Survival is my weekly sprint goal

"Do we have a roadmap, or are we just vibing?"

Every Monday, a fresh sprint board appears. And every Monday, your goal is the same: survive.

Not ship features.

Not reduce tech debt.

Not hit KPIs.

Just... survive. While the codebase catches fire, the product manager throws more story points at you like rice at a wedding, and the

CTO casually suggests you "look into AI" (whatever that means this week).

Welcome to Agile. Welcome to hell. Let’s take a look at what survival really means in the modern dev cycle.

Your accursed week

Monday: Resurrection Protocol

You log in. You sit in the daily standup pretending to care. You nod, mute your mic, and start sorting your life into two piles:

Things you absolutely have to fix today

Things you’ll pretend are blocked until next sprint

You write “Refactor legacy form handler” on a sticky note just so it feels like you did something. You won’t refactor it. No one will. It will outlive us all.

Tuesday: The Slow Descent

You get one PR approved.

You get another rejection for “style issues.”

You spend the rest of the day tracking down the one person who knows how the auth middleware works. They’re on vacation. You consider faking your own.

Your survival strategy? Copy-paste from Stack Overflow like it's 2012. Hope no one notices the jQuery in your Vue project.

Wednesday: The Meeting Gauntlet

Sprint planning. Design sync. 1:1. Retro. Cross-functional alignment workshop (???). At this point, you're basically a professional Zoom attendee with a side hustle in Git.

You haven’t touched the ticket you estimated for “2 hours.” It’s Day 3.

But you're still here. And that counts.

Thursday: Actual Work, Kind Of

You finally write some code. It works. Miraculously.

You feel joy for 30 seconds before QA logs a bug titled “Login button deletes user account.”

You spend the next 6 hours realizing it’s not a bug—it’s a feature from another team. No one owns it. No one wants to. Now it’s yours.

You paste a Post-it to your monitor:

“Survival. Not excellence.”

Friday: Spiritual Flatline

You fix three bugs, merge two PRs, and close five tickets that were never yours to begin with.

The sprint ends. You update the team:

“All done, nothing blocked.”

You lie.

The product manager thanks you. Your manager says “Great sprint.” Your brain is mush. 

You close your laptop and stare at the wall for 45 minutes before realizing you’re still wearing your headset.

But you made it.

Survival Is the Deliverable

They say we’re building the future. But most days it feels like we’re just taping the past together with GraphQL and duct-taped CI/CD workflows.

You’re not lazy. You’re not unproductive. You’re just surviving a system designed to sprint at full speed until you collapse.

So if this week you:

• Didn’t rage-quit
• Didn’t cry on camera
  

Didn’t destroy the production database

…then congratulations. That’s a win. That’s your sprint goal.

Final Thought

The Product team won’t remember your ticket velocity.

Design won’t remember your code reviews.

Management doesn’t care that you worked all weekend.

But you’ll remember you showed up, despite it all.

And sometimes, that’s enough.

Survival is your weekly sprint goal too?

Comment below with your worst meeting story, best fake blocker, or favorite excuse for not pushing to prod on Friday. Let’s vibe in the burnout together.

Would you like a version tailored for LinkedIn, a comic format, or something even more nihilistically motivational for Miserably Employed?