Problem solving Memes

Posts tagged with Problem solving

Early Access

Early Access
Kid's already implementing their own sorting algorithm instead of just using the built-in one. First answer? "aelpp" for apple. That's not a typo—that's literally alphabetically sorted characters. They took the word "apple" and sorted each letter individually (a-e-l-p-p) like they're running a char array through a sort function. The teacher wanted them to sort the words by their first letter, but this future developer interpreted the spec literally: "alphabetical order" = sort the characters. The rest of the answers follow the same pattern—"ikmnppu" (pumpkin), "glo" (log), "eirrv" (river). They're treating strings as mutable character arrays and applying a sort operation to each one. This is the kind of literal thinking that makes you either a brilliant compiler designer or someone who spends 3 hours debugging why their code does exactly what they told it to do, not what they wanted it to do. The kid's not wrong—they just solved a different problem with O(n log n) complexity when the teacher wanted O(1) lookup.

Standard Brute Forcing

Standard Brute Forcing
The absolute CHAOS of debugging summed up in one door sign. Try solution one from Stack Overflow. Doesn't work? Cool, try solution two. Still broken? Solution three it is! And if THAT doesn't work, well... your code is probably just fundamentally cursed and you should probably just give up and become a farmer. The door sign brilliantly mirrors the developer experience: methodically trying every possible approach with zero understanding of WHY any of them might work, just desperately hoping ONE of them does. PULL the dependency. PUSH a random fix. Neither works? Time to close the ticket and pretend the bug never existed. Ship it to production and let the users figure it out!

Call Me Master

Call Me Master
You know that intoxicating rush of dopamine when you casually drop a solution to a problem that's been haunting your colleague for an entire afternoon? Suddenly you're not just Dave from accounting software—you're The Oracle . They're practically kissing your hand like you're some mafia don who just granted them a favor they can never repay. The power dynamic shift is instant. One moment you're both equals struggling with the codebase, the next you're accepting their eternal gratitude while internally screaming "IT WAS JUST A MISSING SEMICOLON!" But you don't say that. You just nod knowingly, because maintaining the mystique is crucial. Bonus points if the fix was something embarrassingly simple like a typo, wrong variable name, or forgetting to restart the dev server. The simpler the solution, the more godlike you feel. It's the unspoken law of debugging.

My Wife Gets Me

My Wife Gets Me
When your wife instantly diagnoses the REAL problem like a senior developer reviewing your pull request. Meimei (the kid) couldn't lock the door, and instead of assuming the door is broken like a normal person would, wife immediately goes full root-cause-analysis mode: "....is something wrong with the door?" But our programmer hero? Nah, straight to the REAL issue: "User error on the 12 year old." Because let's be honest, 99% of bug reports are just PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair). The door works FINE, the API is FLAWLESS, the code is PERFECT—it's always the user who doesn't know how to lock a door properly. This is the energy of every developer who's ever had to explain to someone that turning it off and on again actually DOES solve the problem. She gets it. She truly gets it. Relationship goals, honestly.

Op Doesn't Have Time For Interviews

Op Doesn't Have Time For Interviews
You know those brain-teaser interview questions that have nothing to do with the actual job? Yeah, this person gets it. The classic "three switches, one bulb" puzzle is the kind of thing interviewers love to throw at you to "test your problem-solving skills" while you're sitting there thinking about the 47 GitHub repos you could be contributing to instead. The savage response is chef's kiss—basically saying "I'd rather be literally anywhere else than solving your riddle that has zero relevance to whether I can write clean code or debug a production incident at 3 AM." Because let's be real, when was the last time you had to figure out which switch controls a light bulb in a separate room during a deployment? Spoiler: never. It's the perfect encapsulation of how broken tech interviews have become—asking candidates to solve puzzles that Einstein would find tedious instead of, you know, actually assessing their ability to do the job. But hey, at least it weeds out people who have better things to do with their time.

Well

Well
That glorious moment of clarity after staring at broken code for 6 hours straight. You've tried everything—Stack Overflow, rubber duck debugging, sacrificing a USB cable to the tech gods—and suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, the solution materializes in your brain. Time to speedrun this fix before the idea evaporates like your motivation on a Monday morning. The confidence is palpable, the hair is electric, and the toothbrush? Well, multitasking is a developer's superpower.

Why Computer Engineers Should Not Be Surgeons

Why Computer Engineers Should Not Be Surgeons
So apparently the medical equivalent of "have you tried turning it off and on again?" is just straight-up murder and resurrection. The surgeon here is treating a human body like it's a crashed production server at 2 PM on a Friday. Just kill all processes, reboot, and hope nothing's corrupted. No logs, no diagnostics, just the nuclear option. To be fair, this troubleshooting methodology has a 100% success rate in IT. The patient might not remember their passwords afterward, but that's a separate ticket.

When Your Solution Is Technically Correct But Socially Wrong

When Your Solution Is Technically Correct But Socially Wrong
You know you're dealing with a programmer when someone suggests "install windows" as a solution to overheating and they get YEETED out the window faster than a rejected pull request. Everyone else is playing it safe with "air conditioners" and "fans" like reasonable human beings, but this absolute legend went full literal-interpretation mode. The office is hot? Just install some WINDOWS. You know, those glass things in walls that let air in? Revolutionary thinking, really. The boss's face says it all: "I asked for practical solutions, not dad jokes from a systems administrator." But hey, the solution WOULD work. It's just that nobody appreciates genius when it involves defenestration and a complete misunderstanding of context. Classic programmer move: solving the wrong problem with perfect logic.

Well

Well
You've been staring at that bug for 6 hours. Tried everything. Stack Overflow has failed you. Your rubber duck quit. Then suddenly, while brushing your teeth at 2 AM, the solution hits you like a divine revelation. Now you're sprinting to your laptop in your underwear with a toothbrush hanging out of your mouth because if you don't implement it RIGHT NOW, the idea will evaporate like your will to write documentation. The shower is where bugs go to die, but apparently the bathroom sink works too.

If Political Issues Had Issue Trackers

If Political Issues Had Issue Trackers
The handshake meme that unites developers and politicians under the common banner of "solving issues by creating new ones" is painfully accurate. Developers fix bugs by introducing three more undocumented features, while politicians solve healthcare by breaking something else entirely. It's the circle of technical debt but for society! The only difference? Developers eventually have to face their code in production, while politicians can just blame the previous administration's codebase. At least we have Stack Overflow - politicians are still using Yahoo Answers from 2005.

The Interviewer's Existential Crisis

The Interviewer's Existential Crisis
Oh. My. GOD. The absolute AUDACITY of using built-in functions during a coding interview! 💀 The interviewer's face is SCREAMING "I expected you to write a 17-line algorithm with three nested loops and discuss time complexity for 20 minutes, but you just... sorted the list and grabbed the first element?!" Honey, this is the programming equivalent of being asked to build a house from scratch and just calling a contractor instead. THE HORROR! 🔥

Pick Your Battles

Pick Your Battles
The eternal dev dilemma: spend 20 minutes crafting the perfect prompt for ChatGPT explaining your obscure bug... or just Google the error message in 10 seconds. We all dramatically surrender to AI like wounded warriors, only to sheepishly crawl back to Stack Overflow five minutes later. The relationship status between developers and LLMs? "It's complicated."