Tech Lead Life

Top panel: The face of pure dread when looking at actual development tasks. Bottom panel: Suddenly perking up with interest when someone asks for a TPS report or some other administrative nonsense. It's the universal law of developer productivity - code feels like a chore until someone interrupts with something worse. Then miraculously, that refactoring task you've been avoiding for weeks looks like a sanctuary.

The infamous Suez Canal blockage meets software development! Programmers are the aircraft carrier trying to make actual progress, while project managers are the Ever Given ship blocking the entire canal with bureaucracy. Nothing kills productivity quite like the unholy trinity of timeline reviews, Jira updates, and the dreaded "let's have another status meeting." Meanwhile, actual code sits unwritten, bugs remain unfixed, and deadlines drift further into fantasy land. The greatest maritime disaster of 2021 perfectly symbolizes what happens when management processes become so bloated they prevent any actual work from getting done. But sure, let's discuss our sprint velocity while the ship is literally stuck.

The career trajectory no one warns you about: You start as a passionate coder, slinging elegant solutions and building cool stuff. Fast forward five years, and suddenly your hands haven't touched a keyboard in months except to type "LGTM" on pull requests. Your technical skills are slowly fossilizing while you're stuck in meetings explaining to junior devs why their variable names should be more descriptive. The ultimate developer irony - get promoted for being good at coding, then never code again. It's like training your whole life to be a chef only to end up as the restaurant critic.

The AUDACITY of project managers thinking that physically hovering over developers will magically fix communication issues! Look at this PM in their fancy outfit, invading the sacred coding space like they're about to ask "is it done yet?" for the 47TH TIME TODAY. Developers frantically trying to focus while their PM breathes down their neck is the corporate equivalent of having someone watch you type your password. PURE TORTURE! Nothing says "I don't trust your time estimates" quite like setting up camp right next to the people who just want to be left alone with their code and existential dread. The closer the PM sits, the further the deadline slips - it's basically a law of physics at this point!

When the PM says "make sure your documentation is thorough," and you take it literally. Nothing says developer energy like documenting the painfully obvious while completely ignoring the complex parts of your codebase. "How to use this API? Figure it out yourself. How to open a pizza box? Let me write you a dissertation." Ten years in the industry and I've yet to see documentation that isn't either stating the absolute obvious or so cryptic it might as well be written in hieroglyphics. The middle ground simply doesn't exist in our universe.

The classic developer mantra: "Nobody is going to die if you write bad software" paired with "Faking it till you make it should probably be fine" and a dead platypus in the middle. The perfect encapsulation of that voice in your head justifying why it's OK to push untested code to production on a Friday afternoon. Just remember, somewhere an aviation software engineer is reading this and having a panic attack.