The Arsonist Firefighter Syndrome

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Content Will Ye. 3rd Engineering Cohere Follow 17h Edited Back when I worked at Amazon as a software engineer, the CRAZIEST thing happened to me. Here's the story... I was working from home with my girlfriend (at the time), when suddenly I get an urgent ping from my coworker: "Our service is experiencing a SEV 2! We need all hands on deck!" Uh oh, our team's application has gone down! However, as I scrambled to figure out how to fix the issue, I smelled something burning from another room and heard a fire alarm go off. "Will! There's a fire! Help!" heard my girlfriend shout. Now I was stuck in a conundrum - restore a critical Amazon service, or put out the fire in my apartment? It was at that time I remembered Amazon's famous leadership principle "Customer Obsession". There are customers who depend on my team's application - I can't let them down! So I ignored the fire and my girlfriend's pleas, and started debugging the production issue. But all of a sudden, the smoke in my apartment cleared and the fire alarm fell silent. My girlfriend walked into the room, and to my astonishment, peeled off a wig and revealed herself to be Jeff Bezos himself! "I'm proud of you for being obsessed with our customers," he said, and gave me a 5 Amazon gift card. He then leaped out of my window and hopped into a waiting Amazon Prime delivery van that quickly peeled away. Even though I no longer work at Amazon, I'm so grateful for these experiences that taught me lessons I'll never forget. Agree?

Content How I How I imagined myself actually look debugging like

The classic senior developer paradox: your anxiety-fueled coding marathon just created two weeks of unemployment for your junior devs. Congratulations, you played yourself! That moment when your productivity is actually counterproductive for team dynamics. Now you're just sitting there with your face in your palm wondering if you should create some bugs on purpose just to keep everyone busy. Success has never felt so painful. Next time maybe save some debugging for the children instead of hoarding all the glory for yourself, you anxious overachiever.

Content When your non-programmer friend fixed a bug you couldn't

The galaxy brain approach to coding: why bother with a handful of dynamic variables when you can create a magnificent constellation of magic numbers? Nothing says "I trust my future self" quite like hardcoding 50 constants instead of using meaningful variables that might actually explain what your code does. The real 200 IQ move is creating a codebase so rigid that when requirements change (and they always change), you get to play the exciting game of "find and replace across 47 files." Bonus points if you name them all var1 through var50 !