Odysseus Was Not Lost
A three-thousand-year-old guide to doing everything except the actual work.
Artificial Intelligence Was Invented 4,000 Years Ago
It started in Sumer. It has been running on people ever since.
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Issued weekly
Bad advice that works in production.
Software engineering satire about the meetings, metrics, estimates and corporate theatre. One terrible engineering command every Sunday. Unfortunately correct.
Read on Substack. Unsubscribe whenever, ideally not during a code freeze.
What this is
- Issue
- One command, every Sunday. Four minutes. Free.
- Contents
- Estimates, incidents, metrics, roadmaps, and the theatre performed around them.
- Issued to
- Engineers, tech leads, EMs, architects, consultants, and anyone with corporate IT trauma.
- Not included
- Thought leadership. Hustle. A framework named after a fruit.
BE ANENGINEER
BE AN ENGINEER
BUREAU OF WORKPLACE AFFAIRS
BUREAU OF WORKPLACE AFFAIRS
DOC IDDC-2027-000001
ISSUE19 JUL 2026
VERSION1.0
Certificate of
Dream Compensation™
This certifies that
(Employee name, printed while conscious)
has been approved for Dream Compensation™.
Compensation will be paid nightly while unconscious.
Terms and conditions apply. Primarily one: the holder must be unconscious.
M. VanderSleepChief Sleep Officer (CSO)
The BudgetHead of Financial Imagination (HOFI)
BE AN ENGINEER
OFFICIAL
DOCUMENT
OFFICIAL
DOCUMENT
| Benefit type | Non-cash |
|---|---|
| Taxable | No |
| Transferable | No |
| Redeemable | Dreams only |
| Payment freq. | Nightly |
|---|---|
| Payment method | REM sessions |
| Currency | Feels |
| Valid until | First promotion |
THEBEANENGINEER.COM
Official workplace recognition
Your corporate suffering deserves official documentation.
The Dream Certificate™ is a personalised certificate for achievements your company will never recognise. Survived a migration? Attended a six-hour alignment meeting? Shipped despite the roadmap? Tell us what happened. We'll make it official.
-
Tell us what happened
One incident. The one nobody wrote a post-mortem for.
-
We make it official
It gets a document ID, a seal, and two signatures from people who do not exist.
-
You receive your certificate
A personalised PDF by email, ready to share, print, or hang above the monitor as a warning.
Request your certificate
Delivered as a PDF to that address, usually within a week.
Personnel file BE-1
- Name
- Redacted
- Title
- Depends on the reorg
- Location
- A meeting
- Status
- Still employed
This document was not approved by anyone.
Who writes this
Written by someone still in the room.
Be an Engineer comes from an engineer who has shipped real software inside real teams, and sat through every meeting required to prove it.
No name on the door, on purpose. Honest reporting from inside a company rarely survives a byline, and the jokes only work while the material keeps arriving.
Sundays
One command a week. Zero LinkedIn energy.
Free, and unfortunately correct. Read it before standup.