The Mockroach

This is a satirical article. Don't take it too seriously.

There’s a certain type of pest that scuttles around the tech industry unchecked. He’s not loud. He’s not smart. But somehow, he’s always there. Watching, pretending, and nodding like he understands a single goddamn thing. 

Here at Miserably Employed, we call him The Mockroach.

Every company has one. 

Sometimes it's your boss. 

Sometimes it's a senior developer who hasn’t written a line of code since 2014. 

Sometimes it’s just that guy in the Slack channel who replies with a thumbs-up emoji to every thread and calls it a day. 

Sometimes it’s YOU.

No matter who they are, they’re always the same at their core. They do nothing. They know nothing. They contribute nothing. And they get promoted anyway. They scuttle their way to the top, impossible to get rid of. 

Let me tell you what working with a Mockroach is like.

You spend weeks architecting a feature that actually works. You document it. You test it. You clean up the tickets left behind by three different Product Managers who all rage-quit in a two-month span. 

But, The Mockroach? 

He adds a comment to the Jira thread: “Looks good to me.” That’s it. That’s his whole job. Somehow he’s still here. Somehow he’s still employed. Somehow what he thinks matters.

You bring up real problems in standup. You talk about tech debt. You explain how the deployment process is a Russian roulette of broken builds. The Mockroach just blinks, then parrots something he heard on a podcast once. “Maybe we should pivot to a more scalable cloud-first architecture.” What does that even mean? He doesn’t know. You don’t know. Nobody knows. But he said it with confidence, and now everyone’s nodding like it's genius.

He gets invited to meetings. Important meetings. And in those meetings, he says nothing until the final five minutes, where he regurgitates the last thing someone else said and adds, “Exactly.” Then someone else praises him for “synthesizing the conversation so well.” You stare at your screen in disbelief that this is your sad reality.

You work late. He logs off at 4:58 PM on the dot. You fix production bugs. He forwards customer complaints to support. You ship. He slides into the launch thread the next morning and types, “Great job, team.” And then, inexplicably, he gets the credit. Again.

You’re tired. Everyone is tired. But he’s thriving. He has found a way to game the system so thoroughly that effort is not just optional, it’s discouraged. If you try too hard, you make everyone else look bad. Including him. Especially him. And if there’s one thing a Mockroach hates more than doing work, it’s being exposed.

But here’s the part that really breaks your brain: the Mockroach believes in the job. He thinks this is what leadership looks like. He thinks being in meetings all day and saying buzzwords at the right time is the work. He believes he is valuable because he exists. And the worst part is that everyone else starts to believe it, too.

That’s the horror of it. This isn’t just one guy. It’s a system built to reward Mockroaches. The more you fake it, the more you make it. That’s the deal. It doesn’t matter how many times you save the codebase from collapse or how many weekends you burn through to meet a deadline nobody actually cares about. If you’re not loud. If you’re not shiny. If you don’t “align with the vision” of whatever VP has been installed this quarter, then you’re invisible.

We’re not building things anymore. We’re building appearances of things. We’re managing vibes. Mockroaches thrive in vibes. They are born in the fluorescent light of performative productivity. They are protected by the illusion of progress. And they will outlive you.

You’ll burn out. You’ll quit. Or worse, you’ll stay, and start to resemble him. Your standards will slip. You’ll stop fighting. You’ll say “sure” when you mean “this is terrible.” You’ll become silent in the meetings, too. And then, one day, you’ll forward an email to support, close your laptop, and tell yourself, that’s enough for today.

Congratulations. You’re one of them now.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s this: kill the Mockroach inside of you before it lays eggs. Or better yet, leave. Quit. Vanish. Become a ghost. Go freelance. Start a blog. Sell shirts that scream into the void so you don’t have to. (That’s what we did).

Because if you’re still working in this godforsaken industry, The Mockroach isn’t just your coworker.

He’s your future.

And he’s already in the Zoom call.