Ben Halpern

Posted on May 30, 2019

How many software developers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

#discuss

That’s the setup. What’s the punchline?

Top comments (102)

Jack Harner 🚀 • May 30 '19

1 developer and a 3.4 Gb node_modules folder.

Paul • May 30 '19

I feel personally attacked

Jaken Herman • May 30 '19

This hurts 😔

Der Sascha • May 30 '19

Why? Do you nedd only 2.1GB?

Adam Crockett 🌀 • May 30 '19

It's not the size it's how you use I.T that counts.

rhymes • Jun 6 '19

ahhahha genius 🥳🤣

Anthony Bouvier • May 30 '19

None. That's a hardware problem. ((Old punchline to this joke. Haha.))

Anthony Bouvier • May 30 '19

I also like:

None. The light bulb works fine on the system in my office.

Jaken Herman • May 30 '19

both of these are hilarious

Gopi Ravi • May 31 '19

Mad chuckle

Forest Hoffman • Jun 4 '19

Oldie, but a goodie

Casey Brooks • May 30 '19 • Edited

We can't know how many resources we need until we:

Write a User Story and add it to the backlog
Resolve dependencies amongst other teams who are providing us with the lightbulb and the socket
Estimate the Story using the Fibonacci point system
Determine capacity for our team members in the upcoming sprint
Pull the story into next sprint and assign specific tasks

Jonathan Irvin • May 30 '19

Get a developer to go get the lightbulb
It's blue, the customer wanted white.
Take the blue light back to get white.
The white light now is too white, customer wants soft white.
Developer screws in the light bulb.
QA tests the light bulb, it doesn't turn on. QA unscrews the lightbulb, places it in a bag, hands it back to the developer and says it's "defective".
Developer tests the lightbulb in their own office and it works. After all, it was a new lightbulb and it worked in their office before.
Developer screws in lightbulb again, it doesn't turn on.
Developer realizes that a previous developer turned off the light switch and cut all of the wires.
Developer quietly weeps in the corner, questioning their life decisions. ...
A new developer walks in and duck-tapes a new socket, wires it up with paperclips and rigs a switch. Light is dimly lit, held together by duck tape and faith, but now no one has anymore bandwidth to fix the original light and everyone moves on.

The End.

Vuild • May 30 '19 • Edited

New people buy the bulb for pennies on the dollar.
It gets new team, branding, artwork, photos & interns. Own IG.
Go to trade shows & meetings, events with Bulb 2.0.
Massive growth, rounds, ICO, top 10 on Coinmarketcap. Internet of Bulbs.
1.0 devs are now working at "Flaming Scooters" really hard to pay basic extortionate-bills & look up from emoji Touch Bar realizing they missed the 1000x but maybe 20% is left.
They invest all savings from Bulb 1.0 into Bulbcoin hodl only to see it fall, knife, deadcat bounce & get delisted. 2.0 team had already cashed out & were working on Doorcoin at the time which saw an unexpected climb as Bulbcoin could be an interesting asset for diversification of their oversized fund.

Harrison Witt • May 31 '19

Tl;dr

Vuild • May 31 '19

Me neither. Hope it's ok. 🤣

Harrison Witt • May 31 '19

I was making a joke about the joke. Lol so jokes on you, I suppose.

Vuild • May 31 '19

That tends to happen from time to time. 😅 It's hard making a buck as a dev standup these days. I was attempting, poorly.

Your name proves you have the upper hand this time, Mr Witt.

David J Eddy • Jun 4 '19

This is painfully true.

Oliver Weiler • Jun 5 '19

That sounds more like: How many product owners...

Andrew (he/him) • May 30 '19 • Edited

npm install punchline

Alvaro Montoro • May 30 '19 • Edited

You could have done npm install -g punchline and make the whole world laugh at once

Vuild • May 31 '19

You could have done it in CSS Alvaro while eating Italian tapas.

Alvaro Montoro • May 31 '19

Wait, what?

Vuild • May 31 '19

Was referencing/joking about the paella food tweet & your daily CSS experiments in one. Supposed to be abstract humor but it was a terrible attempt. Sorry. 😳

Adam Crockett 🌀 • May 30 '19

I can guarantee that's a thing without looking it up.

Adam Crockett 🌀 • May 30 '19 • Edited

I couldn't help it, I looked it up, it's not a thing. I will give it 5 mins and I'm sure somebody will have take it.

Al Romano • May 30 '19 • Edited

This needs to be a thing. CLI of random "dad jokes" maybe??

EDIT: Made it a thing - npmjs.com/package/@vip3rousmango/p...

Jeremy Schuurmans • May 30 '19

It's not a CLI, but this has dad jokes galore!

Adam Crockett 🌀 • May 30 '19

Punchline is a dad joke AI trained from said cli?
Features:

can rate your joke
makes jokes from titles of projects in npm
comes with a webpack loader
integrates with all major Frontend frameworks
Has literally 100's of critical issues, but it's on the backlog 😅

I think we have a product here?

Adam Crockett 🌀 • May 30 '19

Dear god, Jeremy. I'm ... speachless.

David J Eddy • Jun 4 '19

npmjs.com/package/punchline

punchline
0.1.1 • Public • Published 4 years ago

It's a thing.

Adam Crockett 🌀 • Jun 4 '19

Curse my inability to use a keyboard. I wonder what it does.

David J Eddy • Jun 4 '19

Not surprisingly; punchline is an actual package: npmjs.com/package/punchline

Tom VanAntwerp • May 30 '19

What dev has time to screw in their own lightbulbs? Just use AWS CloudBulb--abstracts away all the details and they've got a free tier!

Casey Brooks • May 30 '19

Too bad their pricing model is nearly impossible to comprehend. You can't just buy the lightbulb, you have to individually purchase the glass and choose its shape, thickness, opacity. Then you need to pick your filament (from among 17 different shape variations, each in a number of different lengths), decide what kind of screw cap you need (I didn't even know there was more than one option!), and estimate the cost-per-minute given the expected wattage load and service up-time.

But once you've got all that figured out, you'll never need to worry about lightbulbs again! At least until the requirements change...

Vuild • May 30 '19

It's changed since you posted this.

Bulbs, sockets & houses are now a sealed single unit & not user serviceable. To change your bulb please upgrade to our latest house range.

We have houses in succulent pink, lavish lavender, boundless blue & chartreuse. Two sizes.

3 months of free smart door (then $9.99.99 pm). bOS compatible only.

Windows not included.

Quozzo • Jun 1 '19

If you do opt for the optional Windows you will also receive a load of bloatware and occasionally and unexpectedly the house will somehow crash.

David J Eddy • Jun 4 '19 • Edited

~stab~ right at the hear there Tom. :D

Jorge Luis • May 30 '19

One to actually screw the lightbulb and 30 to say that they could've done it better.

Vuild • May 30 '19 • Edited

Vuild • May 31 '19

Don't you dare make this my next most popular comment.

Sometimes I actually post info. 😳

Max Ong Zong Bao • May 31 '19

Hahaha reminds me of this from Toggle that talks about it.

Stephen Chiang • May 30 '19

Throwing more devs at it won't solve it faster.

Ben Lovy • May 30 '19

Ah, the mythical man-bulb

Ste Griffiths • Sep 27 '19

I'm here for this

Ryan Smith • May 30 '19

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Vuild • May 30 '19

👀🤣

Max Antonucci • May 30 '19

Two. One to do it incorrectly and another to shove them out of the way with !important and put it in, before people realize three weeks later it's the wrong lightbulb and it's too late to fix it.

Molly Struve (she/her) • May 30 '19 • Edited

I don't know but you gotta make a JIRA ticket for it first

Shi Ling • Jun 1 '19

🤣 I laughed so hard at this because it reminded of one of my old company where this got out of hand. We replied with "Please send me the JIRA ticket" so often, our colleagues would wonder if they needed to file one to ask us to go for lunch. I could totally see this happening there if someone needed a lightbulb fixed.