After countless incidents, software bugs now make you feel absolutely nothing
Description
The image is a scanned children’s worksheet titled “How I Feel.” Printed instructions read: “Complete the sentences to show how you feel about bugs. Bugs make me feel _____. When I see a bug, I say _____. Complete the picture to show an expression you might make when you see a bug.” In a child-like hand, the blanks are filled with the word “nothing” twice (“Bugs make me feel nothing,” “When I see a bug, I say nothing”). Below the text, a crayon drawing shows a round face with light-orange hair, blue eyes, and a perfectly straight mouth conveying zero emotion. The neutral expression and handwritten answers humorously mirror a senior developer’s desensitized reaction after wading through endless software bugs and production incidents, capturing the cynical calm that accompanies long-term exposure to debugging chaos
Comments
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PagerDuty pings at 3 AM; I deploy the hotfix, verify exit-code 0, and remember I scheduled emotions behind a feature flag we never rolled out
After 20 years in this industry, bugs don't make me feel angry or frustrated anymore - they make me feel HAT, which is somehow more accurate than any emotion I could name
Year one you file a detailed repro; year fifteen you just update the worksheet: feel fine, say nothing, close as won't-fix
This worksheet perfectly captures the five stages of bug grief that senior engineers experience: denial ('it works on my machine'), anger (at 3am), bargaining ('maybe it's a feature?'), depression (this drawing), and acceptance ('bugs make me feel HAPPY'). The real genius is the 'I say nothing' response - because after 15 years, you've learned that speaking up about bugs in sprint planning just gets you assigned to fix them. The subtle smile isn't happiness; it's the muscle memory from years of nodding during retrospectives while internally calculating your severance package
After enough Sev‑1s, your nervous system adds a circuit breaker and routes emotions to /dev/null - bugs now produce ‘the nothing.’
After 20 years, bugs only trigger two emotions: null if the SLO’s green, PagerDuty if it isn’t
After 20 YoE, bugs don't trigger rage - they trigger muscle memory for bisecting git history in silence