Non-technical executive awkwardly greets developers: “How do you do, programmers?”
Description
Meme still from a sitcom: a middle-aged man wearing a backwards red baseball cap, red hoodie, and grey T-shirt reading “MUSIC BAND” holds a skateboard over his shoulder. Center-screen in bold white text is the overlaid label “Executive.” At the bottom, TV-style subtitles in all caps read, “HOW DO YOU DO, FELLOW PROGRAMMERS?” The visual joke is that an obviously older corporate leader is pretending to be part of a youthful developer crowd, echoing the common disconnect between management and engineering culture. Technically, the meme satirizes attempts by non-technical stakeholders to adopt programmer lingo or developer culture without understanding it, highlighting communication gaps and misaligned expectations inside large organizations
Comments
7Comment deleted
“Sup programmers, let’s low-code a blockchain microservice so our ROI stays eventually consistent” - distributed consensus is still easier than executive consensus
The same person who built a 50MB Excel file with 47 interdependent VLOOKUPs, circular references, and VBA macros that only work on their machine is now asking why your microservice architecture seems 'unnecessarily complex' compared to their pivot table solution
When the business analyst who automated their quarterly reports with VLOOKUP and pivot tables shows up to the architecture review meeting with strong opinions about microservices decomposition strategies. Sure, you've mastered circular reference errors and array formulas, but have you ever debugged a distributed transaction across six services at 3 AM while your on-call pager is melting? Excel might be Turing-complete in theory, but 'Ctrl+Z is my version control' doesn't quite cut it when you're managing a monorepo with 47 active feature branches
When leadership opens with “How do you do, fellow programmers?”, ask about hotfix branching - if the answer is “we use Jira,” the Agile transformation is just cosplay with budget authority
Excel users: 'My pivot table handles Big Data better than your Spark cluster - until it hits the 1M row limit.'
You know alignment’s off when the “Excel power user” proposes a quick macro as the integration layer - aka a VLOOKUP-based service mesh on a shared drive
-what do you believe in? -In excel supremacy. Comment deleted