Code monkey, that's what we are

There’s a song that every programmer hears once and immediately recognises as something they’ve lived. Jonathan Coulton wrote it. It’s called “Code Monkey,” and it’s one of the more honest portraits of what this work can feel like from the inside.

The narrator writes code. He sits in meetings. He watches a manager take credit for things he built. He’s in love with someone at the office who doesn’t quite see him the way he sees her. He drinks too much coffee. He fantasises about being elsewhere—not in some dramatic way, just in that low-grade, persistent way that accumulates over long days in front of the same terminal.

What makes the song land isn’t the comedy. It’s the specificity. The “Rob says save the document” line, the “put on headphones, go to work” rhythm—Coulton is describing an actual phenomenology of the job, not just poking fun at it.

We tell ourselves the work is meaningful because software shapes the world, and that’s true. It is meaningful. But meaningful work and fulfilling work aren’t always the same thing, and the gap between them—the space between what you’re capable of and what the ticket queue demands of you—is exactly what the song lives in.

The question it leaves open is worth sitting with: how much of that gap is inherent to the work, and how much is a consequence of how we’ve organised it? Taylorism didn’t disappear when it moved from factory floors to open-plan offices. Most “agile” environments still treat developers as interchangeable units of velocity rather than as craftspeople with judgment worth consulting.

Code Monkey is funny because it’s exaggerated. It resonates because it isn’t, really.

You can watch it on YouTube or download the MP3 from Jonathan Coulton’s site.