Project management Memes

The four horsemen of software estimation in their natural habitat! The noob, still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, thinks everything can be done in a day. Bless their optimistic little heart. The junior dev has learned to pad estimates—3 days should cover those unexpected Stack Overflow deep dives and the inevitable "why isn't this working?!" moments. The senior dev doesn't even bother with numbers anymore. Just grunts "uhh... size: story" because they've been burned too many times by the cosmic law that states: however long you think it'll take, multiply by π and add a random number of meetings. And finally, the principal engineer, who's seen enough estimation disasters to last twelve careers, is genuinely shocked people are still playing this dark ritual of pretending we can predict the future. "You guys give estimates??" Translation: "I stopped playing that game years ago when I realized software estimation is just astrology for programmers."

Oh sweet mother of all that is holy in tech! 😩 The CEO beaver is having another "visionary moment" while the developer beaver is just BEGGING for stability! The absolute TRAUMA of hearing "I have big plans" for the 47th time this quarter! Meanwhile, the developer's soul is actively leaving their body as they contemplate how they'll rewrite the ENTIRE codebase AGAIN because someone read a Medium article about microservices over breakfast! The eternal startup cycle of build, pivot, cry, repeat!

Ah, the corporate time-tracking paradox. You've spent so much time meticulously logging your hours in Jira that you now need to track the time you spent tracking time. Next logical step? Track the time spent tracking the time spent tracking time. Congratulations, you've just discovered recursion without writing a single line of code. Management will probably ask you to create a Jira ticket to improve time-tracking efficiency.

Ah, the sweet sound of a developer who's been through one too many sprint retrospectives where nothing actually improves. What started as a manifesto written by reasonable people has morphed into corporate theater where we pretend estimating tasks with Fibonacci numbers and t-shirt sizes somehow makes software appear faster. Meanwhile, scope keeps expanding, burndown charts look like seismograph readings during an earthquake, and somehow we end with more points than we started with. That pie chart is the truest thing I've seen all day. 90% planning meetings where we argue if something is an 8 or a 13, and 10% actual coding squeezed in between "ceremonies." And don't get me started on the scrum masters who think "velocity" is something you can increase by having more meetings about increasing velocity. The real agile was the friends we made along the way... while hiding in conference rooms trying to get actual work done.

The eternal battle of productivity vs. procrastination, and somehow procrastination is always the underdog that pulls off the upset victory. On the left: Steam, YouTube, Wikipedia, Netflix, Spotify, and Reddit – basically the six horsemen of the productivity apocalypse. On the right: a single Jira ticket with vague requirements that somehow needs to be completed by EOD. That Jira ticket could say "fix the thing" with zero context and still have three stakeholders asking for status updates every 15 minutes. Meanwhile, you've somehow spent two hours reading Wikipedia articles about medieval farming techniques. Just another Tuesday.