Chestbursters in Scrum: Midnight Management Lessons from the Abyss

I didn’t choose this life.
I chose engineering — the solitude of code, the clean terror of debugging at dawn, the strange joy of making machines obey. But somewhere along the line, someone looked at me and said the most damning words of all: “You’d make a good manager.”

That was the moment everything broke.

Now my days aren’t about building. They’re about managing the fallout from half-baked corporate decrees. They’re about shielding my team from executives who see humans as headcount and deadlines as doctrine. They’re about translating absurdity into Jira tickets, then pretending any of this makes sense.

Out of that wreckage came this series: Chestbursters in Scrum.

Why "Chestbursters"?

Because every project starts as something small, harmless-looking, “just an idea.” Then someone touches it. And before you can blink, it’s tearing its way out of the sprint, spraying chaos everywhere. Technical debt with teeth. Epics that multiply. Executives who act surprised when the blood hits the walls.

That’s management: not a clean system, but a cycle of horror and survival.

What This Series Is

Not advice. Not wisdom. Not leadership theory with sanitized bullet points and pastel infographics.

This is a survival log.
Ten lessons written from the trenches — not in ink, but in burns, scars, and the smell of something still smoldering in the server room.

Each lesson is a hard-earned truth:

• About executives who smile while selling you out.
• About tech debt that grows fangs if you ignore it.
• About cross-functional teams that look like Marines on paper but panic like children when the lights cut out.
• About legacy systems that rumble like reactors seconds from meltdown.
• About metrics that beep like motion trackers right before the walls cave in.
• About the impossible, absurd, and terrifying act of leadership itself.

These aren’t “playbooks.” They’re distress calls. They’re what you scratch into the steel bulkhead when you know nobody’s coming to save you.

Who It’s For

For the engineers dragged into management against their will.
For the “team leads” who still dream in code but wake up to HR scripts.
For the managers who know the real work isn’t inspiring people — it’s keeping them alive in the system long enough to ship.

If you’ve ever stared at a backlog and felt the hairs on your neck rise… if you’ve ever sat in a boardroom and realized you were just collateral… if you’ve ever thought “this whole thing is one fire away from collapse” — this series is for you.

What To Expect

Lessons. Stories. Warnings dressed as blog posts.

Each one will pull apart a piece of engineering management and show you what really festers inside it. Some will make you laugh bitterly, some will make you want to scream, all of them will feel uncomfortably familiar if you’ve been in this seat.

Lesson 1: Weyland-Yutani is Your C-Suite — the betrayal baked into executive DNA.
Lesson 2: The Xenomorph is Technical Debt — ignore it and it will eat you alive.
Lesson 3: Ash the Android = Rogue Architecture Astronaut — the architect who serves purity, not people.
Lesson 4: The Alien Queen is Feature Creep — epics multiplying faster than you can kill them.
Lesson 5: The Marines Are Your Cross-Functional Team — some heroes, some cowards, some dead weight.
Lesson 6: Motion Trackers Are Metrics — useful, until you realize the beeping means “too late.”
Lesson 7: Airlocks Are Your HR Tool — sometimes coaching isn’t enough; sometimes you open the hatch.
Lesson 8: The Nostromo Is Your Legacy System — old, haunted, waiting to explode.
Lesson 9: LV-426 Is Your Production Environment — calm in theory, hell in reality.
Lesson 10: Ripley Is the Manager You Must Become — scarred, tired, but still alive.

Hope I survive to write more.

This isn’t a framework. It’s scripture scratched in panic, lit by the glow of burning dashboards.

Why Bother?

Because nobody tells you the truth about management.
They tell you it’s about vision and culture. They give you books with clean fonts and case studies. They paint it as a hero’s journey.

But the truth is uglier. It’s betrayal, exhaustion, fear, absurdity, and somehow — survival.

That’s why this series exists. Not to inspire you. Not to make you better. But to keep you alive long enough to realize that if you’re terrified, exhausted, and deranged, you’re not alone.

So here it is: Chestbursters in Scrum.
Not a guide. Not a playbook. A warning. A scream. A flamethrower’s worth of lessons carved out of blood and meetings.

Read them. Laugh bitterly. Nod in recognition. Maybe steal one or two survival tactics for yourself.

And always, always remember:
When you hear the hiss behind you, the inner jaws are already on their way.