More sub-clauses of Murphy's Law, written specifically for programmers:
- Management’s sense of urgency is both cyclical and non-discriminatory. Therefore, infrastructure upgrades will always coincide with development crunches.
- The nastiest, most deal-breaking bugs will always be found during the status meeting.
- If you're a hardware maven, folks will ask you to create websites; if you're a software maven, they will ask you to troubleshoot their internet connection.
- The process of reverting code that breaks stuff is invariably more manual, error-prone and time-consuming than the process of promoting it.
- Griping about a mess that required much tedious, manual clean-up is the surest way of learning about a tool that could have saved you 3/4s of your time.
- Conversely, installing the shiny new automation tool that “everyone” raves about is the surest way to create a mess that requires tedious, manual clean-up.
- You’re only as good as your last release.
- It's always darkest before the dawn...particularly when you're pulling an all-nighter and the power went out right before you were about to save your work.
- The company that values communication and collaboration enough to jet its management all over the world for face time with each other (and cube-farm everyone else) will be the same one that can't afford enough hard drive space to archive more than two months' worth of email.
- The instinct for simplicity of design is a deeply appreciated skill in programmers. But only when project budgets and deadlines are being set.
- The line between “development methodology” and “cult” is finer than you think.
- Expensive HTML authoring tools that Graphics can't live without were invented for the express purpose of honing the HTML table layout and CSS skills of the programmers who "only need to plug in the back-end code."
- The trade press will never coo over a software company started by anyone over the age of 40. Ever.
- Viruses, malware and spam are the sincerest form of flattery.
- Working late to get into The Zone guarantees distraction from the “Out of Office” auto-replies clobbering your inbox and users desperate for after-hours tech. support dialing your extension at random.
- The more indispensable the gadget, the more likely its accessories will (collectively) weigh more than it does.
- The shortest distance between two points was drawn as a bitmap, rather than vector graphic. (Guess what you need to scale?)
- The probability of being pulled in last-minute to help "save" a project is inversely proportional to your knowledge of it or the personalities involved.
- If you studied for--and passed--the certification test on your own time, the company will have no use for the technology. Or (more likely) will recognize its mission-critical importance by tapping someone (who didn't) to keep them busy.
- If you want to make the Coding Gods laugh, show them the specs. and the deadlines.
(Thanks go out to Dennis for contributing a couple items!)
