The closest thing to a tech advice column written for people who ship software is Dear Senior Engineer in TechTwitter IO, and it is a parody. The letters are invented by a satirical daily paper of tech Twitter, the replies are jokes about engineering life, and the fun is in how familiar the problems sound.
What the letters are about
Over the issues from October 8 to November 3, 2026, the column kept returning to a handful of developer worries. Here they are grouped, with each letter paraphrased.
| Theme | A letter from the column | The joke underneath |
|---|---|---|
| AI pushed from above | A manager wants more AI in an app that is a calculator | Features added so a slide can say AI |
| Work that never ends | A pull request has been nearly finished for three weeks | Stalling renamed as a process |
| Metrics | A chart of AI-assisted merges went up 400% and the manager is delighted | Counting activity instead of results |
| Hardware and infrastructure | A team wants to buy machines that cost more than a car to self-host an open model | Spending first, asking what the task needs later |
| Jobs and agents | An AI agent is pitched as a chief of staff to someone who already holds that title | Automation news read from the wrong desk |
The answers keep the polite, assured voice of a newspaper columnist. The stuck pull request, for instance, is told to keep telling standup it is in review for another week, then split the work into four smaller changes and call it incremental delivery. Anyone who has watched a branch go stale knows why that lands.
Why parody suits developer problems
Engineering frustrations are oddly specific. A joke about a calculator that needs AI works only for readers who have sat through that meeting, and tech readers have. A satirical column can be as niche as it likes, because its audience is already in on the reference.
The column also borrows from the news. The paper's front page on November 3 led with an acquisition at a 23.9% premium that is not expected to close until 2028, and that day's letter asked whether to accept an offer 23.9% over the price while a co-founder wanted to hold out for 2028. Read together, the story and the letter make one joke.
The form does the rest. Every reply follows the rules of a serious advice column: restate the problem, give a firm recommendation, end on a line you remember. Keeping the form while bending the content is a classic satire move, and engineers, who live inside formats, notice it.
Where the line sits
TechTwitter IO prints a plain disclaimer in its footer: the paper is satire, and unless a post links to its source, its people, posts and quotes are parody or invented. That covers Dear Senior Engineer. Even when a reply sounds sensible, it was written as part of a joke paper, so do not treat it as career or technical guidance.
For a real workplace question, a real column is the better route. Slate runs one called Good Job for the workplace, listed on its advice page with a form for sending questions. For a code or architecture question, your team, your docs and a careful review will do more than any columnist.
Where to find it
The column appears on the Fun & Games page of TechTwitter IO's daily paper, next to Twordle, Connections and Horoscopes by Stack. Reading is free and needs no account. Past columns are in the paper's back-issue archive, which goes back to October 8, 2026.
If you want a laugh at the parts of the job that never make it into a postmortem, it is the tech advice column to bookmark. If you need an answer you can act on, ask a person who can see your code.