One of my relatively new coworkers did this a while ago, the logic was: "We can't deploy until the build is green, and this test is failing, so I'll just skip this test so we can deploy." Great teachable moment
These stories are so well-written! Really captures the original style well. They remind me a bit of the koans from The Codeless Code. The simplicity of the story obscures its "lessons", allowing you to apply the story to your own experiences and draw your own insights.
This is one of the most delightful things I've seen come out of the tech satire world. It's not snarky or mean, it's not painting a target on anyone, it's just really meaningful and well done. I'll definitely send these to my team, I think they're really accessible stories about common problems in tech culture. Please keep writing them!
That night when Toad went to bed he thought the biggest thoughts he could think...He thought about bringing free internet to countries like India, so that he could show ads to billions of people
Being outside the US and unfamiliar with the source material, I read several of them as sort of vague but satisfying vignettes, similar to those in Hagakure, or Zen Koans.
Then I discovered the "read more" links and they took on a totally different character.
I agree: I had the same reaction until I noticed broken phrases and ellipsis (well, and clicked). It's kind of funny because the first few sentences seem good enough when you follow the submitted link...
I'm not sure I've ever seen a story marked "minor". Generaly the "priority" of these things is just based on how annoyed the person filing the story was at the time.
I've seen them! Just don't mandate priorities, or be willing to ruthlessly change them as the implementer. Some starting points:
Anything which merely means the publisher won't pay us because it was a milestone deliverable, but which I could see us technically shipping without, is "wontfix."
Anything which will get me fired for not implementing gets to be "minor."
Anything which I will quit over before I can be fired gets to be "major."
Anything which will lead to mass resignations of the entire engineering team gets to be "blocker", but only if it's actually blocking someone else from doing any work whatsoever.
One of my undergrad volunteers is learning Python. I've had to teach him that just because the code runs, it doesn't mean that it is correct.
These are wonderfully painful to read.