When The Product Manager Rolls In To Open A Jira Ticket

Ah, the classic "we want to exploit you but make it sound like opportunity" post. This CTO thinks wanting a guaranteed salary is a red flag, but his actual red flags are waving harder than a windmill in a hurricane: ✅ "Lines of code" as a performance metric ✅ Gamified "leaderboard" to pit devs against each other ✅ Mocking stable income as "playing it safe" ✅ Expecting "tens of thousands of lines per day" (physically impossible) ✅ Belittling testing and maintainable code Translation: "I want desperate coders who'll work 80-hour weeks chasing a bonus they'll never quite reach while I pay them peanuts." After 20 years in this industry, I've learned that any company measuring productivity by line count is where good code goes to die. The truly elite developers I know write less code, not more.

Ah, the classic "build it and they will come" fallacy in its purest form! Some bearded tech wizard with fancy headphones coding away in complete isolation, creating what he thinks users want without bothering to ask a single one. The ultimate developer fantasy - no pesky user feedback to ruin your perfect vision! Sure, the product will be a spectacular failure that solves problems nobody has, but at least the architecture is technically brilliant . Who needs market research when you have caffeine and confidence?

The ultimate reverse interview technique! Instead of companies giving you a "trial task" to evaluate your skills, why not flip the script and get paid to evaluate their competence? It's like unit testing a company's management before committing to the full production environment. The number of tech companies that fail this basic responsibility test would crash the entire recruitment system.

Ah yes, the classic debugging scenario where the big Spider-Man (developers) is actually trying to solve problems while baby Spider-Man (project managers and designers) stands there with that "I'm contributing" energy. Nothing quite like having someone hover over your shoulder suggesting you "just fix the bug" while you're neck-deep in legacy code written by a developer who left three years ago. The little one's face perfectly captures that mix of confusion and unearned confidence that appears right before they ask "is it fixed yet?" for the fifth time in an hour.

The duality of agile development in its purest form. During sprint planning, you're a majestic lion roaring confidently: "We'll implement the entire authentication system, refactor the database, AND add three new features!" Two weeks later at the retrospective, you're that derpy lion meme mumbling "So... we managed to fix one button and it only breaks in Safari sometimes." The circle of sprint life continues, and nobody learns a thing.

The corporate tech meeting from hell. Two folks suggest superficial fixes like "color theory" and "enhanced GUI" while the third person—clearly the only one who's ever shipped anything—dares to suggest maybe, just maybe, the team needs actual time to innovate instead of endless sprints. Of course, he gets thrown out the window. Because in tech, suggesting we slow down and build something good is basically treason. Six years in the industry and I've never once seen a PM say "you know what, let's take a sprint off and fix our technical debt." Nope, just keep sprinting until your knees give out!