The Writing Was on the Wall. The Requirements Were Not.
BREAKING: Ancient stakeholder hieroglyphics have been discovered in a recently unearthed tomb.
Experts are still working to decipher the inscriptions, but early analysis suggests they may document some form of ancient requirements-gathering exercise.
Researchers have released the following preliminary translation notes:
🙏 = Can Workday do this?
🙏🙏 = I really need Workday to do this.
🙏🙏🙏 = I already told leadership Workday can do this.
🔥 = Urgent.
🔥🔥🔥 = I forgot to submit this three weeks ago.
🤏 = Just a small change.
🤏🔥 = Just a small change that needs to be in production tomorrow.
👀 = Following up on the ticket I submitted 11 minutes ago.
💯 = Approved.
👍 = Approved, but I reserve the right to say this isn’t what I asked for later.
🚀 = Move to production.
🚀🙏 = Move to production even though UAT isn’t finished.
🔄 = Actually, can we change something?
🔄🔄🔄 = We have fundamentally reconsidered the entire process.
💀 = Production issue.
🪄 = Automate it.
🪄✨ = Automate a process we haven’t actually defined yet.
🤖 = Can AI do this somehow?
🔒🤷 = I can’t see something
🔒🤷🔥 = I can’t see something and this is urgent
🔒🤷🔥👑 = An executive can’t see something and civilization is collapsing
🍝 = The current business process
🍝✂️ = “Can we just simplify it?”
🐙 = One requirement has become eight requirements
🐙🔥 = All eight are critical
🥞 = We have layered several workarounds on top of each other
🥞🥞🥞 = Technical debt
🥞✨ = “But it works.”
🦖🔌 = Legacy integration
🦖🔌🙏 = Please don’t touch it
🦖🔌💀 = Someone touched it
🛸 = Requirement has no apparent connection to the scoped processes
🛸🤷 = Nobody knows where it came from
🛸👑 = Executive request
🪃 = Requirement we rejected six months ago
🪃👀 = It has returned
🪃👀👑 = With executive sponsorship
🫠👍 = HRIS has received your requirements.
Experts have dated the inscriptions to approximately 2800 BCE.
Interestingly, the HRIS analyst assigned to the project appears to have vanished shortly after the inscriptions were created. Historians are now describing this as the earliest known instance of voluntary employee turnover.
