Circle Four

One builds too much, the other none, And neither task is ever done. The wheel remade, the plan ignored - A war where all are overboard.

First Scene: The War of Misused Effort #

From the foul rain, we passed into the Fourth Circle, a grim, grey plain presided over by a fearsome figure whose body was made from twisted wires of budget reports and burndown charts. Here, the air itself seemed exhausted—thick with waste and stale ambition.

The souls were divided into two immense, clashing armies, each straining to push a great weight.

“What pointless war is this?” I asked my guide.

“This is the circle for those who misused the project’s most valuable resource: effort. On one side are the Hoarders, on the other, the Squanderers. In life, they managed their work with the same lack of reason, and so in death, their fates are intertwined.”

The Hoarders, I saw, were those afflicted by Not Invented Here Syndrome. Their great weights were monolithic libraries of their own creation, a testament to their refusal to use perfectly good, open-source solutions. They shouted, “Our way is the only way!” as they strained to push their bloated creations uphill.

Opposite them were the Squanderers, guilty of Re-inventing the Wheel. Their burdens were haphazard and shoddily built, representing the countless times they rebuilt basic components like logging frameworks, user authentication, or data mappers instead of adopting a standard. They screamed back, "We needed more control!"

For all eternity, they push these burdens against each other. They collide with a thunderous crash of wasted man-hours, then turn, shouting insults at their counterparts for their opposing sin, before beginning the pointless task anew. They are forever locked in a futile struggle, the perfect image of a development budget being burned for no reason.

Second Scene: The Pits of Process #

Beyond the battleground of wasted labor, the Sage led me into a hollow basin where black smoke rose from smoldering trenches. Here, I saw teams trapped in endless, grinding ceremonies.

One group circled a whiteboard endlessly, staring at sticky notes that had long since lost their meaning. Another group sat in mute agony around a flickering screen, watching a status meeting that would never end.

“These are the worshippers of Process-for-Process’s-Sake,” the Sage whispered. “In life, they buried their work under the weight of rituals misunderstood. They mistook the form for the function.”

One soul moaned, "We updated the backlog, filled in the ticket, estimated in points, but no code was written."

Another sobbed, "Our Definition of Done had twenty steps, and none of them meant 'working software'."

Their torment is to toil forever under the illusion of progress. Their ceremonies bring no clarity, only the endless maintenance of the illusion that they are moving forward. They are trapped in sprints that never reach velocity, in retrospectives where no change is made.

Above them floated a phantom Kanban board, its columns infinitely wide, its cards ever replicating. The workflow was perfect, the outcome forgotten.