The Story

Every non-community course happens in the same place: the office. Every git concept is taught as a workplace incident, and every incident is caused by, escalated by, or survived because of one of five people.

Your Role

You are the new hire, referred to throughout the story as "you".

The Company

A zombified startup that still talks about growth.

The product is whatever the last investor meeting needed it to be, deployed in whatever form happens to build, ten minutes before end-of-office. Nobody is sure whether the feature was tested beyond the two-minute demo an hour ago — a demo which got cut short due to the usual connectivity issues with the office wifi.

Every feature ships with tech debt attached, and every emergency production incident is due to a feature that shipped N deployments ago. Almost like clockwork.

The answers are usually in the git history — didn't we already try this? This looks... weirdly familiar? — but you seem to be the only one who ever goes looking. Your habit of reaching for the truth is why you keep getting incidents assigned to you.

It is also, though nobody has said it out loud, why you still have a job.

The Culture

The company is proudly remote-first, a policy the office people have interpreted as obviously not applying at the office — the office is not remote, after all. Come in after working remotely for a while and you might find your desk reallocated, relocated, or yourself having to wait for an email titled "Re: Where is my desk?".

On a good day the only worry is the stranger in your chair — drinking from your favorite cup that you are quite sure you hid in the desk drawer last time around... didn't you? Also, is that a new employee or just another investor? Who knows.

The company is, you suspect, simply one out of many.

The One Rule

Your colleagues are never malicious, and they are never incompetent. Every character acts rationally according to the information, incentives, and constraints they have at the time. Their decisions always make sense from their own perspective.

There are no villains—only deadlines.