There is a terrible fight going on.

I.

It is the terrible fight between a wolf that wants to do something halfway productive, and a lazy wolf that wants to chill out because his organization seems to only care about making dashboards no one reads, but they still provide that wolf as much meat as he wants.

Which one will win? The one that says "great idea, boss" the most frequently.

II.

There is a third fucking wolf now, and it is trying to distract both the other wolves by insisting that meaningful change is possible, but only if all change is added to a Jira backlog and carefully scoped out. The first wolf is pointing out that the backlog is growing in size, which means all cards with a priority lower than 'urgent' will necessarily never get worked on because what we have here is a good old-fashioned wolf bottleneck, and the third wolf is agreeing but insisting on doing the same thing they've always done.

The second wolf has his camera off, so I can only hope he's listening instead of watching YouTube.

III.

Jesus Christ, where are all these wolves coming from? A fourth beast has entered the fray, frothing at the mouth, insisting that wolves #1 and #3 should consult it before making changes to the codebase. The codebase seems to consist entirely of a mixture of scarcely comprehensible Python and ChatGPT tests that don't quite work. All of the obscure lines technically do something, but they solve undocumented problems that the fourth wolf introduced by being a fucking wolf, and wolves can't code for shit. The fourth wolf has unlimited job security because of this.

The second wolf is enjoying Star Trek.

IV.

Fuck me, with God as my witness, as soon as Wolf #1 suggested we get some working tests into critical portions of the codebase, a fifth wolf joined the call to say that we can't start writing tests without a roadmap, because we can't do anything without a roadmap even though the roadmaps have never progressed even roughly on time in the entire history of this department.

The first wolf is infuriated, the third wolf doesn't understand what a test is, the fourth wolf couldn't write one to save its canine life, and I don't even know what the fifth wolf is talking about now.

The second wolf said 'brb' thirty minutes ago, and has not bothered to rejoin the call.

V.

The most senior wolf has joined, and has noted that while all of these issues are pressing, we simply have too much to deliver because of various wolf packs over-committing on projects that have this pack as a critical dependency. We will get to all these improvements as soon as we've cleared those at the end of this quarter, which is what this wolf has said every quarter.

I don't even know where the second wolf has gone. He was muted during standup this morning and just didn't say anything about his cards.

V.

I am filled by an entire department of wolves, and they have collectively decided that organizational change is possible, but it will first require a careful shift of culture and demonstration of best practice. This will take several years, realistically, and while none of these wolves has ever seen it happen successfully, they all agree that this absolves them of any performance issues.

The second wolf has been offered an incredibly lucrative job at an external organization, roughly doubling his salary, because he was having coffee and playing board games with smarter/richer wolves, and learning how to actually get shit done. This is despite only deploying about 50 lines of code this entire year, mostly because this one year old platform somehow already has so much technical debt that anything faster is impossible.

VI.

I am the second wolf, what the goddamn hell is going on with this industry?