Local developer Diego Cala is about to go into the office for a chill end to the week. He usually works from home Friday, his one day a week. But the team decided this day is special. They'll all go to the new pizza restaurant across the street for lunch. It has one of those Coke machines with every flavor. They all hate those machines, but won't admit it. Diego is feeling good about today. It feels right. He's even on track to get in at 8:25 am because he didn't smack the snooze button. But Diego has no idea what's in store.
He already has 3 meeting invites from Manager Kevin, who likes to start the day at 7 am. The first of which starts at 8:30, just early enough for Diego to run in late and answer a question waiting for him. A question he doesn't know the answer to. Beth knows the answer, but she left the company last week. And between you and me, it'll take a whole lot longer than today for Diego to figure it out.
In between the morning meetings a bug will be discovered blocking that afternoon's deployment. Diego will be able to fix it with enough time for QA to test. But it takes a herculean effort, unit tests are skipped, and he delays a much needed bathroom break before meeting number two starts.
At 11:30 am the morning meetings will be over and the much anticipated team lunch will be within sight. Just a half hour away. No need to work hard on anything, right? Too bad Diego. On his way out of the bathroom, Bernard will run something by him. The User Stories for the Job Runner Service re-write next quarter seem incomplete and Bernard needs Diego's input. But it's not a comment or two, oh no. This will become a full on architecture session with whiteboard drawings, re-writes, and taking pictures of the whiteboard drawings. By the time Diego realizes he'll be late to lunch, the team has already left.
Diego will make it to the restaurant after the team has sat down and ordered. By the time he gets his order in, the group conversation will be all about work, not something fun like the latest season of Bridgerton, or complaining about the price of RAM these days. The Coke machine is out of the good stuff. It's down to Lime Coke and every Fanta flavor. Gross. Guess he'll have water mixed with a small taste of everything else the machine has dispensed in the last 3 days. Once Diego's food arrives, he has to eat as fast as possible to make it to meeting number three at 1 pm. Manager Kevin wanted to get the last meeting out of the way so he can head out and start the weekend early.
By 2 pm Diego will be done will all meetings for the day. The only thing left is to coast on an easy sprint item....until the CI/CD pipelines break. Diego was the last one to touch them, making him the expert. Earlier in the day, a vulnerability was announced and patched for a 3rd party pipeline task the entire monolith of microservices is dependent on, and company policy dictates it needs to be patched before any deployment. And of course, the deploy has to happen today (Manager Kevin will call Diego to let him know). Diego gets to spend the afternoon sifting through YAML to find everywhere that pipeline task is used. Not an easy thing to do, because YAML. Plus testing it can't be run locally, making the stressful work take even longer to accomplish. The pipelines will be ready at 3:30 pm and everything is pushed to the QA environment.
Remember those unit tests he skipped in the morning? Shouldn't have skipped them. QA will come back with bugs they found. Bugs Diego added in the morning's "fix". Diego will add the unit tests and fix the code. It should be done in a few minutes, if he hadn't come across another bug making the bug unable to reproduce locally. But fixing that one is a Monday problem.
At 4:45 pm Diego will try to slip out for the weekend before anyone notices. Too bad Finn sees Diego packing up and calmly explains how much they need someone around to approve the deployment, and do a bit of spot testing once the deployment completes. The deployment is fully automated and can complete in a few minutes. It'll start as soon as all the approvals come in. Which can't happen until after QA completes their testing in the Staging environment.
At 6:45 pm Diego finally leaves for the weekend. He ends the day in heavy traffic, wondering if all this is even worth the $350K yearly salary.