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

Ben Halpern on May 30, 2019

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

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jackharner profile image
Jack Harner 🚀

1 developer and a 3.4 Gb node_modules folder.

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peiche profile image
Paul

I feel personally attacked

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jakenherman profile image
Jaken Herman

This hurts 😔

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saschadev profile image
Der Sascha

Why? Do you nedd only 2.1GB?

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adam_cyclones profile image
Adam Crockett 🌀

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

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rhymes

ahhahha genius 🥳🤣

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thebouv profile image
Anthony Bouvier

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

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thebouv profile image
Anthony Bouvier

I also like:

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

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jakenherman profile image
Jaken Herman

both of these are hilarious

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Gopi Ravi

Mad chuckle

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Forest Hoffman

Oldie, but a goodie

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Casey Brooks • Edited

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

  1. Write a User Story and add it to the backlog
  2. Resolve dependencies amongst other teams who are providing us with the lightbulb and the socket
  3. Estimate the Story using the Fibonacci point system
  4. Determine capacity for our team members in the upcoming sprint
  5. Pull the story into next sprint and assign specific tasks
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offendingcommit profile image
Jonathan Irvin
  1. Get a developer to go get the lightbulb
  2. It's blue, the customer wanted white.
  3. Take the blue light back to get white.
  4. The white light now is too white, customer wants soft white.
  5. Developer screws in the light bulb.
  6. 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".
  7. 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.
  8. Developer screws in lightbulb again, it doesn't turn on.
  9. Developer realizes that a previous developer turned off the light switch and cut all of the wires.
  10. Developer quietly weeps in the corner, questioning their life decisions. ...
  11. 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.

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vuild profile image
Vuild • Edited
  1. New people buy the bulb for pennies on the dollar.
  2. It gets new team, branding, artwork, photos & interns. Own IG.
  3. Go to trade shows & meetings, events with Bulb 2.0.
  4. Massive growth, rounds, ICO, top 10 on Coinmarketcap. Internet of Bulbs.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
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altwitt profile image
Harrison Witt

Tl;dr

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vuild profile image
Vuild

Me neither. Hope it's ok. 🤣

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altwitt profile image
Harrison Witt

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

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vuild profile image
Vuild

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.

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david_j_eddy profile image
David J Eddy

This is painfully true.

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helpermethod profile image
Oliver Weiler

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

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Andrew (he/him) • Edited
npm install punchline
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alvaromontoro profile image
Alvaro Montoro • Edited

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

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vuild profile image
Vuild

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

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alvaromontoro profile image
Alvaro Montoro

Wait, what?

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vuild profile image
Vuild

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. 😳

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Adam Crockett 🌀

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

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Adam Crockett 🌀 • 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.

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Al Romano • Edited

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

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

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jeremy profile image
Jeremy Schuurmans

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

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adam_cyclones profile image
Adam Crockett 🌀

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?

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adam_cyclones profile image
Adam Crockett 🌀

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

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david_j_eddy profile image
David J Eddy

npmjs.com/package/punchline

punchline
0.1.1 • Public • Published 4 years ago

It's a thing.

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adam_cyclones profile image
Adam Crockett 🌀

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

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david_j_eddy profile image
David J Eddy

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

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Tom VanAntwerp

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!

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Casey Brooks

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...

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vuild profile image
Vuild

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.

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quozzo profile image
Quozzo

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.

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david_j_eddy profile image
David J Eddy • Edited

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

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Jorge Luis

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

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vuild profile image
Vuild • Edited

Bulbweaver

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vuild profile image
Vuild

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

Sometimes I actually post info. 😳

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steelwolf180 profile image
Max Ong Zong Bao

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

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Stephen Chiang

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

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deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy

Ah, the mythical man-bulb

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stegriff profile image
Ste Griffiths

I'm here for this

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Ryan Smith

closed as off-topic on May 30 '19 at 4:20
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locked on May 30 '19 at 4:20
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vuild profile image
Vuild

👀🤣

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Max Antonucci

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.

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molly profile image
Molly Struve (she/her) • Edited

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

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Shi Ling

🤣 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.

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Conlin Durbin • Edited

Ticket Closed: wont-fix
Reason: This is a feature, not a bug. I like to work in the dark

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Yechiel Kalmenson

Oh, I just wrote a change_lighbulb.sh script to do it for me...

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ahmedmusallam profile image
Ahmed Musallam

Depends on the bulb:

Enterprise bulbs: need 5 developers with 15+ years of experience screwing bulbs.

Startup bulbs: need one developer on 5 redbulls to overengineer the bulb fitting so that it accepts any bulb!

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detunized profile image
Dmitry Yakimenko • Edited

1 C dev or
1 C++ dev and 1 tester or
2 Ruby TDD devs and 1 DevOps guy or
3 frontend Js devs and 2 backend devs or
10 enterprise Java devs and a department of architects

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João Eurico "Bokomoko" Lima

Yeah, all that team indeed.
And the microwave oven will stop functioning. Blame the C guy

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Alan Barr

If it is an enterprise lightbulb 2 teams of 5 developers working for six months. The requirements didn't specify what color the light was supposed to be so it wasted a few iterations. Also all the unit tests passed each deploy but no one wrote any integration tests to verify if it could ever be unscrewed.

If it is a marketing lightbulb couple hours but if there is any bugs it will require replacing the bulb and enclosure totally.

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Felippe Regazio

. lightbulb {transform:rotate(45deg)}

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João Eurico "Bokomoko" Lima

This punchline is the proof that I suck in CSS ...

Brilliant!

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Brian Gorman

1 architect to justify their job by making it overly complicated.
2 senior developers to argue how to make the light bulb immutable
1 junior developer to paint the light bulb to look like it's on so the customer can see progress

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vaidhyanathan • Edited

1)Product manager - To decide do we need to screw or not
2) project managing people - To select the best among the only one option available :P
3) Architect - To design how to screw
4) Manager - To monitor to you and report status back to others
5) Engineer - To actually screw
6) TestEngineer - To test it
7) Finance guy - to pay you
8) HR Guy - To manager all of the above
9) CTO - To manager across all products
10) CEO - to monitor all of you and to gain some insights

PS: Didn't add hierarchy in each level. If added it will reach 24.

:P

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bluiska • Edited

:startOne, but at the first try, it will only light up half as bright. Then he'll re do it in a week's time and it will be bright but take two clicks to turn on. Finally another week later he'll manage to do it properly but by this point they will have already ordered fancier lights and he'll have to get started on them.goto:start

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vuild profile image
Vuild

so it will be ready in less than a week? We have a client meeting

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andrewjames57 profile image
Andrew James

None - its a hardware problem

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Alex

Segmentation fault

 
vuild profile image
Vuild

Yeah, but Michael & I already paid off key industry influencers & speakers to rep for us.

Also, we have already been working on bulb.py a python bulb scraper which is an enterprise product & where the real money is.

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ld00d profile image
Brian Lampe

At least 2, but you're going to need a really large lightbulb.

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Ryan

One. If turning it off and on again doesn't work then it's the manufacturers problem and someone else should call them to have it looked at.

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Harshit

What is the use case? Team X already solved it, why are we re-inventing it?

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Mirza

one => sudo rm -rf /light-bulbs

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vuild profile image
Vuild

Oh, a bulb off.

10/10

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russormes profile image
Russell Ormes

Really? You went for an electric wire and a tungsten filament? Jeez, who did this, it's rubbish!

I'm going throw in a POC using google's wif to protobulb with lightstorm capacity. It can provide light for a city, but we can use it on 1 until we need more light.

I'll quickly change the existing bulb and leave it running just in case, but we should be able to kill it within a week.

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Donald Merand

Back in the nineties it used to take a whole team to do this but now that we know what we're doing I can do it in a weekend no problem. I try to stay humble though, disruption can be hard for non-tech people.

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vuild profile image
Vuild • Edited
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cathodion profile image
Dustin King

"This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below."

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vuild profile image
Vuild

Yep. Working perfectly. 😁

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andrewjames57 profile image
Andrew James

None its the new Dark standard

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altwitt profile image
Harrison Witt

Has no one mentioned pyjokes?

It has the title joke with the already mentioned punchline plus tons of other good ones (shortcut to actual jokes below)

Https://github.com/pyjokes/pyjokes...

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drbragg profile image
Drew Bragg

Meh, new BulbScript frameworks come out every day

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Frederik 👨‍💻➡️🌐 Creemers

If it's an entreprise lightbulb, I'm gonna hire 10 developers who have a whole elaborate process for screwing in a lightbulb. It'll be done in ~6 months!

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Andrei Luca

None. This is a hardware problem. :)

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niorad profile image
Antonio Radovcic

The more developers, the longer it will take.

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Kenneth Uy • Edited

Zero. The documentation was so poor, no developer was willing to fix the problem.

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niorad profile image
Antonio Radovcic

The number of developers you can feed with 2 Pizzas.

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Adam Crockett 🌀

Html is how to GET a head in programming. Bdum cha

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sobiwankenobi profile image
Sobi-WanKenobi

None. That's a hardware problem.

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ctrlshifti profile image
Kat Maddox

5.

1 to actually screw it in, and 4 to argue about what kind of hammer to do it with.

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schmowser profile image
Victor Warno

One. Starts to automate the process. Screws in all the lightbulbs in the world.

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khophi profile image
KhoPhi

jQuery

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dsanchezseco profile image
dsanchezseco

the client wants a blue lightbulb that emits green light

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mallenjenz profile image
mallen-jenz

None, it is a hardware problem

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bokomoko profile image
João Eurico "Bokomoko" Lima

You´re thinking procedurally. A well designed generic lamp class would provide a method "changeItselft()".

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daradedesign profile image
Dallas DeGrendel

I feel like this could go wrong a million ways. Can we scope this out a little more?

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rlease profile image
Ryan Lease

I don't know the answer, but I can give you an approximation in t-shirt sizes or Story Points. Does that help?

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karlredman profile image
Karl N. Redman

all of them
otherwise their "compiling"

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cathodion profile image
Dustin King

Did the developer of the previous lightbulb leave any documentation? Are we sure it's even wired up?

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leojpod

One but only if there is an entry on stackoverflow

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Alex Lohr

If you take German developers, it's one and no punchline, because we're efficient and have no sense of humor whatsoever ;-)

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johnylab profile image
João Ferreira

Scrum master says no more than 9

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drbragg profile image
Drew Bragg

None, we all use Dark Mode

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peterwitham profile image
Peter Witham

None, Product owners will kill the project before the developers get started.

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Benjamin Spak

0