Process Over Progress

Nothing ages a developer quite like an agile project. You start all fresh-faced and optimistic at kickoff, convinced you'll build something revolutionary in two-week sprints. Three months later, you're a hollow shell muttering "that's out of scope" in your sleep while staring at a burndown chart that only goes up. The transformation from "we can do anything!" to "please just let this end" happens faster than a Node.js deprecation cycle.

The classic vampire/Superman weakness meme but with a coding twist! Vampires cower from sunlight, Superman recoils from kryptonite, and developers? They'll do ANYTHING to avoid writing unit tests. The sheer panic on that developer's face speaks volumes about the universal dread of having to verify your own code actually works as intended. Why spend 20 minutes writing tests when you could spend 8 hours debugging in production instead? Pure engineering efficiency!

The spiritual journey of every developer who's had to deal with Jira ticket management. That moment when your project manager starts channeling their inner zen master, asking you to reflect on your workflow choices, only to hit you with the existential crisis of ticket proliferation. Nothing says "we value process over progress" quite like creating 17 tickets to document that you changed a button color from blue to slightly-less-blue. The road to burnout is paved with unnecessary Jira tickets.

The perfect indie dev symbiosis – one calm producer who's mastered the art of corporate-speak and PowerPoint presentations, tethered to a feral developer who's spent years harnessing pure chaos into functional code. It's like watching a trained animal handler at the zoo, except the dangerous animal is the one actually building your product. The producer's on a leash not for the dev's safety, but to prevent them from escaping back to their natural habitat of 4 AM coding sessions fueled by energy drinks and spite. The greatest indie games weren't created by well-adjusted people with healthy work-life balances – they were birthed by this exact chaotic duo, held together by deadlines and the shared delusion that they'll "definitely make it big this time."

The eternal truth of software development. Product managers be like "Let's remove that useful feature nobody asked for" and suddenly users are storming the gates with pitchforks. Twenty years in this industry and I've seen more "bug fixes" that were actually feature removals than actual bug fixes. The worst part? Six months later they'll reintroduce the same feature as "revolutionary new functionality" in their premium tier. Classic corporate gaslighting at its finest.

The pre-vacation documentation marathon—where senior devs frantically explain every obscure codebase quirk, deployment ritual, and that one server that crashes if you look at it wrong. Then the inevitable horror upon return: discovering your meticulously crafted knowledge transfer resulted in precisely zero progress. The junior dev was too terrified to touch anything without your divine approval, and now your inbox contains 47 "quick questions" that could've been answered by reading the docs you spent 9 hours creating. Classic case of knowledge transfer theater!