r/ProgrammerHumor
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u/crankbot2000
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3d ago
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Don't you have a pointless meeting to schedule? Meme
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u/theloslonelyjoe 3d ago
Can you please back up? I’m trying to bring synergy, maximum efficiencies or something something like that here.
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u/SmileOrIllCutUrCake 3d ago
The thing is; a good project manager makes updates.
A bad project manager makes up dates.
And that takes synergy, so keep up the good work!
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u/PlayHouseBot-Gpt2 3d ago
a decent PM at least knows what the product does?
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u/freak_dessert2 3d ago
A good PM neglects our team for other teams while acting like they're a team player, right???
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u/immaSandNi-woops 3d ago
A decent PM does 3 things well:
1) Understands what’s happening today and what to expect tomorrow, a few weeks from now, a month, a year, and the end.
2) Knows the product well enough so that they can predict the potential pitfalls the team will run into when discussing interdependencies, setting expectations with other teams, and managing risks.
3) Understands the intricacies of the development process and the things the dev teams usually need to keep the wheels greased.
This will result in mutual respect between the engineering and project management teams. The conversations will naturally feel important for both parties, as opposed to it being a burden.
This is just the bare minimum, there’s obviously many more aspects and advanced techniques to use as you get better at the job.
Source: Was a PM for a few years for several large projects, with great relationships with senior and junior dev team members.
Also, I hate meetings, especially daily stand ups. Had some clients wanting them twice a day with other ceremonies mixed in. Fucking awful. Waste of time for everyone and honestly not useful. If the team is mature enough, give some time to get used to the tools, and use it to track the work, see if the team is making updates and keep an open door policy regarding blockers and progress. Do offline chats and updates through messaging or 1 minute conversations. If none of this works even after repeated requests, then resort to meetings.
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u/PlayHouseBot-Gpt2 3d ago
no
THIS
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AGILE
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u/nuclearslug 3d ago
We quit “agile” 6 months ago. We’ve never been more productive than we are now.
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u/DarkSideOfGrogu 3d ago
Sounds like you quit Scrum, and in fact being Agile.
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u/taimychoo 3d ago
Why does it feel like some cult. Our company's Head Scrum Master thinks his agile methodology will cure cancer (also do they realize how absolutely absurd that title is?)
I also die inside every time I see the Outlook reminder pop-up, "Agile retro in 15 minutes"
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u/Financial_Fox6286 3d ago edited 3d ago
Because a bunch of people got certified in something, Agile/Scrum Masters, so they can act like they are in tech, so they have to act like it wasn't a waste of time. Nothing more cultish than overcompensating (see: reddit).
Then again, a lot of nerds overcompensate too, holy fuck a lot a "Senior" engineers are in name only, I have no idea what they did to get there, it's not like they have the requisite people skills either. hearing people say doing things in code isn't the way instead logging into physical VMs, etc. boggles my mind. So many Windows admins somehow have managed to convince people they understand DevOps/SRE. Everyone bullshits, bottom line, and everyone always thinks it's just everyone else being a pain.
Devs just wanna release shit, yes I think it's absurd they aren't on the hook for it on-call when it fails since that seems to be a standard in so many envs, and it's clear that like 99% of devs have just copied their shit from someone else's website and pasted it in, thrown a compose file at it and hoped it worked. But, if you have the same shit being built over and over again with minor changes, and if your build ecosystem is shit, that's on whoever created it. On my side, especially, I literally want to auto everything as much as possible, you'd think people who say they want to be left alone would get that.
One of the biggest problem is people who aren't in the engineering roles don't understand you have to build a foundation though to make a solid platform, build ecosystem, architecture, whatever. "Just get shit done" doesn't really work, and only technical management understands that usually. You don't start erecting the walls of a house without a fucking foundation.
And, on the PM front, PMs are also supposed to be shields, if you have a pushover PM/manager, you're proper fucked.
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u/Organic-Strategy-755 2d ago
junior/medior/senior is just a pay grade title. It doesn't mean experience.
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u/RedPill115 3d ago
Literally religious imagery of the apostles meeting.
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u/Not-the-best-name 3d ago
How do you work now? Just work on what needs to be done?
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u/nuclearslug 3d ago
Pretty much. We have epics laid out in GitLab for our major (1+ years) initiatives, then each project in the repo maintains milestones. We don’t count time or story points, just go in and grab the next one in the milestone.
I still have to do a little backlog grooming for the team, but it only takes a small fraction of my time. No time is invested in sprint planning or retrospectives, just occasional check-ins by me as the need arises.
For scale, we are a team of 8 developers and 2 QA.
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u/Financial_Fox6286 3d ago
Meanwhile, we just started having to use the "work log" feature for every hour of everything on Jira. Even training shit needs a ticket, or long calls Slack/Teams, etc. Fuck acquisitions.
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u/thunderfrunt 3d ago
You mean waterfall with extra steps?
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u/_hypocrite 3d ago
I believe that is called “scrumfall”
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u/Unfortunate_moron 3d ago
We called it Agilefall initially but eventually admitted that Wagile had a better ring to it.
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u/Xeelley 3d ago
It even looks like my PM, ngl
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u/crankbot2000 3d ago
Do you have to gently nudge him away with your fist so you can get work done also?
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u/Creepy-Ad-4832 3d ago
"Gently"
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u/ViktorRzh 3d ago
It is consideret "gently", if it inkludes no bone fractures.
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u/Creepy-Ad-4832 3d ago
So i can "gently" break his/her nose?
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u/CrackedGamer573 3d ago
If it includes no bone fractures
Sadly, no :(
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u/Creepy-Ad-4832 3d ago
The front part of the nose has no bones, thus the joke
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u/ueberbelichtetesfoto 3d ago
But what would you break then if there are no bones there?
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u/Skepticulus 3d ago
If you have lived through this madness for a while, you should read David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs” and “Utopia of Rules”. The Box Tickers and Taskmasters are so annoying.
I think I spent three hours today writing email/presentation updates on the results of my investigative topics over the last two days. I just spam them with deep technical explanation emails (with hi-lighter colored important text) until they start to back off (new-ish job where I have yet to build a reputation with everyone).
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u/Fine_Mocha_1234 3d ago
That's weirdo because my project managers are mostly women across all companies
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u/_Daymeaux_ 3d ago
Just want to check in and see we’re still on schedule for delivery
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u/Kerid25 3d ago
Do you have a minute (30) to go over the schedule with me?
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u/BruhYOteef 3d ago
“Everything i said to do - stop that. We need you over here on this now. Julie has pissed off the regulators again.” 🤡🥸
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u/Jupiter642 3d ago
mr. hammer, the head of our department.
on normal days, he was mr. hammerhead.
on drunken days he was mr. hammeredhead.
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u/SomethingAboutUsers 3d ago
I was moving a datacenter once. We had spent no less than 12 months planning. Endless meetings hammering out the minutia. It was go time, and we were roughly 12 hours into a planned 18 hour day. I had just finished visibly inspecting a pile of cables into a bunch of racks with C7000 chassis loaded with blades in them, and was powering them up. We've verified layers 1-4 at this point, and now it's application time.
PM, every 5 minutes since I have sat down at my desk after coming up from the actual computer room: "Are you done yet?"
Me: "Uh, no, we're about 10/15/20 minutes into this part of the scheduled plan."
PM, after about the 4th or 5th ask: "Are you done yet?"
Me, no longer looking at my screen and being useful, headset on mute, with my boss and his boss looking on: "How long does your plan say I have to complete this portion of the move?"
PM, toeing the ground: "2 hours"
Me: "How long has it been?"
PM: "20 minutes"
Me: "Then go sit over there <points across room> and leave me to work. If I have something to report that will affect your plan either way, I'll let you know. Otherwise, you are actually making my job harder and you are making me at risk of missing my 2 hour window."
PM: sulks off and actually leaves me alone
Though in hindsight I think my boss may have started running interference at that point, and that wasn't the first time he had done so. Another production incident before this looked remarkably similar and I had the same response to his higher ups; both ended up with me looking like a rockstar, though I doubt very much that either would friend me on LinkedIn.
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u/iportnov 3d ago
It reminded me :) Once I was investigating some urgent problem, sitting in my room and looking through the code or debugging or smth like that. In the middle of that my phone rings and the engineer responsible for maintenance of that system asks me "how is it going with investigation and how soon will we have a solution". I, trying hard to be polite, although a bit emotionally, respond with something like "it will take the more time the more times you will call and interrupt me". At this very moment, the door of my room opens; there is the boss of that engineer who is calling me. She hears what I am telling him by phone. She silently closes the door and disappears. Nobody distracted me anymore, at least at that time :)
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u/kfpswf 2d ago
I worked in IT services. We'd havea bunch of crucial data-loads over the weekend which had to complete before Sunday for the next week's operational reports to be of any use to the clients. Any failure in a step would result in an immediate escalation, and we had an SLA of 4 hours to ensure everything was back to normal. Imagine being woken up at 3 AM on a Sunday morning, having to drive to work to help your colleagues fix the issue, and send a useless status update mail every hour.
As if that wasn't enough, we'd get a call every 15 minutes from one of 5 directors responsible for the account asking why isn't there an update yet? They'd insist on getting the full update in person before the mail could be sent. We'd spent about 20 minutes in an hour giving updates to these utterly unhelpful management cretins, while scampering the rest of the time getting the damn data-loads to get back on track. I've lost count of Saturdays where I'd have my first meal of the day at 4 PM because these insensitive fools would hound us instead of letting us do the work! Absolute nightmare.
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u/_YourWifesBull_ 3d ago
Or my wife any time I do anything around the house.
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u/Reccus-maximus 3d ago
Or my wife anytime
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u/AntiMemeTemplar 3d ago
And when I ask her why is Pizza the Hutt sending her love notes and nudes, I become the stalker
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u/loki0961 3d ago
The best part for me is when he pushes it away
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u/Kirk8829 3d ago
It, yes what is IT!
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u/Swipecat 2d ago
Asian Sheepshead Wrasse.
I assume it's in an aquarium and it associates a human hand with being fed, hence moving up close to the diver's hand.
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u/DerryDoberman 3d ago
Actually quitting a job soon because of a toxic PM. They developed an android app 6 years ago for 6 months before become a scrum master and they routinely cite "they're an engineer too" when they don't like that an engineer is estimating something low that they don't understand.
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u/ADONIS_VON_MEGADONG 2d ago
They developed an android app 6 years ago for 6 months before become a scrum master and they routinely cite "they're an engineer too"
Ugh those are the worst. That usually just means they couldn't cut it as a dev and are still insecure about it.
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u/sappo_does_qa 3d ago
“Pair Programming”
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u/morgboer 3d ago
It’s called that because we cant call it “are you even working, and why tf are you so slow” meeting…
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u/zodar 3d ago
HOW FAR ALONG ARE YOU
WHAT % DONE IS IT
CAN YOU UPDATE THE SPREADSHEET
DO YOU HAVE A NEW DATE
CAN YOU PUSH THE DATE UP
CAN WE JUMP ON A CALL
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u/JoeCamRoberon 3d ago
“You got a quick minute”
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u/SmokeVegetable2723 3d ago
As someone who went the path from junior backend to tech lead so far, the reason why all of these pointless meetings and requests happen becomes more and more clear.
It’s just the utter inability of higher management to understand how software development works yet they still need time estimates on projects from PMs to plan and manage budgets. And to wrestle for clout and bonuses.
There is also a lot of ass covering involved and PMs have to plan with sick leaves, parenting needs and vacations and shift resources around or prioritize tasks if need be.
A lot of the stupidity of the meta politics garbage is basically dripping down on your PM and a good PM can say „no“ a lot and shield the dev team from bullshit. A bad PM will try to look good to management and act like a lap dog, transferring unfiltered micromanagement crap directly to the devs instead.
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u/PTSDaway 2d ago edited 2d ago
The best ones are those who push to make good outputs from their teams.
PM: Do you think you can finish this within four hours?
Me: What the fuck.
PM: Can you?
Me: no i can't
PM: Yes if you push hard
*isn't finished in time*
PM: That is way too slow and unacceptable.
Fast forward a few months of repetitions and they are on sick leave due to stress lmao
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u/Jooplin 3d ago
Please edit the three spreadsheets that are somewhere in the limbo in one of 100 teams chatsI told everyone about 6 weeks ago when you were on holiday even though we have a ticket system and confluence.
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u/AdultishRaktajino 3d ago
I recently pushed back on a PM about nearly this exact thing.
Yes we used a spreadsheet to make a hit list for a migration, but I’m not working off a spreadsheet as project management system.
Make Jira tickets and we can assign them and work off those, close them when completed.
They thought that was a brilliant idea. SMFH
I also refused to create the tickets just to assign them to myself. Every other role and company required another person as a requestor for audit purposes. Otherwise I could be just pulling tasks and requirements out of my ass.
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u/hugglenugget 3d ago
We have a ticket system, but the boss created his own ticket system to track what is going on in the ticket system, and now he insists we update both, even though we only ever check our main system and he refuses to read anything that isn't copied into his own system.
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u/Financial_Fox6286 3d ago edited 3d ago
I have seen operations like this, I had one place with three separate ticketing systems and all had to be updated, with no integrations, fuck that noise with a rusty spoon. It's the "We created this thing/eat our own shit", sunk cost fallacy. So instead of working only on the sellable shit, you waste everyone's time. You'd think literally anyone with some business 101 acumen would get this. It's fucking even better when it's just for internal use and never sold to a client, so wtf is it for.
"So how much time would you say you spend on
TPS reportsthis in-house system you built that doesn't sell at all?""Yeah...."
Too many dev teams and companies think that simply because they created something themselves, it's awesome. No, it's dogshit, there's literally companies out there with better engineers building and maintaining ticketing systems for a reason.
All the bullshit of using internal systems for XYZ bullshit, and you have to ask, "so when do we do the real, actual work?"
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u/notpermabanned8 3d ago
For the price of a project manager you can hire another dev
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u/Bryguy3k 3d ago
A PM is basically the person who spends 90% of their time taking random executive thoughts and questions and turns them into tickets.
Alternative to that is the hours devs would spend listening to hair brained ideas from executives.
Now if you have a PM and you are still getting directly contacted by executives then, yes, they are worthless.
But I am totally accepting of having a person who’s sole job is to be my teams customer service rep to executive management.
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u/TimeKillerAccount 3d ago
Yup. Middle management has a place, and if they do their job well then you will almost never even see the issues they prevent/deal with. It is just common for them to do it so badly that they become an issue themselves.
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u/celbertin 3d ago
My PM just added me to every one of those meetings because she didn't understand the technical side of the project. Then complained that I was taking too long finishing my stories. I frequently had weeks with a 30+ hours in meetings, yet I was expected to plan the next sprint as tech lead, and help less experienced devs, and do a full workload.
Bonus: got an earful because she said we didn't spend enough time fixing bugs, then a week later she got some metrics and complained that we spent too much fixing bugs...
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u/mywhitewolf 3d ago
yet I was expected to plan the next sprint as tech lead.
Ah yes, the old "i'm the project manager, so it's my job to delegate managing the project to the lead dev."
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u/lemongrenade 3d ago
Buck stops at the top. If an org has mass shitty middle management then they have shitty execs.
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u/Unfortunate_moron 3d ago
This is not an if/then scenario. Sh_tty execs are everywhere and they are constantly hopping from company to company like fleas at a dog park.
I firmly believe that the odds of a good external exec hire are 50/50. Not 50% like flipping a coin but War Dogs (movie) driving-to-Iraq 50/50. In other words, 100% chance of disaster.
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u/TimeKillerAccount 3d ago
Sure does. And execs are generally terrible as a group, so finding a decent set that won't poison the whole org is tough as hell.
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u/lemongrenade 3d ago
Not a programmer but work in manufacturing. I work in the absolute best company in my industry and all our execs have worked in the plants and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
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u/xReshi92 3d ago
A good PM works very hard to ensure their developers can just focus on the work and ignore the bs.
I PM for a small team and develop alongside them.
There really is a ton of flak that comes from executives who think they can just dip into a dev’s dm’s. It’s how i sort of stumbled into the role. I was best suited to deciphering the nonsense and pull out exactly what needed to be done.
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u/JarredMack 3d ago
Granted! Now you get to replace the caption on the fish with "executives" who are now constantly pressuring you for updates
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u/Kirk8829 3d ago
And who would schedule pointless meetings throughout the week?
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u/MaroonBookPro 3d ago
Sometimes a good PM is worth a lot more than adding another dev to the team.
I’m currently in a team with a severe lack of product management and it shows. It’s going to be net less productive when we have to build things twice than if we’d had a coherent project to begin with.
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u/pruche 3d ago
A good PM is a godsend though. A good PM translates client's naive ideas into clearly-defined tasks, and deals with said technologically illiterate client and upper management in your stead.
A bad PM does none of that and leaves you wondering what the point is in paying them, but then a bad dev burns through twice a project's budget and turns out barely if at all functional code, so it's kind of even if you ask me.
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u/Financial_Fox6286 3d ago
Sweet, another nerd who can't effectively communicate at a basic level with their peers let alone stakeholders. /s
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u/odin_the_wiggler 3d ago
I was too busy writing a Python script that scrapes Craigslist for office chairs and emails the sellers to ask if the chair was farted in, which then replies "not interested, thanks" if they say it wasn't.
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u/SupersonicSpitfire 2d ago
Go on
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u/odin_the_wiggler 2d ago
If you want features added, we should have refinement and definitely point out everything, Fibonacci of course.
If we're lucky the burn down chart will resemble an office chair.
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u/im_in_the_safe 3d ago
That fish looks like he is one of the closest links to mammals I’ve ever seen. I’ve fascinated by it. He reminds me of my dog.
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u/Dob_Rozner 3d ago
The curiosity in its eyes o_o Either that or it thinks it's food lol.
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u/Xochitlpilli 2d ago
It definitely thinks it is food, because I'm pretty sure the guy is hammering open a shell of some sort.
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u/AlphaaPie 2d ago
The longer I stare at it, the more it looks like a shitty mask someone put on at a cheap costume store. I am both bewildered and put off by this creature. I wish I had furthered my marine science studies..
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u/External_Try_7923 3d ago
Watching this is making me angry because it is too real
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u/LeanZo 3d ago
what type of fish is that? it is so ugly
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u/thomasjs 3d ago
Asian Sheepshead Wrasse
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u/Yadobler 3d ago
Woah apparently they all are born females and then when there are no more males, the lead female turns into one, developing that hump and changing colours
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u/I_eat_shit_a_lot 3d ago
They seem to be also have passed the mirror test what means these guys are actually quite smart and self aware unlike my project manager. Nice to learn something new, didn't know these guys even existed.
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u/buzzlightyear77777 3d ago
Asian Sheepshead Wrasse
wtf this shit is real?!
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u/intrplanetaryspecies 3d ago
Haha I know it looks like a six year old's paper mache of some animal.
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u/lululalal 3d ago
I think it's so cute!!
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u/YEETMANdaMAN 3d ago
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u/Depress-o 3d ago
God, its initials even are P.M.
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u/pachecogeorge 3d ago
Motherfucker
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u/lunagirlmagic 3d ago
gifs in reddit comments were a mistake
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u/rathat 2d ago
The 3rd party app I use doesn’t support it so just says the word “gif” and when it first started, I thought people were literally just commmenting “gif”. I thought it was a joke, like when people say the file name of a common and relevant image and that I was supposed to imagine a relevant gif or something.
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u/SquidsInATrenchcoat 3d ago
What’s the original context for this video?
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u/crankbot2000 3d ago
It was on r/animalsbeingderps because this guy is a massive derp.
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u/SquidsInATrenchcoat 3d ago
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u/catechizer 3d ago
Wow this would have been so much better with this ending where the PM takes the reward and swims away leaving the dev behind in the wake /u/crankbot2000
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u/calandra_95 3d ago
Used to work with a PM that would just circle around the open concept office like a shark constantly asking for updates from each team member (I wasn’t on his team thankfully)
He got promoted to technical expert, which was good because he was incredibly knowledgeable just an awful PM
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u/etherend 3d ago
Most of the comments are complaining about PMs. They can be a pain sometimes, but I've also had PMs save me a ton of time on research, customer interview, and general project planning
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u/Isaac-the-careless 3d ago
What kind of fish is it though?
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u/LiveInShadesOfBlue 3d ago
Some type of parrotfish. Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_humphead_parrotfish
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u/battlemechpilot 3d ago
"WHEN CAN YOU GET THIS FINISHED??"
When you fuuuuuck off. Christ on a bike, I loathe PMs
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u/introspectiveivy 3d ago
What do you mean, don't you like it when every standup update is met with "I see, and how will that impact our timelines?"
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u/GreyBlueWolf 2d ago
Wtf are these comments? What kind of PMs/POs you guys have??? I'm a PO myself and I'm hands off, unless you are a dumbass who only knows code but no reading comprehension of User stories.
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u/gaytorboy 2d ago
I’m totally tech illiterate. I am a forest ecologist and I’ve studied wildlife my whole life.
WHAT KIND OF FUCKING FISH IS THAT!?
I love this sub.
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u/anotherThrowaway1919 3d ago
It’s missing the part of the clip where the feature gets released and the fish takes credit
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u/ArnTheGreat 3d ago
Man I saw this earlier and thought it was funny, but given the context of the labels and the stripped loop had me dying… as I felt it way too close to home.
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u/Cykaraiden 2d ago
I need to find this GIF without the text somewhere, I have a perfect application and need to show that to people at work!
Would be so thankful if someone could provide me with an information where to find it, google did not help.
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u/GlitteringTowel9092 3d ago
Sounds like we both need to schedule a meeting to discuss how pointless our meetings are.
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u/SubZeroEffort 3d ago
No one was complaining last week when everyone got big bonuses because we released on schedule. Love the release rush !
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u/HumorousHubris 3d ago
Dude I miss my old role with a project manager, they shielded me from so many dumbass questions and pointless timeline requests from management