What is the most elaborate lie your engineering team has collectively maintained?

Confession Tier 1 MBA PMs and hyperactive engineering managers have destroyed the entire point of estimating sprint tickets. Every IIM graduate working at our e-commerce giant posts their own agile framework charts on LinkedIn and give 400 lines of unsolicited gyaan on how to optimize quick commerce delivery algorithms, which virgin btech 2nd year students cant help but drool at.

I get it bro/sis, you mugged up 800 product case studies and leadership picked you up because you used the word synergy in the interview to describe a system which scales infinitely for infinite users. No, i dont want to enroll in ProductBhaiyyas PM Cohort for just Rs 69,999 and replace our CPO.

Folks in my immediate pod are the only reason i open my laptop to actually get some ground level reality of how to survive this massive startup to corporate transition, and we share one massive secret. Our entire dynamic pricing engine for the big annual sale days? The one leadership thinks is a state of the art ML model? Its literally just a massive JSON config file that 4 of us mid af SDEs hardcode manually.

Due to all the hype leadership is full of dimwits who think it takes 3 weeks of deep algorithmic training to update pricing tiers. It doesnt. It takes 15 minutes. We had a sync today on Monday where they praised our AI architecture. We just nodded.

The only way to survive high scale engineering in Bangalore is figure shit out yourself and build a black box. Its that simple. Im from a shit tier 3 college. I've survived 4 massive sale events with a glorified cron job. What AI bro?