You know you've truly become a programmer when spending 10 hours automating a 10-minute task seems like a completely rational decision. Sure, you'll only do this task maybe twice a year, and the script will probably break in production, but that's not the point. The point is you get to avoid doing it manually right now . We'll tell ourselves it's about "scalability" and "efficiency," but deep down we know it's really about the dopamine hit of writing code instead of doing actual work. Plus, there's always that slim chance someone else might need to do this task someday, which totally justifies the time investment. Totally. The real kicker? That automation script you spent 10 hours on will run exactly once, throw a weird error the second time, and you'll end up doing it manually anyway while muttering about "technical debt."

You've got a CS degree, 15 years of battle scars from production incidents, and you've probably saved at least three companies from bankruptcy with your code. Company A sees this and thinks "wow, let's pay this person a decent salary!" Meanwhile, Company B looks at the same resume and decides the best use of everyone's time is to make you reverse a binary tree on a whiteboard while three engineers judge your handwriting. The tech hiring process is basically Schrödinger's meritocracy—your experience simultaneously matters everything and nothing until the recruiter opens your application. Nothing says "we value your decade and a half of expertise" quite like asking you to solve puzzles that have zero correlation with actual job performance, then ghosting you after wasting 20 hours of your life. At this point, that plumbing apprenticeship is looking mighty attractive. At least pipes don't ask you to implement a LRU cache from scratch.

Nothing says "professional courtesy" quite like a departing employee graciously handing over the entire codebase to a company that's about to realize they built their entire infrastructure on the knowledge of one person. The company's desperately reaching for that source code like Frodo with the Ring, while Gandalf sits there with the smug satisfaction of someone who knows exactly how screwed they're about to be without proper documentation or knowledge transfer. Two weeks notice? More like two weeks of panic as management realizes their "bus factor" was exactly one, and that bus just gave its resignation letter. Hope they enjoy deciphering those cryptic variable names and undocumented functions!

Your energy levels throughout the workday follow a predictable trajectory: you start semi-functional, briefly peak after lunch, then gradually decompose into a sentient pile of exhaustion. But the moment you sit down to code at night? Suddenly you're a caffeinated genius solving problems you couldn't even comprehend six hours ago. There's something about the combination of darkness, silence, and the knowledge that you should absolutely be sleeping that unlocks god-tier programming abilities. It's like your brain finally boots up properly once the sun goes down and all responsible adults have logged off. The real tragedy is explaining to your manager why you pushed 47 commits between 11 PM and 3 AM but couldn't figure out that simple bug during standup.