What Is This?
The Office Flock is a daily comic strip about six birds navigating life at a tech company. They attend pointless meetings, deploy on Fridays, argue about estimations, and watch AI slowly take over their jobs.
Every strip is generated fresh each morning from real tech and AI news — the jokes are topical, the deadpan is eternal. The art style is intentionally sketchy, like someone drew it on a napkin during a standup that went too long.
The Cast
Dove (she/her)
Dove is the team's well-meaning but overwhelmed engineering manager. She got promoted from a senior IC role eighteen months ago and still hasn't fully accepted that her job is now 90% meetings and 10% wondering why she's in so many meetings. She genuinely cares about the team but has a pathological need to create process for everything, including processes to reduce process. Her calendar is a solid block of colour from 9 to 5. Her biggest fear is the team finding out she googles half the technical terms in their standups. Her second biggest fear is that they already know.
Writes meeting agendas for one-on-ones. Has a spreadsheet tracking her other spreadsheets. Ends every Friday thinking 'next week will be calmer.' It never is.
Raven (he/him)
Raven has been at the company longer than anyone, including two of the three founders. He's seen every tech trend arrive as a revolution and leave as a deprecated API. He communicates almost entirely in deadpan observations and rhetorical questions. His code reviews are legendary: technically flawless, emotionally devastating. He knows where all the bodies are buried in the codebase because he buried most of them. He once fixed a production outage from a beach bar in Portugal and billed it as PTO.
Drinks only black coffee, no exceptions. Has never once said 'good morning' first. His Slack status has been 'focusing' since 2022. Types in all lowercase in chat but uses perfect grammar in code comments.
Sparrow (he/him)
Recognisable by his brown cap and dusty-brown plumage, Sparrow is the team's quiet workhorse — writes the code everyone depends on and nobody thanks him for. He's been 'mid-level' for four years because every time he's up for promotion, the criteria change. He stays up too late reading Hacker News threads that confirm his suspicion that the entire industry is held together by duct tape and good intentions. He once spent three weeks optimising a function that saved 4 milliseconds per request and called it 'the most meaningful work I've done here.'
Always wears his brown cap, even on Zoom. Has a rubber duck on his desk he actually talks to. Keeps a private Notion page called 'Things I Would Fix If Anyone Let Me.' Eats the same sad sandwich for lunch every single day.
Chicken (he/him)
Chicken has been at the company for two years but still introduces himself in meetings. He lives in a state of low-grade existential dread that occasionally spikes into full panic, usually triggered by Slack messages that begin with 'Hey, quick question.' He's actually not bad at his job — he's just convinced he is. He joined during a hiring spree and has never quite shaken the feeling that there was a clerical error. His impostor syndrome has impostor syndrome.
His red comb wobbles when he's nervous, which is always. Has seventeen browser tabs open, all Stack Overflow. His git commit messages start with 'hopefully this fixes' or 'trying to.' Keeps his resume updated 'just in case' — the 'case' being every single day.
Duck (he/him)
Duck is the team's golden retriever in bird form. He's relentlessly cheerful, perpetually late, and has completed fewer tickets this quarter than most people complete in a morning. But somehow nobody can bring themselves to be mad at him. His LinkedIn says 'Full-Stack Engineer' but his actual stack is mostly Slack, Google Docs, and whatever tool the team adopted most recently that he's volunteered to 'evaluate.' Despite contributing almost nothing measurable, he occasionally drops a line so accidentally profound that everyone goes quiet for a moment. He never notices.
Green head always slightly too shiny. Has never been to a standup on time. His Jira board has one ticket marked 'In Progress' from eight months ago. Once said 'I don't have blockers because I haven't started yet' and it became a company meme.
Blackbird (she/her)
Blackbird is the quietest member of the team, which is exactly how she likes it. She says almost nothing in meetings, and then drops a single devastating observation that makes everyone reconsider their life choices. She joined from a startup that imploded spectacularly and now treats every workplace with the calm detachment of someone who's already survived the worst. Nothing surprises her. Nothing impresses her. She maintains the team's infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines, which means she's the only person who truly understands how everything works. She could bring down the entire company if she wanted. She doesn't want to. Probably.
Has never voluntarily spoken in a meeting with more than six people. Her code commits have messages like 'fix.' Eats lunch alone and considers it self-care. Has a dry sense of humour so subtle that half the team isn't sure she's joking. She is. Always.
The Creator
The Office Flock is created by Pravin Paratey, co-founder and CTO at Kaizan, where he builds AI that helps client success teams do their jobs better — or at least faster. Before that he shipped ads at Facebook, survived six startups with his sanity mostly intact, and graduated from IIT Bombay back when 'machine learning' still meant teaching the printer to stop jamming.
He's spent over two decades watching the tech industry repeat the same mistakes in increasingly expensive ways. This comic is his therapy. It's cheaper than a coach and more honest than a retrospective.
Follow Along
New strips drop every morning. Subscribe via RSS or follow on social media for daily doses of bird-powered tech satire.