November 20, 2022

Drawing an idiotgram

A valuable skill, every engineer should master.

So, imagine you are a (software) engineer. Now you have three problems:

  1. Do your actual job.
  2. Get your boss off your back, so you can do your actual job.
  3. Prevent your boss from running around and leaking company secrets, by only ever giving him what looks like the “Executive Summary” of your job, but is actually just the circuit board drawing of an old TV remote with your company’s vocabulary replacing the part numbers.

Some of the remaining Twitter engineers were nice enough to illustrate the applied concept:

Screenshot of an idiotgram, explaining the Twitter architecture to the new boss and the rest of the world.

For reference, here are the full images of the Twitter architecture, the remaining H-1B visa workforce and the bullpen with the extra ergonomic office chairs.