Development time Memes

The eternal fantasy of management: cook a perfect product in 2 minutes with "vibe coding." Left to right, we have the reality of software development—properly cooked at reasonable temperature and time, burnt to a crisp when rushed, or a magical rainbow unicorn chicken that exists only in fever dreams and sprint planning meetings. Nothing says "I've never written a line of code" quite like believing that throwing more developers at a problem or using the latest trendy framework will somehow bend the laws of software physics. The universe has rules, and one of them is that good code takes actual time to develop—no matter how many times you use the word "synergy" in the standup.

This meme brilliantly roasts project managers who think development scales linearly with headcount. Just like cooking a chicken at 900°F for 1 hour produces a charred disaster (left), while 300°F for 3 hours creates perfection (right), software development can't be rushed by simply throwing more developers at it. It's a delicious reference to Brooks' Law from "The Mythical Man-Month" which states that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." Each new dev needs onboarding, increases communication overhead, and fragments the codebase. The chicken doesn't cook 3x faster at 3x the temperature—it burns to a crisp!

That visceral internal reaction when your non-technical friend pitches their "revolutionary" app idea that's basically just Uber-but-for-dogwalkers and casually mentions "it should only take a weekend to build, right?" The face perfectly captures that split-second calculation of whether to explain that their "simple app" requires a database architecture, frontend framework, backend API, authentication system, payment processing, and six months of your life... or just smile politely while mentally running process.exit(1) .

OH. MY. GOD. The absolute DELUSION of managers who think software development scales linearly! 💀 "The Mythical Man-Month" is basically the software developer's bible that screams "ADDING MORE PEOPLE TO A LATE PROJECT MAKES IT LATER!" But sure, let's give the boss TWO copies so he can misunderstand the concept TWICE as fast! Because apparently reading something twice simultaneously is just as impossible as having nine women produce a baby in one month. The savage irony of this gift is just *chef's kiss* - perfectly capturing every developer's silent scream when management decides that eight developers will finish in half the time of four. Spoiler alert: they won't!