Ah yes the forgotten land of uncompleted tasks. Slated to be a hotfix when it becomes a problem.

I don't know when this meme was originally made, but my boss unironically has this taped to his office door, and it's glorious

Everywhere I've ever been,

If it's lower than "High" or "2", it's as good as "backlog" :)

(There can never be a priority "1" and seldom "Highest", never "Blocker", otherwise the CEO gets a text or something.)

Yet the solution is so simple. Let the them spend 20 – 35 % of their paid time on backlog. Let them refactor the architecture. Let them improve the code base. You know, that thing the Lean book talks about, the part that everyone overlooks, the part so critical yet so often overlooked that others wrote books that ride that one aspect home. Oh, unless you want them to spend overtime on a production problem whose root cause a scrum master added to the backlog 5 years prior to the incident, of course. Oh, unless you want them to give you one year estimates for changes as simple as translation changes 'cause the architecture is so ass-backwards and never improved upon that everything depends on everything and everything breaks with one simple change. And who needs tests, right? Waste of time and money! Just live in fear that one change can break the entire software, like a real man.

I'm a Senior developer, and I'm still playing the part of the Junior in this meme.

I hate it when people insist on leaving their trash lying around where I work.

Backlogs are great. Sometimes while working on prioritized tasks the depriorized backlog tasks are made irrelevant and thus you never have to do them and you don't waste effort. Call it strategic deprioritization or perhaps even tactical laziness.

Ummm yeah it will be in “Phase 2” of the project.

Honestly why do jr devs want to do work so bad, I'm literally just like "yo chill" and they keep pestering me for work

My longest lived backlog task is 3 years old

Our solutions architect is like this. Not because we’re working on anything important at the moment, but because we keep pushing back important upgrades further and further, making each day a more challenging operation to keep our rickety-ass distributed monolith alive.

We were supposed to upgrade from Java 8 on Springboot 2.1 to 17 on Springboot 3. That got wiped off the table because the bosses think shoving our inefficient solution into a cloud product is what will attract customers.

IMO it's good to have a "shadow backlog" for stuff like this. Keep the actual backlog for prioritised product work, "ideas" and tech debt can be kept in GitHub Issues or even just a wiki page somewhere.

ugh Jira. At my first job in 2006 I was the Jira administrator. Every project wanted their own custom fields. We had a Jira project for “infra” problems it had 3 fields yall Title/Description/priority and it worked so well. Moved to a company with a simple ticket system with not much more but the concept of “tags” it was heavily

"I archived them all Padme. They're gone...every single one of them. And not just the minor tickets."

In our case, tossing stuff in the backlog to never get done is just part of trying to get through life.

We have an... eccentric colleague who demands the craziest stuff that no one else wants. Now in a sane world, we explain that his requests are either extremely costly for a minor thing no one cares about, or, like 90% of his requests, run explicitly counter to what our customers want even if we could trivially do it. He is not a customer nor is he in contact with customers or marketing or sales, he's in a different technical team but has an "armchair enthusiast" interest in my teams product.

We used to try to have that discussion to reject items to make it clear they will never ever get worked on. However whenever we did that he would demand hour after hour after hour of meeting to discuss each request that we want to reject and convince us why his requirement is the most awesome thing in the planet, and with enough meetings maybe we'd stop being so clueless and come around to recognize the brilliance.

So now we toss it in the backlog, and there's always a point of comparison like "Customer giving us $40M asks for feature X", and he has to rationally accept why X jumps ahead of his backlog items, even if he is displeased. One new project manager made the mistake of trying to close out the backlog items and the meeting invites flew about us daring to ignore his awesome requests.

So we have a chunk of backlog that every one knows will never happen, and in fact if our backlog ever dried up, then we'd have a big problem because then we'd actually have to have that tough conversation about why his ideas are bad. At this point some of his wacky stories have been on the backlog for over five years.

That's why scrum teams need aggressive POs and scrum masters.