Why Digitalization Projects Always Fail

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.

That moment when your coworker suggests a "quick call" to discuss something you've already meticulously documented in an email with bullet points, code snippets, and three supporting diagrams. Nothing says "I didn't read a single word you wrote" like forcing you into a 45-minute meeting that could have been a 30-second scroll. The modern workplace equivalent of watching someone deliberately stick their hand in a crab trap.

The eternal standoff between management and the lone developer. Boss wants deployment, dev explains there are bugs and they're understaffed, boss responds with "We need this done today!" because deadlines trump reality. Next week's comic: same dev explaining why production is on fire. Tale as old as Git.

The quintessential dev team dynamic captured in its natural habitat. Top dev proudly announces "the energy I bring to the team" while showcasing a comment from a teammate who's bypassing all testing protocols with the battle cry "i'm merging it. f*ck the tests." Meanwhile, the cherry on top comes from someone named "Average Engineer" who declares writing test cases is basically admitting your code might have flaws—a cardinal sin in the church of overconfidence. This is that special moment when the CI/CD pipeline becomes CI/See-No-Evil. Future production issues? That's tomorrow-you's problem! Nothing says "high-performing team" like merging untested code at 11:36 PM and calling it "energy."

No amount of QA testing will ever match the sheer destructive power of end users in production. You spent months testing every edge case, fixed all known bugs, and deployed your "stable" release with confidence. Then day one hits and somehow users find seven new ways to crash your app that should be physically impossible. It's like they have a supernatural talent for finding that one scenario your test suite missed. "I must break you" isn't just a threat—it's the unspoken mission statement of every user who downloads your app.

The eternal cold war between Developers and Marketing, perfectly captured in a Star Trek format. Marketing thinks they're besties collaborating on the company mission, while Developers are silently calculating how many more "urgent priority changes" they can handle before rage-quitting to a cabin in the woods. The only thing these departments have in common is mutual bewilderment at each other's existence. Marketing's enthusiastic "Yes" paired with the Developer's deadpan "No" is basically every product meeting I've sat through for the last decade.