101 ways to create a miserable software development team in 2025

Suppose you wanted to create a miserable software development team? What advice could you give yourself that would guarantee misery?

  1. No roadmap
  2. Write nothing down
  3. Feature delivery only
  4. Change your direction daily
  5. Unstructured brainstorm meetings
  6. No clear notes or follow up actions
  7. Constant interruptions
  8. Hire before you need
  9. Shitty interview questions
  10. Hiring someone’s mate or family member
  11. Hire folks with incompatible personalities
  12. “I’m here until I get my bonus”
  13. Change leadership every few months
  14. Make the teamโ€™s motto โ€œcustomer obsessionโ€
  15. Assume customers understand the real problem
  16. Assume customers know the best solution
  17. Collaboration is like walking through a minefield
  18. Thinking and planning considered BDUF
  19. No formal designs
  20. Discussing ideas considered a waste of time
  21. Create tickets for everything
  22. High prioritise everything
  23. Completely ignore the backlog
  24. Key details in multiple different private chats
  25. Write novels worth of documentation
  26. Write totally inaccurate stuff down
  27. Stakeholders can pester developers
  28. Cients can contact the developers directly
  29. Micromanagement
  30. Someone with an MBA
  31. Add a HR person
  32. No psychological safety
  33. Narcissistic individuals
  34. Ego-driven developers
  35. Sales-driven and unrealistic milestones
  36. Create a reporting hierarchy
  37. Manage by emails and CC everyone
  38. Completely remove all autonomy
  39. A project manager for each developer
  40. Two business analysts for each project manager
  41. Agile (not going to elaborate further)
  42. Ask for accurate estimates
  43. Then squeeze the estimates
  44. Story pointing
  45. Agile coaches who think agile is scrum
  46. Praise whoever aligns with leader
  47. Back stabbing are rewarded.
  48. Churn and no stable relationships
  49. Functional silos
  50. Individuals own parts of the system
  51. Overlapping responsibilities
  52. Repeated scrapping and starting again
  53. Pair programming over Zoom
  54. Create interfaces for every little thing
  55. Prohibit strongly-typed languages
  56. Encourage technical debt
  57. Refactoring is punishable
  58. Hard code as much as possible
  59. All code is saved in txt files
  60. No version control
  61. No coding standards
  62. No code reviews
  63. Too busy to test
  64. Coding from a dark basement
  65. No automation of any kind
  66. Deploy code directly from DEV to PROD
  67. Deployments are not automated
  68. Midnight deployments on a weekend
  69. Patch directly in production
  70. Change requests via CAB
  71. Quarterly on-call rotations
  72. Tools that prevent engineerings doing the job
  73. Use hallucination prone AI tools
  74. Free coffee and out of order signs on the bathroom
  75. Product owners who know nothing about products
  76. Mistakes carry individual responsibility
  77. Never provide positive feedback
  78. Weekly all hands on Wednesday
  79. Publicly criticise team members at daily standups
  80. Business outcomes decided by tech
  81. Rank contributors by PR stats
  82. Focus on velocity
  83. Insufficient parking
  84. Mandated timesheets
  85. Timesheet system is a severe pain to use
  86. Needless return-to-office mandate
  87. Encouraging sales to sell vapourware
  88. Open plan office next door to sales
  89. No headphones allowed
  90. Employees must clock in and out when leaving their desk
  91. Install cameras to monitor staff
  92. Shit keyboard, mouse and monitor
  93. Local machine is a dumb terminal
  94. Development IDE is Vim
  95. Force them to use Windows (if they’re Linux)
  96. Force them to use Linux (if they’re Windows)
  97. Don’t pay or give time off for training
  98. Jira tickets with generic titles like “sprint 2 feature 1”
  99. Javascript (just joking, a bit)
  100. Team building is a strip club until 3am
  101. Ask them to make the logo bigger ๐Ÿ˜‚

Any other recommendations?

Woking, Surrey, GU22, United Kingdom