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Yes, This really happened. And yes, I was at Taco Bell — against my better judgment. When Life throws you a UX lesson. I just wanted a quick dinner. Instead, I got a masterclass in how to build a system so broken it loops back around to being educational. It all started when the self-checkout asked me to enter my own order number. What?? Next to the kiosk was a rack for those little buzzers that vibrate when your food is ready. Perfect I’ll just enter the number…except there were none. Just an empty holder, like a relic from a time when this system maybe tried to work. ...

Incident Summary It started innocently enough. I published a dry little rant about ticket-driven development, fully expecting a quiet life of single-digit pageviews and maybe a pity share from an old colleague. Then a friend dropped the link on Hacker News without telling me. Someone else threw it up on Reddit. And before I could even finish my coffee, bots, link preview crawlers, and over 10,000 developers showed up to see what all the fuss was about. ...

Let’s assume the worst has already happened. Your team is burnt out. The process is bloated. “Agile” is a word people flinch at. The retros are performative, the standups are robotic, and the burndown chart might as well be a mood ring. Good news: you’re not alone. Better news: you don’t have to stay stuck. Step One: Stop Pretending The first fix is brutally simple—stop doing Agile theater. Scrum isn’t working for your team? Stop doing Scrum. The world will not end. The Product Owner will survive. Nobody gets a medal for following the process if the software is garbage and the team hates their job. ...

Agile isn’t your problem. Agile is dead. Long live Agile. Every few years, someone revives the corpse, dresses it up in a new three-letter acronym, and wheels it around the office like it’s going to save your team. Again. This time it’s “SAFe.” Last time it was “Spotify Model.” Before that, it was Scrum with capital-S and a two-day certification course. You sit through the same slides. Someone renames standup to “daily sync.” Jira gets a new plugin. Leadership announces this will bring “clarity and velocity.” ...

Let me guess how your day started. You opened your laptop, fired up the sprint board, and grabbed the next ticket in the “Ready” column. Maybe it was a small feature. Maybe a bug. Either way, you didn’t write it, you didn’t scope it, and you definitely didn’t question it. Because that’s not how it works here. We are Ticket-Driven Developers now. Thinking is out. Throughput is in. Tickets are moving. Morale is not. ...

You renamed a method, moved three files into a new folder, and squashed a 200-line switch statement into six nearly identical strategy classes. You even updated the JIRA ticket. Congratulations — the mess is now modular. But let’s be clear: that wasn’t refactoring. That was furniture rearrangement. The smell is still in the room. When ‘refactoring’ really just means rearranging the mess into a new, equally confusing shape. ...

There’s a special kind of dread that comes from getting a message asking for your personal details — from a random mobile number — claiming to be your hospital. It doesn’t say which hospital. It doesn’t identify itself. It just says: Hi! Please reply with your full name, date of birth, address, and email. Naturally, I assumed it was a scam. But no. This wasn’t a con artist in a foreign call centre. This was an official, government-backed initiative. An actual public health service, running an actual SMS campaign, using random burner-style numbers to collect sensitive personal data, with no sender verification, no pre-warning, and no branding. ...

A few years ago, “Senior Developer” meant something. Not just a pay grade, not just an internal leveling band, but a signal that you’d seen some things. Broken prod on Christmas Eve. Legacy codebases with more comments than code. Real consequences, real complexity, real context. Now? I’m seeing resumes from people three years out of university with “Senior” in their title. Not senior in years, not senior in depth—just the most experienced person on a three-person dev team at a startup that launched last quarter. ...

I’m back on the market. My contract’s wrapping up, and I’ve started scanning the job boards. There it is again — Release Manager. Right next to it? Scrum Master. And I can’t help but ask: How is this still a thing? We’re nearly a quarter into the 21st century. Agile’s old enough to rent a car. DevOps has a full beard. And yet somehow, we’re still posting job ads for roles that feel like relics from the JIRA waterfall days. ...

There’s a special kind of sigh that comes out when someone says, “We’re rolling out OKRs.” It’s not quite despair. Not quite sarcasm. It’s the sigh of someone who’s seen this play before—probably in Q1 of last year, and Q3 of the year before that. The costumes are different, but the script is the same. Let’s get this out of the way: OKRs—Objectives and Key Results—can be useful. They’re not inherently evil. But like many good ideas, they tend to die in the wild. Not because the framework is flawed, but because the way most companies implement them is. ...