Scrum In Name Only

The universal startup formula: someone with zero technical knowledge but a "revolutionary idea" chasing down the nearest programmer they can find. "I'll handle the business side" translates to "I'll take 90% equity while you build the entire product." The programmer's running away is the most technically accurate part of the whole scenario. Just another day where someone thinks their Uber-but-for-dog-walkers concept is worth billions while the implementation is apparently just "some coding stuff."

Sure, AI will replace programmers... right after it figures out what "a button that does something" means. The robot claims it just needs clear requirements and detailed specs, meanwhile product managers are out here giving requirements like they're ordering at a restaurant after three martinis. Good luck getting that neural network to interpret "make it pop" or "you know what I mean, right?"

That moment when your casual "yeah, I'll do it tomorrow" joke backfires spectacularly because your PM immediately updates the Jira ticket with a hard deadline. Suddenly your theoretical timeline becomes an official commitment, and your soul leaves your body as you realize you've played yourself. The panic sets in—you haven't even looked at the requirements doc, there's that weird legacy code you've been avoiding, and now it's officially due tomorrow. Congratulations, you've turned your harmless banter into a binding contract faster than you can say "git commit --amend".

Nothing says "I've made poor life choices" quite like being paraded around as the technical expert in a sales meeting. That grumpy cat is every developer who's been forced to wear the metaphorical bunny ears of client-facing responsibility. Your manager is gleefully showing you off like "Here's our senior developer who will make all these impossible promises come true!" Meanwhile, you're plotting the most elegant way to sabotage their LinkedIn profile later. The universal dev truth: code doesn't lie, but sales decks absolutely do.

The bell curve of programming wisdom hits hard. The junior devs (IQ 55-70) and senior wizards (IQ 130-145) both preach simplicity, while the middle-management types with their "it has to have all the features!!" are trapped in complexity hell. After 15 years in this industry, I've watched countless projects collapse under their own weight because someone insisted on cramming in every possible feature. The truly enlightened know that elegance comes from ruthless simplification. Voltaire nailed it centuries ago, and we're still learning this lesson the hard way with every new framework, library, and enterprise application. The cycle is eternal: build it simple, complicate it needlessly, then spend years refactoring back to simplicity.

The well-dressed manager stands confidently at the front of the boat, sunglasses on, looking important... while the engineering team frantically rows in the back, doing all the actual work. Ten years in the industry and nothing changes—managers taking credit for demos they didn't build, presentations they didn't make, and features they couldn't code. Meanwhile, we're drowning in technical debt and midnight deployments. But hey, at least someone's there to tell us we're "not meeting expectations" during performance reviews!