Another boss defenestrated
Serves him right for achieving an unholy triumvirate:
-AI
-Vibe coding
-Phone app
BOFH: Vibe-coded solutions arrive for problems nobody has
Official BOFH logo (red rotary telephone with devil's tal and devil's horns) BOFH logo EPISODE 10 Sigh. The Boss has written an app and is quite pleased with himself. The higher-ups are even more pleased because it apparently saves us money. They're so pleased, in fact, they're mandating that it be installed on Company phones …
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Saturday 23rd May 2026 16:00 GMT Xalran
Re: Another boss defenestrated
I would have gone for the room with the massively reinforced door at the lowest level of the underground carpark (under the office building) that contains all the failed (rampaging) robotic experiments built over the years. I think there's also a pit with some nasty stuff in it in the same area, it could have also been an option.
But a window sill jumping boss is a classic.
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Friday 22nd May 2026 10:37 GMT frankvw
Best. Summary. Ever.
"...the synergy of deep technical knowledge and plain speaking is essentially what AI claims to be after you add a layer of obscurity, some hallucinations, and a touch of mental illnes..."
This must be the best, most complete and to-the-point definition of all that's wrong with the AI hype that I have ever seen.
Simon, have a few of these. You've more than earned it! ----->
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Friday 22nd May 2026 10:43 GMT Terry 6
Ahh
I have a tiny (very tiny) bit of sympatry for Boss here.
My working years were punctuated by people (ironically usually bosses) who'd focus in on an example and treat it as the substantive issue.
Like when I was running an off-site literacy class and in one of the interminable churns of Local Authority organisation we weren't allocated a budget.
I emailed the new boss.
I told her that we needed a budget for materials for the class.
"Without a budget", I explained, "I can't so much as place an order for tissues for the classroom".
I was young and innocent and just thought this a good example of how dire the situation was.
Said Boss sent a long email about why we needed tissues, couldn't these 7 year old kids bring their own etc.
Which a) most importantly, ignored the fact that we still needed a fucking budget. and b) showed a dismal understanding of small children or the complexities of bringing them to an off-site classroom.
(She was by the way the Principle Educational Psychologist . )
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Friday 22nd May 2026 12:13 GMT GlenP
Re: Ahh
who'd focus in on an example and treat it as the substantive issue
Our management team were doing some business risks analysis, the highest risk by far was staff retention and potential loss of knowledge. Instead of addressing this the board decided we needed to focus on the risks of the MD being kidnapped on a business trip! Of all the people in the business the MD was the one who'd least be missed in the short term and since we don't have a presence in South America or southern Africa his kidnap was very unlikely.
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Friday 22nd May 2026 20:49 GMT Terry 6
Re: Ahh
This sounds like one of Parkinson's Laws. Not the most famous one, work expanding etc..
There's one in which the amount of time spent considering an item is inversely proportional to its significance. He instances spending 10 minutes deciding on a nuclear power station then an hour on a new bike shed.(or something to that effect)
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Friday 22nd May 2026 17:05 GMT doublelayer
Re: Ahh
I don't have much sympathy either for you or the boss. It is annoying when people take an example as the only important part, but generally it means that the example was a bad example, which the boss's definitely was and yours might have been, at least your new boss thought so. The solution to that is to either provide another example or a set of them which make the point more clearly or to describe the purpose in general terms which explain the need for it. I'm sure you could have listed many more things you might have to buy which would have justified a budget, whether or not tissues were important. Perhaps you tried, and I'd have more sympathy with you if, after providing more examples, your boss continued to focus only on tissues.
In the case from the article, the boss had a chance to provide any example he pleased about how his app would be useful. He failed. He then got an opportunity to defend his example. He failed. He then got an opportunity to provide more examples. He failed. In my opinion, this doesn't count as hyperfocusing on the first example.
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Friday 22nd May 2026 13:47 GMT Anonymous Custard
Re: No BOFH on the front page.
I'd also highlights the useful alerts feature of the website.
You can use that to send you a notification email (with a direct link) for whenever an article with the given criteria is posted.
It can do keywords and (optionally) author, but unfortunately not tags (at least explicitly).
I have one for posts by Simon, and so routinely get a link to fresh BOFH articles (and very occasionally others when he posts them) in my inbox.
Used to do the same for Dabbsy and Lester, both sadly no longer appearing here for various reasons.
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Friday 22nd May 2026 12:25 GMT Anonymous Custard
Re: No BOFH on the front page.
I invite you to pour yourself your favourite liquid refreshment and enjoy what the commentards think of the redesign.
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Friday 22nd May 2026 15:06 GMT KarMann
Re: No BOFH on the front page.
It didn't for some part of the first day, but it seemed to be fixed reasonably quickly. Works For Me at the moment. Have you tried again lately? (My bookmark has a final slash, '/Week/', but it seems to work either way. And in at least some cases, pun intended, capitalisation seems optional, at least in the case of the On Call tag.)
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Saturday 23rd May 2026 16:17 GMT Xalran
Re: No BOFH on the front page.
It if was just the BOFH...
The new Mangled Enshitified Vulture Central made it extremely difficult to find the On Call, Who, Me?, Borkborkbork! and a few more that used to be easy to find when a new post appeared...
I won't even talk of the way articles are shown from the latest to the oldest (top down, and not left to right) because I would end up saying bad things ( there's a few languages that are written that way... English is not one of them.)
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Friday 22nd May 2026 11:31 GMT Anonymous Custard
I am so "borrowing" this response!
"It's got AI in it!" the Boss whines, after the PFY and I express our doubts.
"So have the words failure, and painful, and brainless," the PFY points out.
That one is definitely going into the "to use at work" store...
Definitely one of these for such a sunny day ------------------------->
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Friday 22nd May 2026 15:15 GMT Boris the Cockroach
Your BoFH is
far more tolerant that I am
I would have got about 1/2 way through that conservesation with the boss before reaching for the window catch and a swift running jump into oblivion (well that we'd tell the police anyway) he was very depressed we'd say, especially after all those death threats. no we dont know who sent them or why they seemed to be timed stamped 5 minutes after he jumped....... it was a good tuck and 1/2 pike before impact though
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Friday 22nd May 2026 20:48 GMT goblinski
... through a minefield. In the dark. On pogo sticks...
In all fairness, a pogo stick would be the very best way to cross a minefiled in the dark.
Or a minefield - period, as dark or not shouldn't make a difference in a well laid out minefield :)
Orders of magnitude smaller contact surface, and fewer number of steps per distance covered, on the other hand...
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Monday 25th May 2026 17:47 GMT Luiz Abdala
Times New Roman article.
I like it. Or Chrome is having a seizure JUST on the BOFH article and missing HTML tags. This comment page is Arial or whatever, as usual.
Considering the entire BOFH list of articles has the same font, I assume it is proposital, and a neat detail that I missed for far too long.
Edit: forget that, some articles are Times New Roman, some are Arial. Is that AI messing with page generation?
