Shipping at a Large Company Where Plans Are Measured in Centuries

Level 1: Snail’s Pace Plans

Imagine you and your friends want to build a sandcastle, but before you even start, you have to get 10 grown-ups to each approve your plan. One person checks your bucket, another person says you need a permit for sand, and so on. By the time everyone says “okay,” the day is over and the beach has closed! That’s what it’s like for developers trying to finish a project at a very big company – everything moves super slowly. The meme jokes that their plans take “centuries,” which is like saying it takes forever. It’s funny because nobody really plans things for hundreds of years, right? But it feels that way when there are so many delays. In simple terms, the joke means working on a project at a big company can be as slow as a snail racing through peanut butter. It makes us laugh because we all know how frustrating it is to wait forever to see something finished, especially when it’s just a small change.

Level 2: Glacial Release Cycle

In a big company environment, developers often experience extremely slow release cycles. Let’s break down the terms: a “sprint” is a short, focused period (usually 1-2 weeks) in Agile development where a team works on set tasks. Velocity is how much work (measured in story points or tasks) a team completes per sprint. Normally, higher velocity means you’re delivering features quickly. But the joke here is that at a huge company (BigCo), the sprint velocity is so low that it’s measured in “geological time units” like centuries. Geological time units are what geologists use to talk about Earth’s history – centuries, millennia, epochs – insanely long periods. So saying “sprint velocity is measured in centuries” is a tongue-in-cheek way to complain that progress is incredibly slow.

Why would progress be slow at an enterprise? Large organizations have lots of process overhead – extra steps and approvals in the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) that smaller teams might not have. For example, after a developer finishes coding a feature, it might need: code review by multiple teams, passing a dedicated QA testing phase, approval from a Change Advisory Board (a committee that meets maybe weekly or monthly to approve software releases), security compliance checks, and coordination with other departments. Each of these steps can introduce delays. It’s like having to climb a ladder of enterprise bureaucracy for even a tiny change. Instead of deploying code the same day it’s ready, you might wait weeks or months for all the “green lights.” This is often done to manage risk in big companies – they don’t want to break anything critical – but it ironically slows everything to a crawl.

So, the meme shows a character saying “Our plans are measured in centuries.” The header text frames it as “trying to ship anything at a large company.” Essentially, it’s comparing a software release at BigCo to something so slow and grandiose that it sounds like a centuries-long plan. If you’re a new developer on an enterprise team, you might be surprised that even after you finish your part, the feature might not go live for a long time due to all these extra gates. That can be frustrating (DeveloperFrustration) because you feel release pressure to deliver, but you’re stuck waiting. It becomes a common corporate humor among developers: joking that internal projects take so long that you measure time in Ice Ages or that your simple app will be released when humans colonize Mars. This meme is a playful jab at that reality – it’s funny because it exaggerates a truth many have felt.

Level 3: Centuries Per Sprint

At a large enterprise, shipping code can feel like an archaeological expedition. The meme bluntly jokes that at BigCo, “plans are measured in centuries.” This hits home for seasoned developers who’ve slogged through enterprise bureaucracy. It’s a darkly funny exaggeration of how releasing software in a huge company moves at a glacial release cycle pace. In theory, Agile sprint velocity measures how much work (in story points) a team delivers in a 2-week sprint. But in practice at BigCo, those story points might as well convert to geological time units – where delivering a minor feature feels as slow as forming sedimentary rock layers.

Why is it so slow? Picture layers of multi-layer approval chains: every code change must survive risk reviews, architecture committees, security sign-offs, and quarterly budget meetings. By the time you get the coveted “ship it” sign-off ceremony, your code is practically a fossil. The humor is painfully relatable corporate satire: CorporateCulture at BigCo emphasizes process and safety so heavily that ReleaseCycles stretch far beyond any sane deadline. It’s CorporateHumor with a sting of truth – an enterprise life reality where deploying “Hello World” requires three committees and a PowerPoint deck. Senior engineers reading the subtitle “[Our plans are measured in centuries]” nod knowingly, recalling projects where deadline pressure was high, but progress was glacial due to ProcessOverhead. The meme’s image of a hooded figure intoning plans in centuries perfectly captures that absurd feeling when management talks Agile but the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) behaves like a medieval cathedral construction project.

This juxtaposition highlights a real industry pattern: big companies often adopt Agile ceremonies (daily stand-ups, sprints, backlogs) in name, but the enterprise release process is a slow-moving beast. It’s the classic “Water-Scrum-Fall” scenario – teams do scrum internally, but releases still follow waterfall-like big-batch deployments. Everyone has a DeveloperFrustration story of a “quick” change request vanishing into a black hole of approvals and not emerging until the next fiscal year. The cynical veteran viewpoint here is that no matter how many story points you burn down in a sprint, the code won’t hit production until all 47 vice-presidents sign off. In other words, the company’s ReleasePressure doesn’t match its sluggish processes. The meme exaggerates with “centuries,” but sometimes it doesn’t feel far off – like when a simple bugfix misses the monthly deployment train and you joke that it’ll go out with the next Ice Age. The humor lands because it’s a shared truth in EnterpriseLife: at BigCo, planning sessions can sound like century sprint planning, and release cycles are so long that “Definition of Done” might as well require carbon dating.