Bob had been promoted from “guy who once fixed Jenkins” to Engineering Manager. With his new title came a bold claim: he could read his team’s minds.
In his first team meeting, Bob closed his eyes dramatically and said: “I can feel it… all of you work best in Java. Therefore, from now on, everyone writes Java. Frontend? Java. DevOps? Java. Documentation? Also Java.”
The frontend dev gasped. “But… we use React—”
Bob cut her off, pointing at his forehead like Professor X. “Silence. I hear your inner thoughts. They’re screaming for Spring Boot.”
By the end of the week, the website homepage was a .jar file you had to download and run with java -jar homepage.jar. The marketing team begged for help, but Bob insisted it was “enterprise-ready.”
Things got worse. The designers asked for new icons. Bob proudly delivered a folder of .java files shaped like icons. One read:
public class Logo { System.out.println("Blue Circle"); }
When the database crashed, Bob declared: “I have foreseen this. I have rewritten Postgres in Java.” The replacement was one file named Database.java containing:
throw new Exception("Connection refused");
The team tried to revolt. “Bob, we don’t want to use Java for everything!”
He smirked. “Oh, I know what you’re really thinking.”
They didn’t. Because Bob’s “mind reading” was just him assuming everyone thought exactly like him.
By Q4, the entire company stack looked like this:
Frontend: Java Swing app disguised as a webpage.
Backend: Java.
CI/CD pipeline: A bash script that ran javac 400 times.
Company logo: A Java enum.
Coffee machine: Running on JVM.
Even the office Roomba beeped out stack traces.
And still, Bob would walk around, tapping his temple, whispering: “I know what’s in your mind… it’s Java.”