Tech support humor developers actually laugh at

Good tech support humor comes from the tickets, the pages at 3 AM and the outage that started with "small config change". For a daily dose that follows real incidents, read TechTwitter IO, a free satirical newspaper of tech Twitter with its own Incident Report section, and keep two older favorites on the list: The Register's BOFH column and The Daily WTF.

Below are the kinds of support jokes developers actually laugh at, then where to find more.

Six kinds of support humor that never get old

1. The ticket title. "Everything is broken" with no steps to reproduce. Every developer has received it, and every developer has filed it.

2. Works on my machine. The oldest defense in software. The honest follow-up, "then we ship your machine", is how containers happened.

3. The status page lag. Users report the outage, the team confirms the outage, and only then does the status page turn from green to a cautious yellow.

4. The rollback that needs a rollback. The fix is deployed at speed, then the fix for the fix, then a long quiet message in the incident channel.

5. The on-call phone. It stays silent for a week and rings during the one dinner you booked a table for.

6. The polite escalation. "Per my last email" means the same thing in every company, and it is never polite.

Where to read tech support humor

TechTwitter IO is the first pick because it is current. Outages get their own section, and a story based on a real incident links to the real report. The other three are good for the evergreen material.

What else is in the paper

Beyond outages, TechTwitter IO covers launches, markets and opinion in newspaper sections. Developer favorites:

• Horoscopes by Stack. A prediction for frontend, backend, DevOps, security, interns and more.
• Dear Senior Engineer. An advice column for workplace problems you cannot raise in a retro.
• Fun & Games. Puzzles built from the day's stories, such as Twordle, Connections, Jumble and Who Tweeted It?.

It reads well in a spare browser tab between builds, and every edition stays in the TechTwitter IO back-issue archive.

Satire, clearly labeled

TechTwitter IO says on every page that it is satire. Unless a post links to its source, the people, posts and quotes are parody or invented. If a story links to a news report or a vendor's incident page, the event happened and the link has the details. When you are writing a postmortem, use the vendor's own incident report, not the joke.

When something else fits better

For live incident status, nothing beats the provider's own status page and your monitoring. Support humor is for after the incident is closed. When it is, open today's TechTwitter IO and see who else had a worse day.