The Countdown To Chaos
Have you noticed this strange software engineering correlation?
I think I can safely say that as a long term progressive in the Grand Game of Software Engineering, that I’m not alone in the fact that come the end of the working day¹ there’s always that one remaining problem that just can’t be fixed before leaning backwards, pushing away the keyboard, and putting my head in my hands for a good cry.
We all like to end the day on a high, sometimes quite literally (though since the dot com bust this rarely happens except in the more progressive startups with cash left to incinerate and who have tended to pivot from blockchain to “AI” in search of quick cash), and so it grates as much as hearing a project manager trying to give fashion advice to have that one remaining line of code that won’t compile, that encryption certificate that just won’t load, or that Kubernetes pod that just won’t come up² and stay up.
And, the thing is, if we don’t end the day on a high we do tend to get a bit sad and it goes on to ruin our evenings — a time when we try not to think about work at all and want to spend time programming our own things, play online FPS games to “eliminate” other players, or just write endless cynical Medium articles about the software engineering industry as a cathartic exercise³.
