management Memes

CEO Expectation

CEO Expectation
Some consultant just made $500k selling management a fantasy where 2 engineers and 1 PM can replace a team of 12-15 people while somehow achieving "20x-50x dev speed gains." The table shows "AI-Native Goals" that turn 6-month projects into 6 days and PR reviews into under 2 hours. Sure, and my code compiles on the first try every time. The real kicker? They're citing Amazon, Klarna, and GitHub as proof that AI will magically compress human effort into nothing. Meanwhile, actual engineers are still waiting 3 days for PR approvals and debugging why the AI suggested using a deprecated library from 2015. But hey, at least the PowerPoint looks impressive. This is what happens when executives read LinkedIn thought leadership posts and mistake them for engineering documentation.

Too Much Work

Too Much Work
Companies love to brag about "sparing no expense" on their tech infrastructure, then proceed to hire exactly one developer to babysit 2 million lines of undocumented legacy code. Because why hire a team when you can just slowly crush the soul of a single engineer? The Jurassic Park reference is chef's kiss here—Newman's setup perfectly captures that "I'm surrounded by chaos I didn't create but am somehow responsible for" energy. At least Newman had dinosaurs as an excuse. Your solo dev just has management's budget cuts and unrealistic expectations.

I Don't Blame You I Blame Your Employer

I Don't Blame You I Blame Your Employer
Someone finally said it out loud and the "Agile Coaches" are sweating. The truth is, most companies treat Agile like it's a recipe from IKEA - just follow the steps and you'll get productivity furniture. But Agile isn't about mandatory daily standups that could've been a Slack message, or sprint planning meetings that eat half your Monday. It's supposed to be about values like collaboration, adaptability, and responding to change. Instead, we got Jira tickets, story points that nobody agrees on, and managers who think "being agile" means changing requirements every 3 hours while still expecting the same deadline. The real kicker? Developers know this. They're sitting in their fifth ceremony of the week, silently screaming. But hey, if those kids in the window (management) could actually read the Agile Manifesto instead of just attending a 2-day certification course, they'd realize they've been cargo-culting the whole thing.

My Take On The AI Thing

My Take On The AI Thing
Nothing says "increased productivity" quite like inheriting your manager's workload after they got axed for "efficiency gains." Sure, you could've been cranking out AI-generated code like a factory line, but instead you chose the artisanal route of actually writing software. The reward? Congratulations, you're now a developer-manager hybrid with zero pay bump and twice the meetings. The AI was supposed to replace the boring stuff, not create a corporate restructuring speedrun. At least when the AI hallucinates a solution, it doesn't have to attend the retrospective to explain why.

Why We Need AI Everywhere

Why We Need AI Everywhere
Employee picks the urinal with proper spacing like a civilized human being. Boss walks in and stands directly next to someone when there's an entire row of empty urinals. Classic power move or complete lack of bathroom etiquette awareness. Boss then decides the real problem isn't their questionable decision-making skills—it's that we need to "infuse AI into our products." Because nothing says innovation like ignoring basic social protocols while pitching buzzword solutions. Maybe we do need AI everywhere. Starting with an AI-powered bathroom assistant that gently reminds management about the unwritten urinal spacing rule: always leave at least one urinal gap . Could call it GPT-Pee.

Boss Vibe Coded Once

Boss Vibe Coded Once
Boss spent a weekend playing with Claude AI and now thinks the entire dev team is obsolete. The plan? Fire everyone, let customers "vibe-generate" their own features directly, and somehow this will scale better than having actual engineers. The corporate email is a masterpiece of buzzword salad: "Claude is faster than all of us combined" and customers will just tell the AI what they want. Because we all know how well requirements gathering goes when you cut out the middleman who actually understands the codebase, infrastructure, and why Karen from sales can't have a button that "makes everything purple and also exports to blockchain." The DevOps person's relief at the end is chef's kiss—they know they're safe because someone still needs to keep the infrastructure running when this brilliant AI-first strategy inevitably crashes and burns. Good luck getting Claude to debug your Kubernetes cluster at 3 AM. Sent from my iPhone, naturally.

Me Watching My Manager Commit My Next Three Weekends

Me Watching My Manager Commit My Next Three Weekends
Ah yes, the classic dance of technical debt meeting client promises. Your manager's out here selling "quick fixes" like they're on QVC, while you're sitting there doing the mental math on how many architectural sins you'll have to atone for. The thing is, they're not wrong that it's a "simple" bug fix—if you ignore the spaghetti code, the lack of tests, the deprecated dependencies, and the fact that touching one line somehow breaks three unrelated features. Sure, slap a band-aid on it and call it done, or spend your weekends untangling the Gordian knot that is your codebase. Your choice! (Narrator: It wasn't a choice.) Nothing says "healthy work-life balance" quite like refactoring legacy code on a Saturday because someone promised the client a miracle by Monday. Time to update that LinkedIn profile.

Answered Without Thinking Anything... The Yesss Man

Answered Without Thinking Anything... The Yesss Man
You know that moment when the CEO casually drops the "can we build this in 6 months?" bomb and your junior dev brain goes "OF COURSE!" before your neurons even fire? Now you're standing there like you just signed your own death warrant while your manager, mentor, HR, the Chief Architect, CTO, and literally EVERYONE who knows better is staring at you with the collective energy of a disappointed parent council. They've seen this tragedy unfold a thousand times before. They know you just promised to build Rome in a day using only duct tape and Stack Overflow. But sure, go ahead and commit to that timeline, champ. We'll be here with the coffee and tissues when reality hits in month 2.

Linear Scaling 101

Linear Scaling 101
Classic PM math right here. If 16 developers can build a C compiler in 2 weeks, then obviously 32 developers can do it in 1 week, right? Just double the resources, halve the time—it's basic arithmetic! Except that's not how software development works. Brooks' Law states that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later," and the same principle applies here. More developers means more communication overhead, more merge conflicts, more onboarding time, and more coordination chaos. You can't just throw bodies at a problem and expect linear speedup. With 32 developers, you'd probably spend the entire week just setting up Slack channels, arguing about code style, and resolving Git conflicts. The compiler? Still not done. Maybe management should read "The Mythical Man-Month" instead of treating software like a factory assembly line.

All True

All True
The brutal truth of an IT career visualized in one devastating graph. Your desire to BE in IT? Plummeting faster than a production server at 5 PM on Friday. Meanwhile, the number of idiots you have to deal with? Exponentially skyrocketing like it's trying to reach escape velocity. The excuses for bugs? Growing steadily because apparently "it works on my machine" is a personality trait now. Credit from your manager? Flatter than a pancake, basically nonexistent. Stress levels? Climbing those stairs to burnout city, one sprint at a time. And the pièce de résistance: your desire to LEAVE IT shoots up exponentially like a hockey stick graph, threatening to break through the ceiling. The only thing that stays consistently low is managerial credit—because why acknowledge the people who actually keep the lights on?

I Suffer From Shiny Object Syndrome

I Suffer From Shiny Object Syndrome
You know that feeling when you discover some bleeding-edge framework on GitHub with 47 stars, zero documentation, and a README that just says "WIP"? And suddenly React feels like ancient technology from the Paleolithic era? Yeah, your manager just crushed that dream faster than a null pointer exception. The painful irony here is that the shiny new framework probably has terrible docs and a community consisting of three people arguing in GitHub issues, while React has literally millions of developers, Stack Overflow answers for every conceivable problem, and more npm packages than there are atoms in the universe. But nope, your brain sees "new" and goes full dopamine rush mode. That sad otter perfectly captures the internal screaming of every developer who's been forced to be... reasonable . Deep down you know your manager is right, but it still hurts to stay with the boring, stable, well-documented choice when there's experimental tech to break prod with.

My Boss

My Boss
The duality of workplace reactions: you're out here ready to flip tables and rage-quit over yet another production bug at 5 PM on a Friday, meanwhile your boss is sitting there like some emotionless algorithm analyzing edge cases. "Oh that's interesting" is corporate-speak for "I have zero emotional investment in your suffering and will now ask you to investigate this during your weekend." The sheer contrast between your very human, very justified meltdown and their cold, detached curiosity is the perfect summary of every dev's relationship with management. They're observing your crisis like it's a fascinating science experiment while you're literally combusting.