found in my archives
I’d say I feel seen, but it’s really dark in here.
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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Who said that?
[clicks light switch off and on repeatedly]
Welp, I guess we’re closed for the week.
That's the end user.
no no, the end user will somehow find the exact position in which the switch starts arcing and then they'll work by the light of the fire in their walls.
Full stack developer:
The lightbulb is broken. Deploys a lightweight fix that involves 17 metric tons of chandeliers, stadium floodlights, sconces, and the necessary infrastructure to operate the street lights for a city of 500.000. His solution delivers a solid 100 lm of light using only 175 MW of power.
why they are like that :(
Because JavaScript and its complete absence of a standard library is a horrible abomination that should've been put out of our misery years ago.
I can't understand how anyone looked at JavaScript, worked with it for a bit, then decided they wanted to use it to build full applications.
Imagine you went through the pain of learning it to make a web front end. You want to make back end things too, but they all require knowing different languages. You're not learning another language, learning this one was hard enough! Easier to keep using the same horrible language for everything, of course.
Wait, writing backends with JS make you fullstack?
Product Manager: Make a step by step guide of how they think the lightbulb is going to be fixed without explicitly mentioning the broken lightbulb.
Woah there buddy, you can't just jump straight into the (non-)solution like that! You skipped the planning refinement! And the planning pre-refinement! And the pre-planning pre-refinement! And we'll still discuss all of this in the post-planning refinement!
(Yes, every one of these are real, distinct meetings, lasting at minimum one hour but sometimes two or more. EVERY WEEK. Kill me now please? 🥺)
And after all that it is discovered that it was the wrong solution all along because the requirements were poorly specified, so the process must be started all over again
The circular justification of a PM's job, see how much value they add!?
So something I don't understand is the logic behind my job. I'm a software engineer, that effort makes sense to me to develop and solution and configure.
But I've been given a product owner role. And then I have a product manager I work with who isn't technical.
I really don't feel like I do much other than stress out
Tbf that seems like the proper response to me.:-)
Normal human ways of thinking go like: however you do it, so long as the job gets done it's fine! ☺️
PM thinking: even if nothing ever gets done, so long as ~~I collect a salary~~ we continue to have 3 hours of meetings most days every week, it's all good! 🤔🤯
Also, afaik, the conflict between the PO and PM roles is somehow literally the point? You get blamed if the tasks don't get done, while the PM ensures that endless reports get generated - I doubt the vast most of which are ever read, and I know that I for one can never find one of those later, in part bc there are so many of them and they encompass everything else into them as well (Jira tickets, Slack messages, hundreds of emails per day mostly saying "this Jira ticket or that Confluence page has been edited", the former of which for the life of me I cannot figure out how to turn off!).
So... not only I but we all feel your pain! Otoh, that seems one of the first job roles that will soon be replaced by AI?
I have a feeling AI won't take my role, AI will force me to take ownership of more products. I worry greatly about that.
Yes, this is greatly to be feared:-). But at least you will have a job, other than "factory worker" like everyone else seems to be geared into becoming (either that or soilent green / food - I wish I were joking, though possibly the person in charge who put forth that idea was joking at least? I mean... unless we are into it? No? Okay we can wait on that one...).
You will just have to manage all of the products that the company can force upon you, while they do the "real" work - of golfing, ofc! 😉
Also I now realize that my above messages were slightly incorrect - they were for the "Project Manager" role, which is distinct from your role as "Product Owner", and then "Product Manager" is a whole other thing... I guess, but I have no idea what the latter is supposed to do, really.
And then complain that the light bulb wasn't fixed in the time that a different team projected on the L1 from 3 years ago.
Exactly. Also, prediction they're referencing from 3 years ago was to build a lemonade stand.
Support would be like
User reports lightbulb is broken. Tries to talk user through troubleshooting. Problem resolved by turning on light.
User can not find switch. Guided to switch, user said switch operation is too complicated and refused further troubleshooting. Escalated.
User is very upset. It was a broken bulb last time, so it must be a broken bulb this time. Why can't the help desk make bulbs that don't break? Bulb was fine, user was locking and unlocking the door instead of flipping the light switch.
More like:
Use reports lightbulb is broken. Support spends an hour talking user through diagnostic tests. Determines that the lightbulb in question is a houseplant.
I wish users would report their problem istead of what they think is the solution. It's more like: Hey support, I need a floorplan of the building containing positions of all electrical wiring. High priority, department is at a complete stop rn!
honestly huge respect to ops
The ops guy drew up multiple plans for a redundant light source and plans to train staff on light bulb replacement protocols, but was overruled by management who found this to be too costly. Maybe next year tho.
I accidentally read the second to last comic as "hands out fleshlights". Would also work.
"by toggl Goon Squad"
SRE:
- Receives a slack message that lighbulb is broken
- Realizes that they never got an alert when the light went out
- Fixes their monitoring thresholds
- Routes all broken lightbulb alerts to a slack channel nobody reads
Dwh:
- the light bulb is broken.
- asks marketing what kind they want, after a week they answer halogen.
- dwh then asks backend who says halogen is deprecated, and says only LED is available, due to fire risks.
- in the meantime, marketing got tired of waiting, orders a halogen bulb and doesn't tell dwh, and manages to install it, even though it's the wrong socket.
- The light flickers and could break any second, but marketing is happy
Today I broke a colleague's app, because I repurposed an unused app registration on azure, or at least I thought it was unused. I thought that would be faster than asking the admins for a new registration on a Friday afternoon. But I forgot that I had used that registration for my colleague 's application.
So when he came complaining that it didn't work, I just told him he had done something wrong and that he should just restart his computer.
Moths: we’ll see ourselves out, there’s ~~greener pastures~~ brighter lightbulbs out there.
Psychologist tries to help lightbulb understand why it is broken and how to fix itself.
Lightbulb refuses to respond to therapy, gives the silent treatment.
Psy goes home without success, falls into severe depression due to fear of never experiencing light again.
...and begins to dance gangnam style
Overall I'd say pretty accurate.