Total Engineering Reset

He’s sharing his screen with me the day before we sign our contract.

He’s pointing at an easy dev task.

Look at this one. Sixteen hours, my client says. Just a simple piece of dev. Sixteen hours. It ended up taking twenty-one.

Then comes the whisper, the one you hear in the deep, dark hours of the morning when you’re staring at the ceiling and thinking about every mistake you’ve ever made. My client had it, too. A nagging feeling.

It should take forty-five minutes.

And the cold, greasy dread that slides down your spine is the certainty that he was right. He was right. But he can’t prove it. No, sir. Can’t prove a thing.

You look at the payroll. You look at the output, the number of tasks they’re supposedly working on, and it’s like staring into a deep well.

You know there’s water down there, but you can’t see it, and you’re starting to think maybe it’s poisoned. 

The math doesn’t lie, clients are dropping like flies. And your gut… your gut is screaming bloody murder.

So you ask. You join the stand-up, a digital seance on your screen. It’s a graveyard of black boxes, each one a hiding place. Every camera is off.

You’re speaking to ghosts. Their voices float out of the void, disembodied and complacent. They could be anywhere, doing anything.

You ask for a straight answer, just once, and wait for the darkness to speak back.

What you get is fog. A thick, rolling bank of it, made of words like Source Code and Bugs and Refactor. It’s a language designed to keep you out, a high fence of jargon built to make you feel stupid.

Obfuscation.

It’s a tactic. A weapon. And it’s working.

Because the good ones, the ones who still have the light in their eyes, the ones who remember the simple joy of building something that delights the client? They’re frustrated. You see them in the slack channels, their virtual shoulders slumped. You’ll see their profiles getting updated on those job-hunting websites. They’re quietly, desperately, looking for a way out. They can smell the rot.

And the worst ones? The comfortable ones? The ones who speak the fog-language as their native tongue? They’re thriving. They’re building little fiefdoms of complexity where only they hold the keys.

This is the spiral. The slow, grinding descent into darkness. It never happens with a thunderclap. It happens in the small white lie increments. It happens in every jargon-filled answer to a simple question. You’re in the passenger seat of a car heading for a cliff, and the people in the driver’s seat are telling you, with a perfectly straight face, that this is the scenic route.

And the real horror, the thing that will keep you awake tonight and every night after, is that you’re not crazy. You’re right.