12 Nightmares Every Coder Faces (Junior or Senior, It Doesn't Matter)

31 May 2025 #coding

#1. A micromanaging boss. Why trust your team members when you can ask them every 5 minutes how they’re doing?

#2. A spaghetti-style crappy codebase. Why use good names and focused methods when you can copy-paste code and leave outdated comments all over the code? It’s faster that way, right?

#3. Working on something nobody will use. Why bother having your team create something valuable for users? They’re getting paid, anyway. They don’t need motivation.

#4. QA only caring about colors, alignment, and fonts. Who cares if the app works? QA should just test how it looks, right?

#5. Too many meetings. Daily stand-ups, sprint planning, poker estimation sessions, retrospectives, another meeting to present next sprint tickets, and another one just to answer questions from the previous meeting… They’re Software Meeting Attendees, not Software Developers, after all.

#6. Clueless project managers. OK, you already explained to your PM how serious the issue you had to solve was and that’s why the sprint is behind schedule by one or two days. But they don’t seem to get it. It’s time to fire up ChatGPT and prompt it to explain like your PM is 5.

#7. Constantly being paged. Why even write clean, organized code when you can fix everything while on-call rotation, right?

#8. Not having time to refactor. Again, why bother if we can fix all those issues while on-call rotation?

#9. Code reviews taking too long. A good title and description, and a short PR to make sure it’s easier to review it… But still more than 48 hours to get it approved and merged. Arrggg!

#10. Constantly changing requirements. “What are you working on right now? Oh, there’s a new priority. Sales just promised a client a feature that wasn’t even in our roadmap…,” a random PM told a developer.

#11. Repetitive tasks and grunt work. Why bother using a computer to automate repetitive tasks and best practices if developers are cheap and fast code monkeys? A full regression testing cycle? Let’s make developers click on every button of the app. And let’s create a test case for every single text box of every single page. Manual labor is cheaper than automating it, right? They’re contractors paid by the hour, anyway.

#12. Unrealistic deadlines. “Can we add a Facebook-style feed, I mean, a full Facebook-style feature, in the three days left in this sprint? It’s easy, right? Facebook already did it,” the same PM who asked for another priority just yesterday.

If this feels familiar, I swear it’s just a wild coincidence.