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How Management Weaponises Their Free Time

Dr Stuart Woolley
CodeX
Published in
5 min readJan 4, 2025

It’s a “New Year”, with “New Ideas” — or so you’re led to believe.

“Image generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E.”

I think perhaps my catharsis has gone into overdrive this New Year, particularly since the Christmas break has been an especially long one — what with holidays falling midweek and customers basically just going AWOL and not wanting to commit to anything before the new tax year.

Well, at least that’s what sales and marketing are telling themselves, anyway.

But wait, I hear you collectively thinking, why are you involved with customers when you’re a humble, yet persistently cynical, software engineer? Well, I’m not going to go into that (we’d be here all day, most likely all week) so I’m going to refer you to my ever expanding back catalogue if you’re that interested.

Suffice it to say that I’ve already gone through the horror of reliving many thoughts concerning how the return to the usual corporate modus operandi. The endless night terrors, cold sweats, and disturbed dreams about being imprisoned in a badly written Docker container, managed by an intern whose only experience with Kubernetes is being able to successfully spell it — I’m used to all of that.

Let’s call that “existential coding horror” — attempting to do actual productive work in spite of management, process, and HR — and put it to one side…

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CodeX
CodeX

Published in CodeX

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Dr Stuart Woolley
Dr Stuart Woolley

Written by Dr Stuart Woolley

Worries about the future. Way too involved with software. Likes coffee, maths, and . Would prefer to be in academia. SpaceX, X, and Overwatch fan.

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