On the subject of developer morale, I was just reminded by a friend of a joke he played on me while at University. A cruel, cruel joke.
We were doing a group software engineering project together, and we were in the middle of “code crunch” mode. I was trying, trying, trying to track down a NULL pointer bug. I was at it for freaking HOURS. I had even come in early to the computer labs to get the jump on it. The cool air of the air-conditioning had me wrapped in it’s comforting, metallic-tang embrace. But it was taking FOREVER to find this bug. Stupid pointers.
And then, after a thousand printf("got here") messages, I found the bug:
fprintf(stderr, "Segmentation fault");
exit(1); // bwehehehe
A call shot out around the labs, startling the other proto-nerds. “Brad! You bastard!”
“BRAAAAAAD!”