That Damned Jenkins Smile

OH. MY. GOD. The absolute TRAGEDY of spending 30 HOURS automating a task that takes 3 MINUTES to do manually! But darling, that's the hill we die on! 💅 The banner says it ALL: "We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy." The AUDACITY of our optimism! The DELUSION of our time estimates! Sure, I could just do the task 600 times manually before breaking even on my automation investment, but where's the DRAMA in that? The THRILL of overengineering? The pure ECSTASY of writing a script that will save me time in some hypothetical future that will never come?!

Who needs test-driven development when you can have bug-driven testing? The top panel shows the proper way to catch bugs—writing tests to find problems in your code. But let's be real... the bottom panel captures what actually happens in the trenches. You write some janky code, it breaks spectacularly in production, and suddenly you're frantically writing tests to figure out what the hell went wrong. It's the classic "I'll write tests later" approach that somehow becomes "I'll write tests when everything catches fire." The smug satisfaction on that face says it all—there's a twisted joy in debugging through chaos rather than preventing it in the first place.

Behold, corporate problem-solving at its finest. One developer in a hole actually doing the work while eight people stand around "supervising." The two project managers are probably discussing which Jira board to create while the "analysts" (air quotes required) prepare PowerPoints about the hole. Meanwhile, the designer is concerned about whether the dirt pile has proper user affordances. The customer liaison is just there to say "the client wants it deeper" every 15 minutes.

THE SHEER AUDACITY of someone sending just "hey" on Teams! Like, seriously?! Are you trying to give me a heart attack?! 💀 That single word hanging there, menacingly, while I frantically try to figure out if I broke production, missed a deadline, or if my code just set the entire company on fire. The suspense is UNBEARABLE! Just tell me what catastrophe awaits so I can properly prepare my resignation letter, PLEASE!

The eternal developer paradox: spending 8 hours debugging a complex authentication system but completely freezing up when faced with the green "Code" button on GitHub. The fear is real—do I clone? Download ZIP? Copy the URL? And what's this "gitmodules" thing? Meanwhile, StackOverflow is full of answers that assume you've already mastered this dark art. The silent shame of senior developers everywhere.

The existential crisis hits hard when junior devs finally grasp that their precious code is just a tiny speck in an endless Russian doll of virtualization. Their Java app isn't running on a "computer" – it's running on a Java Virtual Machine, which is running on a VM, which is running on a hypervisor, which is part of a Virtual Private Cloud... which is probably running in some AWS data center that might not even physically exist for all we know. Seven years into my career and I'm still not convinced my code isn't just running in a simulation inside another developer's fever dream. The turtles really do go all the way down.