Work culture Memes

When your tech lead says "this should only take an hour" but you're still getting paid for the full seven. Suddenly, that impossible legacy codebase doesn't seem so bad when you're collecting a senior dev salary to stare at your IDE for 6 hours and 50 minutes after making one tiny commit. The sweet satisfaction of being overpaid for underdelivering - the true developer dream.

The eternal developer dilemma: finish a project in 4 hours that management estimated would take 6 months. Do you reveal your wizardry and risk getting more work dumped on you? Or do you quietly sip coffee for the next 5 months while occasionally muttering "it's more complex than it looks"? This is why estimation meetings exist—so developers can pad timelines by 800% while managers nod knowingly. The remaining 19% of the project is just documentation no one will read anyway. Pro tip: Always save some trivial feature for the last week so you can heroically "finish early" without revealing you've been playing Minecraft for five months.

The eternal developer's dilemma: finish too fast and you've just proven management's timeline was complete fiction, or sit on it and enjoy six months of "working hard" while secretly playing Elden Ring at your desk. Veterans know the correct answer: release it at 95% completion in exactly half the estimated time, then spend the remaining months "fixing critical bugs" that mysteriously appear right before each status meeting. The real skill isn't coding—it's managing expectations so you don't get rewarded with twice the work for being efficient.

A Venn diagram that perfectly encapsulates the software development experience! Vibe Coders get "way too much rope" to hang themselves with feature creep and scope expansion. Rodeo Cowboys get "just enough rope" to do their jobs efficiently. Meanwhile, actual Prisoners get none. The beautiful intersection? We're all "unlikely to deliver production-grade software" while being "ordered around by disembodied voices" (hello, Product Managers on Slack!) and having a "high risk tolerance" that would make financial advisors weep. The real kicker is that we're essentially just prisoners who occasionally get exercise in the fenced yard of our cubicles. Freedom is an illusion - just like our estimated delivery dates!

The well-dressed manager stands confidently at the front of the boat, sunglasses on, looking important... while the engineering team frantically rows in the back, doing all the actual work. Ten years in the industry and nothing changes—managers taking credit for demos they didn't build, presentations they didn't make, and features they couldn't code. Meanwhile, we're drowning in technical debt and midnight deployments. But hey, at least someone's there to tell us we're "not meeting expectations" during performance reviews!