Software development is a special kind of a nightmare. The kind that you wish you could wake up from, but can’t, because code is money and money is life.
We asked our Toggl developers to describe their personal hell. After much screaming and hyperventilating, we ended up with this 7 circles of developer hell:

This is yet another infographic by the Toggl Goon Squad – the developers behind the Toggl time tracking app.
Toggl, by the way, is a tool for showing your boss that yes, it really does take 2 hours to find that damn missing semicolon.
Hah – how much time did you spend on this?
Way, way too much.
If you liked it, you might enjoy some of the other pieces we’ve done in the past – like explaining tech jobs with a simple lightbulb. Or another epic piece about how to save the princess using different programming languages.
Nice but… shouldn’t you be working on your app?
Nonsense. Everybody knows that once coded, software basically maintains itself.
But actually, we rather enjoy the occasional break from serious work to point out the pain points in the biz with some brightly coloured images.
Software development is hell, and any ray of light is appreciated. It’s also the reason why we like working on Toggl – it’s great for fending off attacks from pesky clients and managers at bay. With data.
We’ll also keep doing these comics, so keep an eye on our Facebook or Twitter if you want to catch them early.
Also, if you have any ideas for the next one, or if you think our Developer Hell is missing something, drop a line where it says “Comments”.






“Terrible solution holding everything together” So LOL
Scope creep….so true.
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Is there a higher quality image or poster available? I want to hang this at my workspace 😛
I love these comics. Maybe you could do one about freelance developers? “The *almost* freedom of self-employed developers” or sth like that?
Could expand your target group a bit, too. I dunno, just saying, you asked for ideas so here’s one. Hope you like it.
Freelancing is a double edged sword, definitely could be something there! I’ll summon our Goon Squad at once.
Either my eyes lie to me terribly, or the 7th circle of hell is ‘off-by-one’ errors. That is, I count only 6 circles, unless documentation also counts even if it’s not mentioned in big caption. In that case, maybe ‘overly nitpicking QAs’ is the 7th circle 😉
Well it works, so better not poke it or it’ll break.
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And 8th Circle is “stackoverflow is down”
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Yes its always True for a Client Work based company…
Yes its always True for a Client Work based company…
Actually, there are nine circles of hell.
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Dante)
So, please add two more 🙂
Cannot add 2 circles, missing dependencies. Would have to rewrite hell.
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It’s good old WordPress 😉
now I understand why Toggle’s iOS app doesn’t even NOTIFY ME THAT A TIMER HAS BEEN RUNNING ALL NIGHT… it’s because you were cartooning instead of developing.
Is there ANY possibility to have this as a poster?
I couldn’t agree more
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We would like to have this graphic at our office. Is there any way to get our hands on a high res version? Who do I contact?
Wait until the Blood Moon shines in the Eastern sky, then sacrifice a pack of Szechuan sauce in front of a macDonalds at midnight – and then send a Twitter message to @arcaderage :3
Some amount of bots here talking about jerseys! Great post, I LOL’d almost as much as I did at the comments section invasion!
Haha yes, just went back and deleted the jerseys 😛
PLEASE KEEP THE INFOGRAPHICS COMING
Damn, I love your work.
This Isn’t Infographic! It’s illustration.
So true 😄😂
Your “Related Posts” links are in a limbo. They point to “domain/blog/year/month/name” while current website/theme uses just “domain/blog/name”. deleting date from link shows proper article.
Hi All im noob here. Good post! Thx! Love your stories!