Developers are from Mars, Managers are from Venus:

Yesterday I received a forwarded email describing communication gap between developers and managers in very funny way. It is well designed and worth to read. Here I am giving few selected, to read complete version click here (Originally version written by Chad Z. Hower aka Kudzu).

A Developer Says

 I saved 2 bytes

What a developer means:

I spent 4 hours on a 5 minute task and the code is five times bigger than it was before. It does save 2 bytes, but its only used 3 places in the program so I shaved 6 bytes off of our 45 megabyte footprint.

What a manager hears:

I have room for more features!

 I reused some code

What a developer means:

I cut and pasted some stuff.

What a manager hears:

He used an existing library, great!

 Its not a bug, its a documentation issue

What a developer means:

Its a bug, but its really gnarly to fix it. Let's just document it as designed behaviour and maybe we can even convince them its a feature.

For a real life example, please see:

http://butunclebob.com/ArticleS.UncleBob.OutlookUgh

The official response is even better:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA010565301033.aspx

The author of this one has a job waiting for him in Government if they ever leave Microsoft.

PC Mag has fun too:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1356794,00.asp

What a manager hears:

We can't have too much documentation can we?

 A Manager Says

 I just read about x. I want the whole team to use x.

What a manager means:

Manager Magazine says buzzword x will make you guys program faster and save me money. I really don't have a clue what it really does or if it applies to our situation, but I am sure somehow we can apply it to our 4 million line code base, by next week.

What a developer hears:

Uh oh, his monthly magazine arrived. I'll have to talk to the guys in the mail room again.

 If it will take you 4 weeks, 4 of you can do it in a week, right?

What a manager means:

4 weeks = 4 developers x 1 week = 4 weeks x 1 developer. Why not? It computes! Algebra does not lie.

What a developer hears:

I guess he thinks 9 women can make one baby in 1 month.