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The Classic Light Bulb Problem
Hardware Post #3522 · source on Telegram

The Classic Light Bulb Problem

Description

An illustration depicting a classic programmer joke. Against a dark blue background, two cartoon hands are shown reaching for a compact fluorescent light bulb. The text is split into a question and an answer. The top text reads: 'How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?'. The bottom text provides the punchline: 'None - It's a hardware problem.'. This meme is a timeless piece of developer humor that plays on the stereotype of software engineers deferring any issues outside of their code to other departments. For senior developers, it's a relatable and amusing take on the strict division of responsibilities (and blame) between software and hardware teams, perfectly encapsulating the 'not my department' mindset that can be prevalent in tech organizations

Categories

Hardware Debugging Troubleshooting DevCommunities DevOps SRE

Common Tags

DeveloperHumor Hardware RelatableHumor DeveloperInJokes SharedPain

Comments

22
Anonymous ★ Top Pick Why don't programmers change light bulbs? Because they'd first have to write a 30-page RFC, debate the merits of LED vs. incandescent in a two-hour meeting, and then ultimately decide to create a ticket for the facilities team to handle the physical layer
  1. Anonymous ★ Top Pick

    Why don't programmers change light bulbs? Because they'd first have to write a 30-page RFC, debate the merits of LED vs. incandescent in a two-hour meeting, and then ultimately decide to create a ticket for the facilities team to handle the physical layer

  2. Anonymous

    Sure, it’s a hardware problem - right up until the firmware team asks why your JSON config turned the bulb off in prod

  3. Anonymous

    After 20 years in the industry, I've learned the real answer is: one to open a JIRA ticket, three to debate whether it's a P1 or P2, two to argue it's actually a feature request for smart bulbs, and an entire DevOps team to implement Infrastructure as Code for automated bulb replacement - only to discover the real issue was someone forgot to flip the switch

  4. Anonymous

    The real answer is that it takes one programmer to open a JIRA ticket titled 'Light bulb replacement' with priority P4, assign it to the facilities team, add it to the infrastructure backlog, and then spend three sprint planning meetings discussing whether this should be handled by DevOps or if it requires a cross-functional working group to establish a Light Bulb Replacement Framework (LBRF) with proper observability and rollback capabilities

  5. Anonymous

    Blameless postmortem: the lumen service failed at Layer 1, so we opened a Facilities Jira, marked the bulb as an external dependency, and preserved our error budget

  6. Anonymous

    How many engineers to change a light bulb? Zero - it's outside our bounded context; we ship ToggleLight(), mock it in tests, and let Facilities own the side effects

  7. Anonymous

    None - we'd deploy a Kubernetes pod to simulate photons via shaders before admitting it's not a software abstraction leak

  8. Sultanahamer Mohammed 5y

    Not now. Iot

  9. @kyrylo22 5y

    10. First one changes a bulb, second one tries to understand the joke.

    1. @teleus3r 5y

      11. third one explains the joke to the second n00b

      1. @kyrylo22 5y

        Too complicated and dragged out, Mr. Boring Man.

    2. @thisisluxion 5y

      this was actually pretty good lol

    3. @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 5y

      There are 10 types of people in this world. First: who understand binary numbers. Second: who don't.

      1. Deleted Account 5y

        I almost fell for that

      2. @RiedleroD 5y

        there are 26ab0db90d72e28ad0ba1e22ee510510 types of people in this world: those who understand hashing, and those who don't.

        1. @adhdnigga 5y

          did you really hash 2...

          1. @RiedleroD 5y

            yes md5sum

            1. @UQuark 5y

              MD5 = 💩

              1. @RiedleroD 5y

                only for cryptographic purposes, for everything else it's actually quite nice since it's quite fast

        2. @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 5y

          Holy f did you really hash 2?

  10. @Harel_Brodai 5y

    Soooooo old

  11. @cringle_flex 5y

    NaN

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