer is concerned about whether the dirt pile has proper user affordances. The customer liaison is just there to say "the client wants it deeper" every 15 minutes.

This is the perfect children's book explanation of tech debt! The dog Haggis never fixes his roof because when it's raining, it's too wet to work (aka "we're too busy putting out fires to refactor"), and when it's sunny, it doesn't need fixing (aka "why fix what isn't breaking production right now?"). Meanwhile, the ladder in the sunny picture is the perfect metaphor for the tools we finally get approved in the budget once the problem becomes critical. By then, the dog is desperately hanging out the window while his house slowly deteriorates. The real kicker? That ladder isn't even tall enough to reach the roof. Just like how management finally approves refactoring but only gives you two sprint cycles to fix three years of shortcuts.