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Onorio Catenacci
Onorio Catenacci

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If You Laid All The . . .

It's sometimes helpful to people to have an analogy to help understand the magnitude of something. That is, to get an idea of how much money one is discussing sometimes authors will refer to a line of dollar bills laid end to end and how many times it'd circle the earth at the equator. In that spirit we'd like to give some helpful approximations of the number of various kinds of technical people there are in the world to help people get a grasp of the magnitude.

  • If you laid all the software developers in the world end to end, the project would never get finished. Or it'd get finished but some developers would be laying perpendicular to the line, some would be standing (some on their heads) and a few lines of developers would go off in different directions for no apparent reason but leave them alone because when we tried to fix it the line broke.

  • If you laid all the business analysts in the world end to end--no wait, we need to lay them parallel not end to end. Is that a problem? It's a minor change right? We don't need to change the delivery date, right?

  • You couldn't lay all the scrum masters in the world end to end but you could get them to all stand in one place once a day.

  • You can't lay all the .Net developers in the world end to end until Microsoft releases their "AI-enabled EndToEndLayerAPI for Enterprise 1.0".

  • If you laid all the C developers in the world end to end . . . we're still not sure what happened because we had a buffer overflow halfway through and we're still trying to figure out where we used the wrong array index.

  • There are 746 ways to lay all the C++ developers in the world end to end. None of our teams have been able to agree on how to lay them end to end.

  • If you laid all the Rust developers in the world end to end, they'd never start because they couldn't figure out how to transfer ownership of the end of the line.

  • If you laid all the Haskell developers in the world end to end, you'd spend 3 months figuring out how to get them all to lay down but when they do it'd run the first time with no compilation errors.

  • If you laid all the open source developers in the world end to end, they'd never reach an agreement on standards.

  • We tried laying all the COBOL developers in the world end to end but the twelve of them got really angry, yelled something about "having a bank to run" and told us to go bother the PL/1 developers.

  • If you laid all the Javascript developers in the world end to end: '12'. We're not sure what this means and we're afraid to ask.

  • If you laid all the developers who rely on regular expressions in the world end to end ^*$ or maybe ^[:alnum:]*$. We can't figure it out because one way we get too many developers and the other way we don't get enough.

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