The Programmer's Guide to Problem Solving: A Hard Reboot
Description
This is a two-panel meme with the title 'Be like a Programmer.' It features a simple, sketch-like Wojak character. In the top panel, the character has a weary, neutral expression. The text next to him reads, 'John is a programmer. John has 3 bugs to resolve, 2 funtionalities to implement, and needs to attend a meeting.' Note the typo 'funtionalities.' In the bottom panel, the same character is shown with his eyes closed in a state of peace or sleep. The corresponding text simply says, 'John decides to sleep.' The meme humorously captures the feeling of being overwhelmed by a typical developer workload. It suggests that when faced with a mountain of tasks, the most rational or relatable choice is to simply disengage and rest. For experienced developers, this isn't just procrastination; it's a nod to the very real issue of burnout and the occasional necessity of stepping away from a problem to maintain sanity or even solve it more effectively after a break
Comments
13Comment deleted
John isn't procrastinating; he's offloading the bug fixes to his subconscious garbage collector. It's more efficient, but the process is non-deterministic
John’s new “scheduler” wraps every bug, feature, and meeting in a CompletableFuture, then immediately .get() with no timeout - guaranteed four-nines of uptime for his REM cycle
After 15 years in the industry, you realize John isn't procrastinating - he's implementing the most efficient garbage collection algorithm: letting his brain defragment overnight so tomorrow's debugging session doesn't require a full system restart
John's decision tree has O(1) complexity: regardless of the input (bugs, features, meetings), the output is always sleep. Some might call it lazy evaluation, but John calls it optimal resource management - you can't fix bugs if your brain's garbage collector hasn't run in 48 hours
Three prod bugs, two “funtionalities,” one meeting - invoke sleep(); the senior fix for calendar-induced priority inversion while the org scheduler rebalances overnight
Faced with three P1s, two features, and one meeting, the senior thread invokes sleep(8h) for cache eviction and fewer context switches - adaptive backoff, not procrastination
John chose the path of least resistance: exponential backoff into dreamland
John decides not to sleep. That's the problem 🙁 Comment deleted
we need a crowdstrike meme Comment deleted
But why do you think this one isn’t about crowdstrike? 😲 Comment deleted
The second picture should be: John doesn't need to choose but sleep Comment deleted
Though meme or meme + short summary of recent events from someone who researched the driver which lead to collapse of the infra all around the world Comment deleted
You asked for it, you got it 😄 Comment deleted