The Cyclical Journey of a Software Engineer
Description
This is a five-panel 'Expanding Brain' meme that satirizes the career progression of a software developer's mindset. Each panel pairs a statement with an increasingly transcendent or 'enlightened' image. Panel 1 starts with 'just make it work' and a simple X-ray of a brain, representing a junior developer's focus on functionality. Panel 2, 'using FP / OOP makes me a better programmer,' shows a more complex brain, signifying the stage of learning and applying paradigms. Panel 3, 'arbitrarily introduced paradigms encourage cleverness over quality,' depicts a more cosmic brain, reflecting the mid-level realization that dogmatic adherence can be harmful. Panel 4 reaches peak irony with 'my life is dedicated to object orientation' next to a god-like figure, mocking the zealotry that can consume a developer. The final panel brings the journey full circle with 'just make it work' paired with the most cosmically powerful being, representing the senior developer's return to pragmatism, where the ultimate goal is a working, simple solution, armed with the wisdom of experience to know why that's the hardest and most valuable state to achieve. A watermark for 't.me/dev_meme' is in the bottom left corner
Comments
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A junior developer wants to 'just make it work' because they don't know any better. A principal engineer wants to 'just make it work' because they've seen all the ways 'making it better' actually makes it worse
After the two-hour debate on FP vs. OOP vs. event-sourced hexagonal microservices, Jenkins quietly shipped the same 2,000-line Bash script that’s been “just making it work” since 2008
After 20 years, you realize the junior who shipped a working monolith while you were debating whether your event sourcing should use CQRS with hexagonal architecture just got promoted to VP of Engineering
After 20 years, you realize the junior dev who said 'just make it work' and the architect who spent three months designing a pure functional monad transformer stack were both wrong - and both right. The real enlightenment is knowing when to use each approach, but the cosmic truth is that most production code is held together by duct tape and prayer regardless of paradigm. The expanding brain meme perfectly captures this: we start pragmatic, get seduced by paradigm purity, recognize it as cleverness theater, become zealots anyway, and eventually transcend back to pragmatism - but now with the battle scars to know *why* we're being pragmatic
After 20 years mastering FP monads and OOP hierarchies, the real paradigm shift: 'just make it work' outperforms any Gang of Four pattern in prod
After a decade of FP vs OOP wars, the final paradigm is: ship behind a flag, watch the graphs, keep rollback warm
After enough Sev-1s, FP vs OOP becomes bikeshedding; SLOs don’t grade purity - only whether PagerDuty stops at 3 a.m