Warm fuzzies are when people tell you:

"Better you than me." (Especially effective when it's from the person who owns the code you're working on.)

"How's your 401K?"

"I hope you're planning your exit from the department as soon as this is over with."

"As far as I'm concerned, your whole feature is an open issue."

"You haven't cut far enough. Keep cutting."

Everyone in the group's brain trust says, "I have no idea how that works."

"You're the only person with less than 10 years experience in the area that I'd trust with this." (I've been here 3 years. Such flattery can be rather chilling.)

Warm fuzzies are knowing that if your feature breaks, it can cost customers a million dollars a minute.... and your company's contract with them includes penalty clauses for lost data and revenue. Warm fuzzies are about knowing that you have to meet public requirements, mandated on your company and its competitors, that limit downtime for your function to less than a minute a year.

Warm fuzzies are when you have trouble finding the bare minimum number of people who can give your designs and test plans an adequate review.

Warm fuzzies are when you have absolutely no margin for increasing real time consumption on your main code paths. And knowing that the real-time police can pull your feature if they're not happy.

Warm fuzzies are when your unit test cases involve integration-test or product-test scenarios to verify basic functions.

Warm fuzzies are when everyone else (around a thousand developers) shares a common library stream and loadbuild, but you have your very own stream and dedicated compile and loadbuild (not a cheap resource for a package with 40,000 modules) because no one wants their development or testing affected by one of your bugs.... and you have to be built in to a system load in order to run your first test.

Warm fuzzies are when you can ask for lots of dedicated time on expensive (and very scarce) test resources, and you get it. For unit testing. (Price comparison: equivalent to a very large mainframe. Most people use simulators for unit test.)

Warm fuzzies are when you get a late start on a project, have to finish early, and you can't miss your dates by so much as a minute.

Warm fuzzies are when you give presentations at customer sessions telling them about your feature, when it's barely up and running in the test lab. Warm fuzzies are when you can say to those customers, "This number scares me. It should scare you, too." (Yes, I was a little smoother than that. Not too much, carefully not too much.)

But you can relax. My feature doesn't run on Windows. Or on Unix. Or on the Mac.

It runs on the telephone network.

Douglas Hencke replied:

Warm fuzzies are when, thanks to deregulation, the latter is not necessarily exclusive of any of the former three.

E911 has performed an illegal operation and has been shut down to avoid possible data corruption. Press the "*" key when you are OK with this. Twenty nine, eleven.