The Sorting Hat of Corporate Onboarding
Description
A four-panel comic strip titled 'DEVS & DRAGONS - #4 THE SORTING HAT'. In the first panel, a manager-like figure wearing a tie and a wizard hat tells a new employee, 'NOW LET'S SEE WHAT PROJECT WE WILL ASSIGN YOU TO...'. The second panel shows the large, white wizard hat being placed on the new employee's head, covering their eyes. The third panel is a close-up of the employee wearing the hat, with a look of intense concentration, thinking, 'NOT THE LEGACY PROJECT... NOT THE LEGACY...'. The hat itself has a stern, determined facial expression. In the final panel, the manager celebrates with a 'PERFECT!', while the hat announces, 'HE WILL WORK ON THE LEGACY PROJECT!'. The employee stands by, looking defeated. This comic humorously parodies the 'Sorting Hat' from Harry Potter, applying it to the corporate ritual of assigning new developers to projects. The joke lies in the universal dread developers feel towards being assigned to a legacy project - an old, often poorly documented, and difficult-to-maintain system. It satirizes the inevitability of this rite of passage in many tech companies, where the least desirable work is often given to the newest team members
Comments
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Our Sorting Hat is just a bash script that greps the new hire's resume for 'passionate and enjoys a challenge,' then immediately assigns them to the undocumented COBOL monolith
The Sorting Hat just measures residual optimism; anyone above 0% gets sorted onto the 2-million-line monolith that still deploys via an NFS-mounted “prod” folder and an Ant script from 2007
Just like the Sorting Hat placing Harry in Gryffindor despite his protests, senior architects have an uncanny ability to assign junior devs to legacy codebases despite their silent prayers for greenfield projects - except instead of 'not Slytherin,' it's 'not the COBOL system from 1987.'
The Sorting Hat never assigns anyone to the greenfield microservices project - that's reserved for the chosen ones who somehow always avoid the COBOL codebase that's been 'temporarily' running the company's core business logic since 1987. Meanwhile, the rest of us get sorted into Slytherin's dungeon of undocumented stored procedures and global variables
In big-co Hogwarts, the sorting hat runs a greedy allocator: minimize perceived onboarding time by sending every new hire to the monolith with the least documentation and the most single points of failure
The Sorting Hat only says “legacy” to people who can read a flame graph and a 2009 migration script; congrats - you’re now the SRE, the architect, and the historian
Sorting Hat's true horror: assigning a senior dev to that unkillable COBOL hydra managers call 'perfect'
1 Comment deleted
That feel when you go for an interview and they tell you they work in python/go/whatever, but they do have a legacy app in php they're trying to retire... And you can know at that moment, this comic is what will happen. Comment deleted
yea, and this is will be your task for testing period of 2 weeks Comment deleted