That’s what everybody says now. It’s practically the department slogan. People mutter it in the hallways, joke about it during Zoom calls, even write it on the whiteboard in the conference room only to see some clown sneak in later and write "safe "for the cleaning crew to leave the message pristinely untouched
It wasn’t always like this. We used to have these absolute legends. Folks who could spell "IT” without meeting Grammarly. Engineers who could properly size and troubleshoot storage, elastic pods, and network utilization. Geeks who could run procmon and tcpdump in their sleep.
They’re all gone. Not because they retired to Texas or Florida due to an RTO policy no one is enforcing. No, they got swept out during the Great Purge of ’25. Management said it was “cost optimization,” which in corporate-speak means “we got rid of the people who actually knew what they were doing and replaced them with people who own a lot of golf shirts.” The new crew showed up with iPads, catchphrases, and not a single useful skill between them.
Things went downhill fast. Servers got unplugged because someone needed to charge their phone. Deployments failed because the release manager thought Git was shorthand for “Git’er done.” Agile meant fail faster and more often. The service desk ticket queue grew so big it needed its own zip code, and every single ticket was marked “Pending Review” like that somehow solved anything.
Nobody knows how long the department can keep limping along like this. But somewhere, I guarantee those old leaders are sitting by a pool, sipping martinis, watching the chaos from a distance, and laughing until they can’t breathe.