The Usual Suspects of Project Issues
Description
A two-panel meme using the 'It's always you three' format from Harry Potter. In the top panel, Professor McGonagall looks sternly ahead, with the subtitle reading, 'Why is it, when something happens, it is always you three?'. In the bottom panel, the faces of the three protagonists - Hermione, Ron, and Harry - are covered by logos. Hermione is replaced by a yellow box with 'JS' for JavaScript, Ron is replaced by the green leaf logo for 'mongoDB', and Harry is replaced by the circular arrow logo for 'AGILE'. This meme humorously personifies three of the most common scapegoats in modern software development. It reflects a sentiment often held by experienced engineers that when a project runs into trouble, the root causes can frequently be traced back to the inherent complexities and ecosystem churn of JavaScript, the potential data integrity pitfalls of a schema-less database like MongoDB when used improperly, and the bureaucratic overhead of poorly implemented Agile methodologies
Comments
8Comment deleted
A project manager, a JavaScript developer, and a MongoDB instance walk into a bar. The bartender asks what they want. The PM says 'to deliver value,' the JS dev says 'a new framework,' and the Mongo instance says 'any data, I'm not picky.' The whole bar spontaneously combusts
Prod outage timeline: 09:01 - JavaScript decides “undefined” is a perfectly cromulent number, 09:03 - MongoDB cheerfully persists it sans schema, 09:05 - Agile schedules a four-hour retro to story-point the blame
After 20 years in tech, you realize the real CAP theorem is: Consistency (JavaScript type coercion), Availability (MongoDB during elections), and Partition tolerance (Agile teams after the third sprint planning change) - and somehow we've chosen none of them
Every incident postmortem: 'The root cause was a race condition in our async JavaScript calling a MongoDB aggregation pipeline that wasn't in the sprint backlog.' At this point, we should just have a template that says 'See: The Usual Suspects' and attach this image
Postmortem bingo: JS's dynamic typing, Mongo's dynamic schema, Agile's dynamic requirements - the only static thing was the pager
Every RCA ends with the same stack trace: JavaScript type coercion, a MongoDB document with a surprise shape, and Agile redefining "done" mid-sprint
Dynamic types, schemaless docs, ever-shifting priorities: the unholy trinity ensuring no postmortem ever lacks suspects
Because ppl who are too stupid for SQL hope that MongoDB will magicaly solve their problems. Same for ppl who cant plan their work and who dont know OOP. Comment deleted