Too Many Captains, Not Enough Rowers

The only documented case of a developer experiencing genuine happiness at work - submitting their resignation letter. That moment when your coworker notices you're smiling for the first time since you inherited that legacy codebase with zero documentation and 8,000 TODOs. Nothing sparks joy quite like typing that final git commit with the message "Someone else's problem now" and knowing you'll never again have to attend those 2-hour sprint planning meetings where the product manager keeps saying "how hard could it be to add just one more feature?"

The skeleton of corporate productivity! Taking vague business requirements and transforming them into mandatory 8:30 AM standups where nobody knows what's happening. Bonus points if the requirements change right after the meeting ends and the sprint board looks like it was organized by a toddler with a keyboard. The only thing more dead than that skeleton is my will to estimate story points for features nobody understands.

Ah, the classic "sell the dream, build it later" startup strategy. These two are basically running the tech equivalent of a Ponzi scheme with PowerPoint slides. They've mastered the ancient art of "requirement gathering" by letting the customer unknowingly fund the entire development cycle. The beauty is that by the time the customer realizes they've paid for vaporware, you've either built something that kinda works or secured another round of funding from some VC who thinks "pre-revenue" is a legitimate business model. Ten years in the industry and I've seen this cycle repeat more times than git commits on a Friday afternoon. The smug expressions say it all – "Can you believe they actually bought that demo we cobbled together last night?"

That car suspension is the perfect metaphor for legacy code that's been "temporarily fixed" with zip ties and prayers. Just like how developers keep promising to refactor that horrific spaghetti code module that somehow powers the entire application. The classic "we'll clean it up next sprint" is the software equivalent of duct-taping your car's axle and hoping it survives another 10,000 miles. Spoiler alert: it's still running in production three years later, and everyone's too scared to touch it because "it works, don't mess with it."

The eternal developer's dilemma: finish too fast and you've just proven management's timeline was complete fiction, or sit on it and enjoy six months of "working hard" while secretly playing Elden Ring at your desk. Veterans know the correct answer: release it at 95% completion in exactly half the estimated time, then spend the remaining months "fixing critical bugs" that mysteriously appear right before each status meeting. The real skill isn't coding—it's managing expectations so you don't get rewarded with twice the work for being efficient.

The corporate food chain in its natural habitat! Junior devs thinking they've discovered a magical solution to their workload by dumping all testing on the poor intern. Meanwhile, the senior dev watches silently, knowing full well that karma is about to strike when that untested code inevitably crashes in production. The circle of tech life continues – where today's testing-dumper becomes tomorrow's 3 AM production bug fixer. Nature is healing.