Scrum In Name Only

Task estimation in software development is basically just high-stakes gambling with your career. "Shouldn't take long" is the biggest lie in tech, right after "we value work-life balance." The range between "an hour and 11 months" perfectly captures that moment when you know the requirements are vague, the codebase is a nightmare, and three different managers are asking for status updates. Meanwhile, the product owner is already telling clients it'll be done by Friday. Pure fiction, just like those story points we assign in sprint planning.

Junior dev: "Is it normal that the codebase is so difficult to work in?" Senior dev: *stares into the void with thousand-yard gaze* "Years of tight deadlines, changing requirements, and revolving door of developers creates this beautiful disaster. Successful software either dies a hero or lives long enough to become legacy code that you'll maintain until retirement." The brutal truth no CS degree prepares you for: technical debt is the REAL company debt. Your inheritance won't be wealth—it'll be 15-year-old spaghetti code with comments like "TODO: fix this before release" from 2009.

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.

Ah, the sacred chain of command. The meme shows a PM sprinting at Olympic speed when they discover someone has dared to speak directly to a developer. Nothing triggers project manager fight-or-flight response quite like circumventing their authority. That frantic dash represents the pure panic of potentially losing control of the narrative—or worse, discovering a developer agreed to something with a 2-day timeline instead of the PM's carefully padded 2-week estimate. The bureaucratic equivalent of "I'LL HANDLE THIS."

That moment when your face physically contorts from the pain of reviewing an intern's code, only to discover HR wants to hire them permanently . It's like finding a production database with no backups and realizing the CTO thinks it's "innovative." The horror intensifies when you remember you'll be maintaining that spaghetti code long after the "vibe-coding" wunderkind has moved on to their next unsuspecting victim. The real pandemic isn't viral—it's nested ternary operators with no comments!

Skip code review? No problem! Just sit back and watch the dumpster fire unfold in production instead. Nothing quite like that 3 AM call when everything's imploding because someone thought their untested spaghetti code was "good enough." The best debugging sessions are always the ones where customers are your QA team and your boss is breathing down your neck. It's fine. This is fine.