Software engineering gothic
Modeled after the Texas gothic, graduate school gothic and similar memes.
* * *
The new release is deployed. You reload the application in your browser, and your screen fills up with lorem ipsum data. This is what all your customers are seeing now. Your conference bridge lights up with a flurry of panicked messages. "The devs forgot to replace the mock API calls with the real ones," says a manager.
An emergency fix is quickly rolled out. You refresh your browser. You still see Lorem ipsum, and so does everyone else. Where is it being cached? Everybody clears their browser cache; the mock data is still there. Your teammates dig deeply into their AWS management consoles, going through every setting that controls the caching. You know it's futile; the mock data has killed the real data and is doomed to be there forever.
* * *
The disaster recovery test is on Saturday night, but the manager's email says it's on Friday. No one reacts, no one asks questions. You are afraid to ask; you don't want to find out what would happen if you broke the silence.
Just to be safe, you join the conference line on Friday night: you can't sleep anyway. The conference line is silent. There is not even static. Then you hear a beep, as if someone has joined the line, but no one speaks. Another beep, then another. After listening to those beeps for ten minutes, you are afraid you are starting to discern a pattern. You hang up before you can hear the next one. You can't let them complete the pattern.
* * *
A patient has two insurances, but your software won't let them access the second one. "This feature was implemented a year ago," the team lead complains, "what happened?" You find the old JIRA ticket for this feature; it was marked as having passed the tests and signed off by QA and product owner. You dig through the code, and here it is, deep in the bowels of a SQL query. The query is hardcoded to check just the first insurance provider. The QA and PO that signed off on the feature are long gone. The HR database has no records of their existence.