I've been thinking a lot about eating dicks lately.
And I think we, as an industry, need to talk about it.
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For the past 30 years, I've been building software. Shipping product. Scaling teams. And through it all, there's been one constant:
People telling me to eat a dick.
But here's the thing nobody tells you about senior engineering:
The hardest problems aren't technical.
They're interpersonal.
Last week a junior dev told me to eat a dick in a code review. I was blocked. Emotionally. No clear path forward. Zero stakeholder alignment on whether I should, in fact, eat said dick.
Sound familiar?
Here's my hot take: Eating dicks is just technical debt for your ego.
You refuse? Congratulations, you've preserved your dignity today. But you will pay interest on that decision when the same dev rejects your PR with "lol no."
So what do I want for lunch?
Dicks, apparently.
But here's where it gets interesting. What if we reframed dick-eating as a growth opportunity? What if, instead of viewing it as an insult, we saw it as an invitation to practice radical acceptance?
I want a dick-eating architecture that's loosely coupled—where my self-worth layer doesn't depend on the implementation details of the feedback layer.
I want microservices, but for my feelings.
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The real 10x engineers? They eat dicks for breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. They've automated it. They've built a CI/CD pipeline for humiliation.
Think about it.
Agree? Disagree? Drop a 🍆 in the comments. And don't forget to follow me for more insights on engineering leadership, distributed systems, and swallowing your pride.