Scrum Master: The Requirements Reaper

Ah, the beautiful naivety of junior developers! The top part shows a CEO casually asking if something can be delivered in 6 months, and the junior dev confidently saying "Of course!" without consulting anyone. Meanwhile, the bottom image (from Harry Potter) shows the entire management chain looking absolutely horrified at what this eager little code monkey just committed them to. The seasoned folks know the truth: whatever timeline the CEO suggested, multiply by 3 and add testing time that nobody accounted for. But our junior dev hasn't been crushed by reality yet, still believing deadlines are something other than wild fantasies written in vanishing ink. Six months later, they'll be working weekends wondering why their "it works on my machine" code isn't scaling to 10 million users. Welcome to the industry, kid!

The unwritten law of software development: Friday is sacred ground where no code shall be deployed. Yet there they are—the bugs—armed and ready to ruin your weekend plans like some skeletal terminator from your coding nightmares. Every developer knows the existential dread of that Slack notification at 4:30 PM on Friday. "Hey, just a quick fix needed in production." And suddenly you're huddled in the corner, praying to the git gods that your emergency hotfix doesn't cascade into a weekend-consuming disaster. The irony? The more desperately you want that read-only Friday, the more aggressively the bugs seem to materialize. It's like they can smell your weekend plans.

Ah, the classic one-person development team. James Pearce here is playing 4D chess with version control - creating the PR, assigning himself as the reviewer, approving his own work, and then merging it. Who needs code reviews when you're both judge and jury? This is basically the corporate equivalent of marking your own homework, except somehow it's completely acceptable in certain "agile" environments. The circle of trust is just... a dot.

The evolution of a developer in its natural habitat. Junior devs naively believe documentation exists somewhere in a mythical folder. Meanwhile, senior devs have transcended the need for written instructions because they've internalized every painful bug, every midnight hotfix, and every legacy codebase nightmare. After years of trauma, they've become one with the code. They don't read documentation—they remember the mistakes that led to its creation. The knowledge isn't written down because it's etched into their souls alongside their will to live.

Ah, the classic "too many cooks" scenario but with programmers! The left shows a beautifully simple, straight railway track representing your solo coding journey—clean, predictable, and headed in one clear direction. Then management decides that "adding more programmers will speed things up," and suddenly your elegant project transforms into that chaotic railway junction on the right—a tangled mess of conflicting ideas, merge conflicts, and "but on MY machine it works perfectly." It's the software development equivalent of trying to make a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. Some problems just don't scale linearly with headcount, and codebases are notoriously allergic to sudden influxes of new contributors who each bring their own "brilliant" ideas to the table.

The AUDACITY of tests! First, I'm screaming bloody murder when someone tries to force me to write them. "GET THAT THING OUT OF MY FACE!" because who has time for that nonsense when there's actual code to write?! But then... oh THEN... after I reluctantly take a bite and actually write some tests, my entire universe TRANSFORMS. Suddenly I'm floating in a pink bubble of euphoria, experiencing a spiritual awakening that only well-tested code can provide. "Damn this is good" indeed - the reluctant convert's confession after discovering the religion of test-driven development. The duality of programmer existence captured in four perfect panels!