Project management Memes

The three stages of developer enthusiasm. First panel: naive optimism. Second panel: the moment you realize they want you to build a spaceship but won't tell you if it needs to fly or just look pretty. Third panel: pure, unfiltered joy because no requirements means no one can tell you you're doing it wrong. You're not building what they want—you're building what they deserve for not writing a single user story.

You know your career has peaked when a magical genie offers you wishes and your first instinct is to check your ticket backlog. The programmer logs into Jira and discovers zero issues—a miracle so statistically improbable it makes winning the lottery look like a Tuesday. But here's the kicker: even with a genie granting impossible wishes, the programmer's second wish isn't infinite knowledge, world peace, or even unlimited coffee. Nope. He wants to become a duck farmer. Because at some point, you realize that dealing with actual ducks is probably less chaotic than dealing with sprint planning, merge conflicts, and stakeholders who want "just one small change" on Friday afternoon. The genie's seen some stuff, but even he knows: every developer secretly dreams of escaping to a simpler life where the only bugs are the ones eating your crops.

The eternal struggle of explaining Brooks' Law to management who think software development is like cooking chickens. Sure, you can crank up the heat to 900°F and cook it in 1 hour, but the result is a charred, inedible disaster. Meanwhile, the proper approach at 300°F takes 3 hours but yields something actually usable. Same logic applies to dev teams: throwing 2 more developers at a late project doesn't make it 3x faster—it makes it slower. Why? Communication overhead scales quadratically. With 3 devs you have 3 communication channels, with 5 devs you have 10. Plus there's onboarding time, context switching, merge conflicts, and the inevitable "wait, who changed this file?" Slack messages. The PM sees "3 devs = 3x speed" but reality delivers a burnt chicken that nobody wants to merge into production.

Oh, you sweet summer child asking how sprints make them agile. Let me tell you about every company that puts "Agile" in their job posting: they think slapping two-week sprints on their waterfall process magically transforms them into a lean, iterative machine. Meanwhile, they're planning features 10 sprints out like it's 2005 and Microsoft Project is still cool. Real agile is about responding to change, iterating quickly, and actually talking to users. Fake agile is when management learns the word "sprint" at a conference and thinks they've unlocked the secret to Silicon Valley success. Spoiler: having standups and calling your waterfall phases "sprints" doesn't make you agile, it just makes you waterfall with extra meetings. The "DUH" really captures that condescending energy from teams who genuinely believe they've cracked the code because they use Jira.

The ancient art of story point negotiation: where developers give honest estimates and managers treat them like opening bids at an auction. Developer says 200 hours? "Too much." Manager counters with 20. Developer meets in the middle at 150. Manager scoffs and says "You just said 20!" So naturally, the developer lands on 83—because nothing screams "I've done rigorous analysis" like a prime number that's suspiciously close to the Fibonacci sequence. The real genius here is that 83 sounds oddly specific and scientific, like you've actually calculated something. It's the perfect middle finger wrapped in compliance—too weird to argue with, too confident to question. Manager thinks they won the negotiation, developer gets to say "I told you so" when the ticket takes 200 hours anyway, and everyone's happy until the retrospective. Fun fact: Story points were supposed to abstract away time estimates to focus on complexity, but here we are, still converting them back to hours and haggling like it's a used car dealership.